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How we show up for a Free Palestine

When we are privileged

Kadir

Kadir

— 6 min read
How we show up for a Free Palestine
Stop the genocide, Free Palestine, free poster by Hazem Asif, worldofhazem.com

My dear community,

I'm writing to you about the ongoing genocide of Palestine and the movement for a Free Palestine.

I'm writing because although a significant number of people in my community are showing up in a diversity of ways for a Free Palestine, not everyone in my larger community are.

I'm writing to those who:

  • find the pain and suffering so unbearable you distance yourself to take care of yourself,
  • are artists or entrepreneurs that worry that aligning your platform with a Free Palestine will be expensive,
  • who work a 9-5 and need to get paid so you can't rock the boat,
  • who is building a platform as an artist or practitioner that centers inclusion/justice/equity for women/neurodivergent folks/queer people/BIPOC/other axes of marginalization and hasn't integrated the Free Palestine movement into your work.

I think it is absolutely essential for our collective survival, liberation, joy, freedom, that we show up for Palestine. And I want to talk to you about why and how we show up while caring for ourselves.

I say Free Palestine because it is urgent.

I say Free Palestine
and I add
Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Tigray
Free Eelam, Free Puerto Rico, Free Hawaii, Free Kashmir
Free Rohingyas, Free Yemen, Free Uyghurs
Land Back to Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island
End Caste apartheid
End anti-Muslim hate, violence
End anti-Jewish oppression
Abolish prisons and cops
It’s all connected: end all oppression.

I say Free Palestine, as the occupation and genocide of Palestine by Israel, with support from U.S., Canada, U.K. and India, lays bare the horrifying truths of settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy and ethno-nationalism. I see posts by folks in my network that for many of us, this is the first time we are watching genocide streamed on our phones by the folks that are experiencing it. We see so much more than destruction or the count of how many people are dead: we know Bisan and Plestia; we know their stories. We see how they are surviving in Gaza under harsh conditions I cannot even imagine: without water, food, electricity, and medical aid; without sanitation systems; under rubble. Amidst homes and schools reduced to ash, we meet the children they hold and kiss and laugh with. We feel the tug of the olive trees. The wailing of the Mediterranean sea.

Living under capitalism and settler colonialism resounds with dissonance. Our hearts are broken, yet we need to go to work and act as if everything is fine. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dying, yet we have to sell things to make money. The pain and grief is so much to bear, and we still have to take care of our own health and illnesses and Disabilities and people.

This dissonance causes us to feel alone and activated in our bodies. It pushes us to dissociate or self-soothe with our backs to the pain. Our fear of our own safety strives to keep us quiet, keep everything unchanged. It's human not to be able to bear this pain, and to want to survive.

What we have to recognize is that we are being systematically trained to uphold the status-quo while genocides and the destruction of lands and waters and peoples continue. We're incentivized to choose our safety and comfort, no matter the cost. Colonialist propaganda works to obfuscate the true cost, by controlling the news media, shutting down communication in places experiencing genocide, and rewriting histories through colonizer lenses. Palestinians are showing us the truth, at great cost. It is up to us to listen. Witness. Grieve. Change.

Colonialism tries to water down oppression by assigning us broad identities that don’t encapsulate our unique histories and struggles, and propagating narratives that people that hold a lot of privilege, are in fact ‘oppressed’. For example, identities like “brown” or “BIPOC” or “women” are automatically considered ‘oppressed’. Not that these identities don’t experience marginalization or oppression, but it papers over which communities are being systematically and disproportionately harmed and who is part of the harm, within the same communities. The outcome is that people with significant privilege from these identities continue to center their own trauma and lenses while propagating caste/class/race/Disability based discrimination and violence. We need to end this vicious cycle.

“A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that 'all women are oppressed'...Sexism as a system of domination is institutionalized but it has never determined in an absolute way the fate of all women in this society. Being oppressed means the absence of choices.”

    - bell hooks, Feminist theory: from margin to center. (In this context, modern feminist thought refers to white feminism)

Trauma, oppression, and privilege live within us simultaneously on a spectrum. I embrace my disabilities, transness, queerness, neurodivergence, pain, trauma, fatness, show up as who I am and exist in opposition to oppressive systems. My light skin, dominant caste, middle class, and Hindu Indian privileges have been shaping the trajectory of my life, whether or not I stand in opposition to casteism, colorism, capitalism and Hindu Brahmin supremacy. I'm marginalized, centered. I'm unsafe, safe. And at this moment, I'm not oppressed. I have choices. We have to remember when we have choices.

For those of us that are privileged, we have a responsibility to go beyond seeking inclusion and justice for trauma that we personally experience from oppressive systems. We need to consider how we are also part of systems that harm people at the margins of our communities. We need to look within and into the history of our privileges and heal from the ways we’ve been taught to carry out the violence of oppression. If we don't, we continue the harmful legacy of bourgeois, white feminism. We cannot claim that we are fighting oppression or supporting marginalized communities along any one axis without centering the folks that are at the forefront of our struggle for liberation. We cannot free ourselves if we don't Free Palestine. 

"The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free."

- Maya Angelou talks with Anderson Cooper about equality and what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream means today, 28 Aug 2013

wizard_bisan1 instagram post from Nov 12 2023, photo of Bisan, Palestinian journalist, looking into a rearview mirror holding up a red phone and wearing a blue press helmet. Caption reads Dear world, this is Bisan from Gaza.. I am still alive! But have some inquiries! How can you accept that you and your children live in a world where there are no red lines? In a world where international institutions cannot bring a cup of clean water to 2 million besieged people, in a world controlled by excessive, unrestrained power! In a world where men in power can take a decision in isolation from the will of the world and the people and where they can easily commit genocide, wars and lie to you about them! Now, you are not only supporting Palestine and the Palestinian people! Rather, justice for you and your people... because injustice, discrimination and intimidation can be the face of any regime or authority in the world. You are changing the world, restoring the balance of power, and rejecting colonialism and occupation, and if you continue to demonstrate and reject, you will be able to punish the criminals, writing history in a fair way for oppressed peoples.. We are human beings, we are all human beings, and they are occupation, colonialism, and We are human beings, we are all human beings but they are occupation, colonialism, injustice and war! And we can stop them!
"We are human beings, we are all human beings but they are occupation, colonialism, injustice and war! And we can stop them!" - Bisan, Palestinian journalist, Nov 12 2023

Palestinians aren't asking us to save them; we are not saviors. "Free Palestine" is a path to retrieving our own humanity.  We are being invited to take action towards our collective liberation.

We need to act, but we don't need to be perfect, because we are not alone. We don't have to be superheroes that neglect ourselves. We need to remember that we are part of a collective, a lineage of teachers and activists and artists and plants and waters that are reaching towards our collective liberation. In this moment, Palestinian spirit, love, hope, grief, resistance, journalism, art and leadership fuels our collective uprising, which is proliferating into an interconnected, pulsing, and active organism. Our grief tides with the ocean. Nothing we do on our own has to have a big impact, because everything we do together does. We only need to keep showing up, in whatever ways are accessible to us.

We cannot just show up until there are temporary pauses in this war and hope for the best. We need to think about what it means for us to entwine our dreams, lives, bodies, work, and art with the movement to Free Palestine, irrevocably. We cannot just be silent. We have to say more than ‘with everything going on in the world.’ If we hope to survive as humans on this planet, we need to choose, Free Palestine.

Here is a selection of resources I’ve found helpful. Please reach out if you need any support <3

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