From the River to the Sea

Banksy’s Armoured Dove

“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.” — Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

I’ve been meaning to post Palestine pics on social media for a month now, but I can’t figure out how to fit my thoughts onto the size of a phone screen.

I guess I’ll start by admitting that the reason I’ve barely posted about Iran or anything else that matters more than the camels I met in Jordan is that I was afraid that if you saw me posting about something everyone else is posting about, you might swipe past it, and then when I post about causes that feel even more personal, you won’t look at all. Also (re: actually) because I rarely post, so when I do, you get the notification, which means my exes get the notification, which means they’re more likely to see what I’m doing with my life, which means they’ll see I’m living a more fulfilling life than they are, and their jealousy will silently morph into my own concrete feelings of fulfillment. Point being: for all I have to say in the next several paragraphs, know I am not judging you for inaction.

Separation Wall in Jerusalem, aka the Apartheid Wall

My brain has spent the past month obsessing over the question of how to be more “strategic” with social media activism (or How to Make You Care). For all the insidious downsides of this entity taking so much of our attention, “regular” activism feels cheap without seizing the opportunity of the virtual megaphone. I’ve felt so caught up in connecting to a purpose greater than my own daily bullsh*t that I’ve forgotten I cannot make you care about anything. But if I can’t force you to care, maybe I can encourage you to be brave about the things you already do care about.

I recently came across a post from @wokescientist on exclusionary activism asking, “What does it look like to invite everyone to our movements?” To be more creative than jargon (what counts as jargon?), to release the urgency to accomplish the revolution RIGHT NOW, to welcome those without a “formal colonial education.” When even those of us with a formal colonial education suffer massive gaps in our knowledge, it seems pretty relevant to figure out how to be effective without relying on acronyms.

There are so many content creators who manage to sum up thousands of years of complex information into bite-sized educational slides. I clearly do not have the talent for brevity, so if I ever get around to posting on IG, I’ll be doing a lot more reposting than anything. Also because—for as outspoken as I’ve tried to be over the years about these human rights violations—actually watching it and interacting with it and FEELING it showed me just how little one can possibly understand if they do not live it.

It echoes parallels of home, working in the entertainment industry especially, where the whole concept of acting operates on the premise that the human imagination is limitless. Even if the scope of our emotions is finite, the discourse around the ethics and creative inadequacies of playing identities we don’t embody reverberates deep into the real-life chasm between friends, family, and community members who can never quite fully conceptualize the combination of silent weights we carry.

It also just felt like Black Mirror. Like I’d stepped into a parallel universe where the US was a little less apologetic in its self-branding and the Right was a little more powerful, and some faraway planet gave us billions of dollars to violently squash dissent. In the month I’ve spent procrastinating this post, it’s the tiny details of the parallels that have kept me up at night just as much as the our-tax-dollars-to-murder-children thing.

Murals on the separation wall of Iyad Hallaq and Leila Khaled

Much of this procrastination has involved manic research of the “other side” in an attempt to feel more empathy for the teenage soldiers swinging automatic weapons in our faces—for their (admittedly impressive) Jennifer Lawrence-style compartmentalization, as if a director has suddenly yelled action just before the punchline of their joke. How they turn their head, spit vitriol toward a Palestinian child or civilian, stand a little straighter, puff their chest already protruding and bulletproof, as if this unarmed person at yet another checkpoint on their way to work has the means to fight back to a machine gun. How, during the pat down, the soldier turns back to their coworkers and finishes the joke, the punchline lands, the civilian looks straight ahead.

If you’re in East Jerusalem, you’re on camera.

I want to say that this month of research transformed me, that it made something click about the complexity of this “conflict.” I came up short, though, like when I spent a summer in Kentucky doing The Wizard of Oz and was sooo excited to visit the Creation Museum and finally learn what “alternative” science these Christian Fundamentalists used to base their claims. But as soon as I entered the museum lobby, I learned that there is no other science, just a narrative through which they cherry-pick history. Beside the hall where a life-sized Adam and Eve live in harmony with a T. rex, a video played with a man brushing dirt off a small raptor fossil, a bucket hat rendering him faceless. One of Them. A man next to him spoke to the camera:

My colleague here uses carbon dating to estimate that this fossil is hundreds of millions of year old. Because the Flood, according to the Bible, was about 4,300 years ago, that’s how old I believe this fossil to be. We come to different conclusions, but we start at different starting points. I start with the Bible. My colleague does not. We all have the same facts. We merely interpret the facts differently because of our different starting points.

