All Eyes on Gaza 🇵🇸❤️🔥
How the fight for Palestinian liberation is freeing me + urgent calls to action
I think the reason why I was never into politics is because it’s used as a mechanism to label, separate, and divide us. Rather than advancing humanity, our use of politics furthers our oppression, ingraining in us that we are fundamentally different than one another. It poses that we are either conservative or liberal, either Republican or Democrat, either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian lives. This binary thinking is white supremacist & colonial imperialist mechanisms at work. It is rhetoric of the oppressor to keep us fighting one another, rather than fighting the system as a whole. Our enemy is the unjust system we live under. Not each other.
This moment in time asks us to hold multiplicities with skill in order to generate progress with the conflict at hand. It calls on us to expand our consciousness, our frameworks, our container of who and how we love. It is critical we understand that we can honor both Israeli and Palestinian lives. We can mourn the lives lost to both the violence of Hamas and the violence of the Israeli government. We must also understand the nuance that while lives have been lost on both sides, one side has suffered exponentially more at the hands of one of the most advanced militaries in the world, funded largely by American tax dollars, which amounts to $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel per year.
We must understand that the oppressed can, too, be the oppressor. Because we live under oppressive systems, these systems’ violent beliefs, limited ways of thinking, and harmful ways of resolving conflict are entrenched in us as the only way to operate. Let this moment in time remind you that we can, and must, unlearn these harmful ways of relating. Violence is not the appropriate way to heal anger and grief. We must build a new world that is deeply rooted in the belief that we are all interconnected. A world where we are in right relationship with each other and the Earth—meaning indigenous people have a right to sovereignty and their ancestral land, colonization & imperialism are nonexistent, and we act knowing all liberation is irrevocably bound together.
This moment in time also asks us to learn from history. How did people let the holocaust happen? The Nazi regime characterized their anti-Semitic actions as the “evacuation” of Jews from territories that rightfully belonged to non-Jewish Germans—and people were convinced that this was justified because the Nazi regime spread harmful propaganda, silenced voices that called for help, and characterized Jews as less-than humans who were undeserving of compassion. Sound familiar?
The Israeli and American governments are deploying the same tactics to justify the killing of 7,326 (and counting) Palestinians—including 3,038 children—in the last 20 days alone, and depriving 2.3 million people of food, water, fuel, and electricity, while completely collapsing their health system. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has also been ongoing for 75 years, and the totality of harm caused over the decades is likely innumerable. And while the politics of it all is currently murky to many Americans, the truth will reveal itself in time. A death count cannot lie. The world will wake up to the fact that this is intentional ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. And where are you? What will you say when your descendants ask you what you did during the Palestinian genocide?
I’m aware that what I’m writing is polarizing. If you are triggered by this post, ask yourself why someone advocating for human life is hard to digest—there are likely paradigms within you that need to be burned to the ground, and reimagined entirely.
We are in the midst of a global movement for liberation. The fight for a free Palestine has changed me. I lose Instagram followers every time I post about Palestine, and receive violent messages in my inbox. This would have stopped me from speaking up in the past—but now, in bearing witness to the unimaginable massacres happening in Gaza, my former fears are trivial. What is the point of having a “platform” if I don’t use it to fight for justice? I am no longer an activist solely for Asian American issues. My activism is not single-issue, and my empathy is not selective. I am finally interwoven into the fabric of liberation for all.
On Friday, October 27th, Israel cut off all communication in Gaza, and simultaneously began their most aggressive bombing yet. 2.3 million people have gone dark. No access to water or medical aid, no way to reach civilians or journalists. I cannot fathom the violence and terror that is occurring as I type this. What will be of Gaza when I wake tomorrow? How will we know the truth of what happened? If Gaza is wiped off the map, who gets to tell its story?
The consequences for American apathy and inaction are chilling.
❤️🔥 Urgent calls to action ❤️🔥
Call and email your representations asking for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The app 5Calls makes calling easy.
Join a local protest in solitary with Palestine, and consider joining the protest in DC on November 4th if you have the capacity and resources.
Learn as much as you can about what’s going on. Diversify your news sources, and look to people who are on the ground in Gaza (citizens, journalists, photographers, and people who are not trained by Western media). Here’s an incredible toolkit by Palestinian Feminist Collective that has information on all of the above.
Talk about what’s happening with your friends & family. If you disagree with whom you’re speaking with, try your best to approach the conversation from a place of curiosity: “Where are you at with this? Why do you feel that way? What are you reading / hearing / learning? What are your sources?”
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Thank you, Palestine, for freeing me.