I am not okay. I am furious. I am enraged. I don’t have eloquent words, I’m just angry. The headaches and stress filled dreams in October came from witnessing a genocide unfold. Watching the catastrophe that is white supremacy, that colonized the entire globe continue to steal, kill, and destroy in Palestine. This is not an exaggeration only five countries fully escaped European domination. White supremacy hasn’t ceased, it’s insidious and permeates every part of global society.
My blood boils seeing the government I pay taxes to and the administration I voted for condoning, funding, and supporting apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. There are 582,462 people in the U.S. experiencing homelessness, our infrastructure is outdated and poses security risks, and 30.4 million public school students can’t afford their school meals. Instead of alleviating these burdens the U.S. government sends money and bombs to tear through the schools, homes, and bodies of brown adults, teens, and children in Palestine.
I am familiar with news about armed conflicts between the settler colony Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement, commonly known as Hamas, in Gaza. Following October 7th is the first time I’ve done proper research to try and understand the history. If you haven’t yet, familiarize yourself with the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, the illegal settlements, and violence enacted against peaceful protestors during the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019. A simple guide is available from Al Jazeera with a plethora of information spanning decades.
Israel’s Zionism has led to the theft of land and homes, displacement of millions, and an apartheid state where Palestinians are dehumanized and treated as second class citizens. Zionism’s claim of “a land without a people” is asinine. The desperation of Theodore Herzl partnering with a British colonizer to split a country and ignore the concerns, rights, and sovereignty of Palestinians is dumbfounding. The desire for safety is understandable but never at the cost of the lives and safety of other people. Harming Palestinians to protect self is nonsensical especially when Europe is guilty of historically terrorizing the Jewish community. Please always remember that Zionism and Judaism are not the same, do not conflate the two.
I don’t care how white supremacy decides to disguise itself, we see you. The people who have always been your targets, the people you’ve tried to crush, the people you’ve oppressed, stolen resources from, the people from cultures you’ve attempted to demonize, we fucking see you. We recognize your tactics; the playbook doesn’t change. The half-baked attempts to deceive us are insulting. The lies aren’t even well crafted. Artificial intelligence renderings of “command centers”, claiming that a calendar is a terrorist shift schedule, or bombing a hospital and placing blame on the resistance. Western media has ignored the reality of people being shot at and killed as they have attempted to reach hospitals or return to check on their homes. 278,000 of those homes are damaged or destroyed.
These actions are despicable. They’re a curse and a sin. An atrocity that is felt in parts of the universe we can’t even identify. It’s being observed and recorded. These are the same heinous actions that white supremacist colonialism has employed since the Treaty of Tordesillas. Despite the feigned superiority, ultimately you’ll fail. It’s devastating that millions of people across hundreds of years will have to suffer before you crumble but it’s coming. We don’t have to live like this, and we know it. Some of us may not know how to get to liberation, some only dream, some are too afraid to dream, and some will fight with everything they have to end you.
I have never known faith like Palestinians possess. In joy, sorrow, relief, despair, in the face of death and heinous treatment by other human beings, Allah is acknowledged. Always a place for refuge, a fount of hope, and always receiving those who have gone ahead. Their unshakeable faith keeps me from being selfish enough to fall into despair. I am relatively safe; I live in the settler colony that sits on Turtle Island and that’s funding the genocide. There is no time to wallow. I need to demand action from my representatives, a permanent ceasefire and the end of all aid to the apartheid state of Israel. I need to keep sharing the words and experiences of Palestinians worldwide.
I recognize the language, the vile descriptors used against Palestinians. They’re the same ones levied against the Black community. I can’t sit by silently and watch the attempts to displace, destabilize, dehumanize, and destroy people who share my struggle. Never forget that Palestinians were helping protestors during the Ferguson Uprisings in response to the state murder of Mike Brown. Giving advice on how to handle tear gas, the same tear gas that is used on them. They’ve lost people who became symbols of resistance as we have, rest A’ed Abu Amro and Edward Crawford. Even without this support it is our duty to ensure that Palestine is not terrorized and murdered on our dime.
I have viewed photos and videos daily. All I see are my friend’s children or the high school girls that I work with. There are age mates who have been martyred, elders holding the keys to their familial homes. There’s no difference to me, every Palestinian is us. We all hold hopes, fears, dreams, annoyances, favorite things, hobbies, quirks, plans, and pet peeves. I vehemently reject the denial of humanity. I am grateful for the bravery of journalists such as Bisan and Motaz Azaiza. I pray for their resilience and continued safety. I remember being ecstatic over a picture of Bisan’s socks days without an update, fearing the worst.
I am accompanied daily by the images of the surviving NICU babies from al-Shifa Hospital. I carry with me the image of the half body of a little boy covered in ash carried in the arms of a man I presume to be his father. I was shaken by the October 14th murder of Wadea al-Fayoume and attack on his mother Hanaan Shahin in Plainfield Township in my home state of Illinois. I’ve been overcome by Abu Dia’a bidding farewell to his granddaughter who was martyred in an Israeli airstrike. Most recently, I’ve been maddened by the shooting of three Palestinian college students, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad.
The anger must go somewhere and it’s always going to be on the side of Palestinian liberation. Liberation for Turtle Island, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Congo, Sudan, and every people and land scarred by colonialism. I pray a reinstatement of the country where all three Abrahamic faiths have historically lived together. Return Palestine, her olive trees, her beaches, her streets, her skies, her resources to Palestinians. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
