The last 28 days have been inexplicably heartbreaking. Israel has massacred thousands of innocent people. There is still no hope of a ceasefire or an end to the occupation. If anything, it looks like today they will have the heaviest bombardment yet.
I like to think that though it is possible to kill the people of Palestine, nobody will ever be able to kill the idea of Palestine. Nobody will be able to stop us from knowing where Palestine is, and from knowing how strong and brave and beautiful its people are. Nobody can kill in us, our understanding of right and wrong. We will share this understanding as widely as we can. We will remember what happened. There are a lot of beautiful places in the world that are obliterated for no good reason (money isn’t enough, sorry). There are a lot of wonderful people and children that are killed, who deserved to live a long and beautiful life. We will remember who did this to our children, not only our Muslim children or our Arab children, but the children of humanity as a whole. When these children die, it makes it so that we live in a world where children must sometimes die. It breaks my heart into a million pieces to think about remembering as it means that their lives are in the past, but they will live on in our hearts. Those who fired the air to ground missiles will live on, a long and full life, but when they die, people will cheer and then people will forget them. They have lost their dignity, compassion, and integrity. May they always feel hollow without them. May their hands always look as bloody as they are. May their own gold turn to horror.
The world is largely just pockets of horror and pockets of people doing everything they can to forget the horrors. It’s so weird going on your phone from an ad for the Sephora sale, to a tweet from your Prime Minister saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” to videos upon videos of innocent people being murdered to drone footage of protests with thousands and thousands and thousands of people yelling “stop killing them PLEASE”. I don’t know what to do when I see any of these things. I go through each phone screen, quickly, trying not to focus too much. And then between it, I assure myself, that we can protest and boycott and sign petitions and call our representatives and organize and make sure that everybody knows that something extremely horrible is happening. I try to ignore the unsettling feeling that this could be like other times, where the people suffering have been forgotten. Watching horrors and knowing that in some sense your own money has funded them to happen is so fucking debilitating. I keep thinking “shut down all the schools, the history classes, the poli- sci classes, everything, all of them”! I keep thinking “what is the point of analysis and theory if we won’t let it affect what happens in the real world”? Why are our greatest ideas meant to rot in a database? Why are the same people who write against colonialism unable to speak in the face of a genocide? Why are we ok living in a world where progressiveness and change are fairy tale concepts? How can I stand on the same ground as someone who doesn’t care about justice or peace or innocence? I’m scared to see humans unable to stand for their own humanity. If Palestine falls, we all fall.
I feel everyday like the whole world becomes more and more heavy and damp with the feeling of innocent people losing their lives somewhere too far away and airportless for any of us to be able to go. When I walk home from a place and I’m at the end of my walk home, and I see my house, I think about how I couldn’t see my house at the beginning of my walk home. But now that I’ve walked towards it for a little while, I can see it again. And then I have this unrelated thought about what it would feel like to never see my home again without warning or what it would feel like to be buried under my home. Then, I think about how often this has been done to people in the middle east. Then, I think about how often it has been happening to people in Palestine, especially in the last 28 days. It started happening to them on October 7, and for me, it feels like all of those days since have flown away into an endless doom scroll of “what happened now? what did they say? what is the death toll?”. I think that being deeply occupied with this conflict in your heart, as hard as it is, can be an indication of your empathy, compassion, and humanity.
These thought processes are what makes me so loud and intense about what’s going on. Oh and of course there’s also the fact that we do really need to stop bombing places. Cognitive dissonance isn’t cool or chill. We shouldn’t be able to just ignore this violence and go on with our lives. We are raised to believe that our own success and wellbeing are always the most important things, but I think this sentiment somehow morphs into “my success and wellbeing is the only thing that matters”, which isn’t true. Looking away is a complete moral failing. We should look out for each other as people. If there is a genocide, we should want to know about it, we should want to tell people about it, and we should want to protest against it. The easier it becomes for us to look away, the less humanity we have within us. I don’t really know a lot of sure things about humanness, but I do know that having humanity is about looking out for humanity. If one of us is wrongfully massacred, we are all living in a place where we can be wrongfully massacred.
So, please attend any protest for Palestine that you can. Go out there and revel in the sight of people who are so strongly on the side of humanity that they’ve gathered to defend it. Go out there and scream as loud as you can for those who are too busy digging through the rubble of their lost homes to scream for themselves.
The media has been trying to keep you uninformed, so it is understandable if you don’t know much about the conflict! If you don’t know enough about the situation but would like to learn more or find ways to get involved, please email vulnicuravideo@gmail.com with questions! Or, ask them in the comments section below.
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message board/ palest*ne
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