Impossible not to have a view on Israeli government policy these days, but Artem’s views are not so different than those held by the mainstream Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In which case, the question is what has Artem done and why has he been sitting in a Shin Bet prison without habeas corpus for a week?
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To arrest Artem is to make private individuals afraid and to make them internalize their penguin-like condition, to shut up, and sit quietly in the corner. Arresting a bespectacled writer with a narrow audience is both easy and makes for a perfectly instructive example. Before Artem was arrested, it seemed to many of us – me included – that there were ‘anomaly zones’ out there: in those anomaly zones, one could be somewhat safe from arbitrary arrest. It was felt that as long as you did not cross certain well understood line, you could write, read, and speak about pretty much anything. Don’t join a party, don’t donate to certain organizations, don’t say certain things. But the lines that seemed to exist have now been erased and what you whisper in your kitchen can now get you into a prison cell.
The everyday curdles into a nightmare. The kitchen and the prison are becoming the same room. We have become like frogs that do not notice that the water in which they are swimming has started to come to a boil. We have made straightforward cannibalism normal.
When Artem was arrested, his old blog opponents said, what did he expect, going to Israel, when he could have sat quietly in Petersburg and minded his own business. Sorry. That’s just the attitude of the frog. There are no safe places left. There are no crags left to hide a penguin. Artem is not the hero-petrel. He is much more like the penguin. And so, it is now getting clear to us, that the penguin hunt has begun. Anyone at all can be picked up and tossed into the darkness.
Gorky did not know much about penguins. Although they look defenseless, they can stand their ground as a pack and peck their way out of trouble; in water, penguins are agile and fast, forming ‘rafts’ to beat adversaries and escape. Artem needs his penguins to act in unison. Please make noise for him.
Most of this essay really spoke to me. Reading news of journalists, historians, writers, being arrested in Russia and Israel, Jacques Baad, a retired Swiss colonel having his bank accounts frozen in Belgium for his writing about Ukraine, a Russian journalist being expelled from France for her views on Ukraine, a Turkish journalist having his banking frozen here in Berlin for his writing on Gaza, with the justification that by writing on Gaza he was serving Russia, British citizens being arrested, and in fact en masse, by the hundreds, simply for voicing support for Palestinians, all of these expose societal myths about free speech, democracy, due process, as what they are: myths.
What really stood out for me, though, was her conclusion, where she continues her analogy to say that humans, like penguins, can “stand their ground as a pack and peck their way out of trouble”, or form “‘rafts’ to beat adversaries and escape”. Here, for us, there seems to be little ability to peck our way out of trouble. Escape seems for many people to be the possibility that remains, however escape does not alter the threatening environment.