I recently read that there are 5 Gates of Grief that we enter through. One of those gates is “The Sorrows of the World.” I've been grieving a lot this week. The heaviness that I've been feeling is a result of what has been going on in Palestine and Israel. I grieve the loss of life. I grieve how easily it is for folks to identify with the powerful and not the disempowered. I grieve the rewriting of history. I grieve our collective lack of understanding of colonialism. I especially grieve the creation of the conditions that lead to the loss of life in Palestine and Israel in the first place.
What is happening in Palestine is not a “conflict.” It is colonialism. It is occupation. It is state-sanctioned genocide against the Palestinian people. Full stop.
There are no “equally opposing sides.” There is one side, Israel, a colonial power backed by the West, with the ability to cut off food, water, and electricity for over 2 million people in the 88-square mile strip of Gaza.
There is one side, Israel, who garners exclusive sympathy from the Western media despite this asymmetrical power imbalance. Israeli politicians engage in dehumanizing language, re: all Palestinian people, because we know that makes it easier to justify bombing Palestinian civilians in their homes, places of worship, along evacuee caravan routes, etc.
There is one side, Israel, with the ability to conflate 2 million people with “Hamas,” and “terrorists,” while actively bombing thousands of innocent civilians with impunity. It is important to note that Hamas didn’t even exist 37 years ago but many Palestinians have spent their entire lives under occupation. So often we are forced to start this conversation with condemnation of Hamas while skipping over 45 years of Israeli occupation and violence which to me is unethical, dishonest, and ultimately a non-starter that begs the question— exactly whose innocent lives matter?
There is one side, Israel, who has so much control over the historical narrative that they’re able to able to obfuscate the fact that Zionism was literally described as “something colonial” by it’s founder, Theodor Herzl, who promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state—in a place already inhabited by 2 million people and over 500 communities (i.e., colonialism). (Are you connecting the dots now?)
Zionism is a choice. It is a political stance. Not all Jewish people are Zionists. In fact, it is anti-Semitic to suggest that all Jewish people are Zionists. The implication that speaking out against Zionism is “anti-Semitic” is a falsehood that shields Israel from accountability for the violence they’ve committed for over 75 years.
These aforementioned reasons and more are why none of us can be politically neutral despite our claims to be. Burying our heads into the sand rather than facing injustice allows history to be perpetuated over and over, while our tax dollars fund it. (The United States in particularly pledges Billions in weapons, military funding, cop training exchanges to Israel annually.)
Our political education is imperative to our collective, global freedom.
I am grieving for Palestine and its people and the near-century of violence they’ve endured that barely garners news coverage (intentionally so), and certainly has never elicited widespread public sympathy in the West. I also mourn the innocent Israeli lives lost; but it is important for us not to engage in bothsidesism, nor act as if the latter occurred in a vacuum devoid of the colonial history that created it. That's ugly and dishonest, and unethical. And it serves to further perpetuate the genocide of Palestinian people while Zionists make TikTok videos mocking the severing of water and electricity, and celebrating the displacement and violence committed against Palestinians en masse, in the name of "revenge." My hope is for the undoing of colonialism, the root cause of this violence, and the freeing of all Palestinian people.
So this morning, to process my grief, I got up and listened to the late Nina Simone, North Carolina’s very own, who never minced words regarding injustice. I’ll leave you with the lyrics from her song, “Revolution.”
“And now we got a revolution/
Cause I see the face of things to come
Yeah, your Constitution/
Well, my friend, its gonna have to bend/
I'm here to tell you about destruction/
Of all the evil that will have to end./
Some folks are gonna get the notion/
I know they'll say I'm preachin' hate/
But if I have to swim the ocean
Well I would just to communicate/
Its not as simple as talkin' jive/
The daily struggle just to stay alive/
Singin' about a revolution/
Because were talkin' about a change
Its more than just evolution/
Well you know you got to clean your brain/
The only way that we can stand in fact/
Is when you get your foot off our back.”
(Addendum: An earlier version of what I wrote read, "[Israel is] actively bombing thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children, with impunity." It has since been edited to omit "including women and children," a knee-jerk, mirrored response that reduces the value of Palestinian men's lives and completely erases genderqueer/gender nonconforming Palestinian folks who are being harmed right now.
This does not reflect my values regarding the preciousness of life, my beliefs about gender, nor my own experience of gender. I am sorry for anyone who read and felt unsettled by this.)
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