That was the day the world heard of the Hamas resistance fighters breaching Israel’s apartheid wall, and wrecked some havoc on, what was once, Palestinian land
News immediately came out that “Hamas invaded Israel from Gazza, attacking people partying at a rave. They killed innocent civilians, beheaded 40 babies, and raped both men and women. They also burned people alive and took hostages”. Right…suffice to say that every single one of those claims was later shown to be either false or unsupported. But that didn’t matter. The fear had been stoked. I immediately knew of what was going to follow. Israel was going to unleash hell on the Palestinians of Gazza.
Today is December 27, 2023, and Israel has so far murdered thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, pregnant women, children, babies, some still in the incubators. Genocide on the one hand, and ethnic cleansing on the other hand, as Israel breaks multiple human rights and international laws. The prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu said they have no intension of stopping until they have irradiated every member of Hamas. So the massacres continue
I should not that as well as the Palestinians in Gazza, Israel was and still is bombing Lebanese in Lebanon, and Syrians in Syria. But that’s just Israel’s government and military showing how horrific, insecure, and pathetic they are and can be. Murdering innocent people, so they can flex their military muscle and show the world they have no qualms of literally disintegrating human beings in order to fulfil some uncivilized genocidal agenda.
The images, the videos, and the stories that came out and continue to come out are nothing short of horrific. Watching as my people are being murdered indiscriminately, by the most advanced technological warfare is terrifying. It stirs within me a rage, a sadness that was boiled and then left on simmer.
How disgusting that human beings should behave in such a manner. Murdering wantonly. Dropping thousands of tons of explosives on innocent people…Over a million Palestinians have been displaced. There have no access to resources, electricity, clean water, food, women hygiene materials etc. There are only a couple of functional hospitals left, the rest all destroyed. People have been trying to get by with makeshift ambulances which are carts pulled by donkeys or horses. Oh and Israel has been bombing those carts and horses too.
It’s complete and utter madness. Israel has been brutalizing the Palestinians for decades. 75 years. And I don’t even know where to begin with how this has been affecting me, from day one. The Palestinian cause is something that I have carried with me ever since I was a child. And I still remember the first question I asked my father about it. It was the mid 80s, and he and other men in our family were talking about the latest atrocities that Israel has been committing against the Palestinians. I remember hearing that Palestinian resistance had made a move against Israel, and Israel retaliated disproportionately, as they always do. I asked my father “Why don’t the Palestinians just no antagonize the Israelis?” I knew little to nothing about anything at the time. That Israel was bombing us. That I was born into, and lived in a refugee camp that was set up to hold all the Palestinians that have been displace from the first Nakba. That Israel has been illegally occupying so much of Palestine, and has been brutalizing Palestinians for decades. I’ll never forget what my father told me. He said “Ali, imagine someone comes into your house, they kick you out and murder your family. How would you feel?” and I immediately understood. He didn’t have to say anything else.
It took about two weeks for me so full of anger, confusion, rage, that immediately started to feel isolated. That is one of the tactics of war, and oppression. To make the oppressed, and anyone associated to them, feel completely helpless to the will of the oppressor. In this case, Arabs, be they Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, and ESPECIALLY PALESTINIANS, everywhere were and are still forced to watch Israel commit atrocities and war crimes, along with the US, France, Britain, Canada, and other countries who are complicit.
My own trauma was triggered by the initial event, and has been prodded constantly since. Simmering, stewing. And the pain from that is indescribable, because of how many things are attached to it. I felt as if my trauma was ripped out of me and put on display for everyone to see. I felt as if my fears, insecurities, private thoughts and feelings, all my emotions laid bare and on full display. I felt as I was stripped completely naked, and stuffed into a cage with my hands and feet tied along with millions of other Arabs, and put in the middle of a colosseum full of people. And still, none of it is anywhere near an atom of what the Palestinians in Gaza were and are still going through.
I began to look to every relationship around me, frantically trying to find someone to connect with. My family, my cousins in both Syria and Lebanon, my Arab friends, everyone was glued to their TVs, Phones, Computers, Social Media, every bit of news outlet, speaker, analyst, scholar, journalist, who was talking or reporting about the issue.
And while I was finding closeness and connection with some people, I began to feel immediate distance from other people. Friends who either weren’t paying attention, or didn’t care to pay attention, or payed some attention but didn’t want to get too involved. I felt so far from those people. And what I had immediately noticed was that it was all my white friends who didn’t engage enough. I became so angry and disappointed with them. I felt as if those people that I knew and trusted were in that colosseum, watching, gazing, with pity in their eyes but little no action in the hands.
I wanted them to come and stand beside me, to show solidarity, to start learning, asking questions, posting on social media to bring awareness to and amplify what was happening to the Palestinian men, women, and children who were getting annihilated. I was once that little child, growing up in a war zone, full of innocent civilians trying to make due with the shitty hand we were dealt, and having bombs dropped on us. And anyone who didn’t acknowledge what was happening now wouldn’t be acknowledging was was happening to me, my family, friends, and people, back then.
The cries of the Palestinians have always been loud, but that doesn’t matter to people who shut their ears completely. The plight of the Palestinians could always be seen, but what’s the point if everyone just looks away and shuts off their screens, or scrolls right past it.
And I just cannot for the life of me forgive or forget how so many people looked away, or acknowledged but didn’t follow through with any action. I’m talking not even the most minimal of actions that Palestinians were asking people to do: bare witness, tell our stories, tell people what’s happening to us. If you have a social media account, then post about it! Help the cursed algorithm to push the pro Palestine content that is being actively suppressed by every Western media outlet.
We have a saying in Arabic, and I always thought it was said to people as an insult. We say “Al 3Ama fi Albak” which means “Blindness is in your heart”. Now I know that this only applies to someone who is incapable of feeling empathy towards the needless and inhumane suffering of others. It’s not an insult. It’s an observation and an accusation, to try and bring alert the person that their inability or refusal to connect to the plight and the cries of people who are suffering, is adding to the harm and the suffering that others are living through.
This is how I felt about those people. They have blindness in their heart. I wanted to be understanding, compassionate, and considerate towards them. They have their own struggles, I get it. At least that’s what I would tell myself. And the more I thought about it the more I kept coming back to the same line of questions: What about last year? Where were they 2 years ago? 4 years ago? What’s the reason 5 years ago? What’s their excuse 8 years ago? and every single time for as long as we have been around?
I found out about this when I was 5-6 years old. I am not holding their ignorance from that time against them. But what about later on? When we became friends and as our friendship grew, I naturally opened up to them about my past, and what me and my family, friends, and people have lived through. I would talk about what was happening whenever Israel would engage with what’s been referred to by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shami as “Mowing the grass”: which is when Israel would decide to go into Palestinian territory and bomb and destroy and kill and murder Palestinians.
I began to ask myself: how much more of their ignorance do I have to excuse? When I have made myself available time and time again, and not that I was preaching about it, but that I’ve said enough that should at least give them a hint about how important this issue is to me. Naturally, I would expect people to stand by my side about this. Stand next to me, or infant of this cage where I’m trapped and feel so completely exposed.
What I did next felt both extremely difficult and also liberating. I had to cut myself off from those people, for a few reasons. I had spoken to a good Arab friend of mine, whose opinion and advice both of which I value. She said to me that one, this is a good opportunity for us to revaluate and re-evaluate the friendships and connections we have with people. Do their values really align with our own? And second, that perhaps this is a great opportunity for us to focus on those relationships with the people who have been showing up, checking in, learning, and doing their best to connect.
And that is exactly what I started doing. I began to check in more often on my friends and family who were living through this. Those who were feeling, bearing witness, amplifying the voices of the Palestinians. Those who cared more about human life, human dignity and integrity, than they did about their social standing, their jobs, and how everyone saw them and what they would think of them.
People that I knew, people I didn’t know, were all of a sudden witnessing the same thing, and watching Arabs, brown bodies of Palestinians, being brutalized in the most monstrous of ways. And I wanted to talk about this. Every day I, like many others have been glued to so many different news outlets, looking for any kind of update. No matter how small. I didn’t want to miss a thing. And at the same time I was doing my best to use my social media platform, on Instagram and Facebook, to push and amplify the messages and the news as much as I can.
I didn’t want distraction, I didn’t want to look away. This pain, the horror, the trauma, doesn’t disappear if I looked away. It only gets worse. And by not engaging with it, even on a small level, only contributed to my feelings of helplessness. This is exactly how propaganda and fascism develop and exert their force, by feeding on this helplessness and hopelessness. The more helpless and hopeless we feel the more likely we are to give up, and let the war machine of Capitalism continue to annihilate human life. I don’t want to contribute to that, and I don’t want to be connected to people who won’t even so much as repost the plight of Palestinians through their social media.
❤️🥹 Free Palestine #amplify