View of East Jerusalem from the sacred, 500-year-old Jewish Cemetery. From the viewpoint below, a sign describes the desecration of graves while East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. The sign does not say, “Meanwhile, we were bulldozing the sacred, 1400-year-old Muslim Mamilla Cemetery in West Jerusalem so we could turn it into a parking lot, public bathroom, and—hear us out—Museum of Tolerance.”

As with the Creation Museum, I expected alternative data. “Alternative facts.” And while there are plenty of full-blown lies in Zionist and Western media about the Nakba and ongoing violence, what disturbs me far more than the denial of key historical facts is the devaluation of human life fundamental to the dominant narrative. Like Trevor Noah said: where you decide the Palestine narrative begins is beside the point. What eclipses every conceivable nuance is the sheer magnitude of human rights abuses occurring right now as you are reading this.

And this leaves me with the burning question: What can be said to convince those who are indifferent or even silently in solidarity to move loudly to the anti-apartheid side of history? The reminder that we are literally directly funding this violence? That there are 1984-esque cameras all over the streets, anti-miscegenation laws and gerrymandering that make ours look like reparations, and tax dollars spent as if El Paso and Juarez were one city? (I recognize this last analogy is flawed for several reasons re: American Imperialism, but the withholding of basic infrastructure in East Jerusalem draws the comparison.)

The tax-paying Palestinian citizens of Israel in the walled-off Shu’fat neighborhood of Jerusalem do not receive, among countless other available amenities, any garbage removal service.

However naive or selfish, what haunts the sh*t out of me is the realization that We are not free until everyone is free is not a metaphor. The fight for Palestinian liberation is the fight for our liberation in the most technical, legal sense. To say Black lives matter without in the same breath saying Free Palestine is to call for ineffective protections of Black and brown lives. Our laws and rights, in addition to our subtle relationships with ourselves and each other, are irrefutably tied up in the harrowing and astonishing success of the Zionist project.

 

Israeli-owned app Waze alerts you of “danger” the moment you cross into the West Bank.

 

Until recently, I thought it was f*cked up to bring Jewish safety into this entirely different, entirely more urgent conversation, but I’m (shamefully) floored by the blatant antisemitism I've encountered when talking to people about the Israeli government. The Zionist movement has been so successful in conflating the critique of its human rights abuses with literal antisemitism that it puts Israelis and the Jewish diaspora at greater risk of harm. (The comments in the linked video range from the Streisand Effect to direct threats of violence.)

Even more complicated is that so much of the antisemitism I've heard from Americans has come from BIPOC folks who intuitively recognize the dynamics of intersectional privilege as well as the blatantly racist white-washing of history wielded by Jewish people of European descent in the US. And while some Zionists argue that the term "settler colonialism" disregards the historical existence of Arab Jews, those who claim indigeneity and are, as we speak, invading the land and demolishing the homes and communities of the indigenous population—inadvertently proclaim their total disconnect from the experience of being so.

More Apartheid Wall art

In this conflation, the Israeli government makes the world a more dangerous place for Jews of all races, a more dangerous place for the Muslim diaspora, and—like the American government does to white folks and everyone else—robs Israelis of their humanity. My head spins thinking about what it must take to laugh with your friends while threatening a stranger’s life, to grow up believing the entire world wants you dead and your only solution is to kill your neighbors first, or the exhaustive mental gymnastics required to believe state-sanctioned gaslighting because it’s the only way you know how to relate to intergenerational trauma.

We all have strategies we use to hold onto ancestral wisdom and make peace with what we’ve inherited, whether or not it serves us now. My family doesn’t speak Spanish at home. We don’t talk about boarding schools. We make jokes about poverty-inspired penny pinching and keep our guards up even when the door is locked. We speak politely to cops. Our resistance is our assimilation because our resistance is our physical existence. Sometimes it feels like we have not made it very far past that yet.

Across the entire planet, our relationships to each of our peoples’ attempted annihilations vary. The stories vary; the forms of healing vary. We might oscillate between the extremes of “[wearing] victimhood like a badge,” and believing self-victimization is itself the main problem. However non-nuanced they become, these coping tactics emerged from horrific circumstances without objective narratives to cling to. They linger in all aspects of our world views, and these limited perspectives are often validated as the correct ones by our communities.

 

Bethlehem, West Bank

 

When I ask Palestinians how their families teach them to interact with the Israeli army, I’m met with mixed responses. Many get The Talk as young children because the army maims and murders children to pass the workday (I won’t repeat the stories I’ve heard in real life here, so enjoy this ~fun game~). Many warned by their mothers to bow their heads and “feign” submission defy this advice. They answer back with the same aggression they’re met with. They look the soldiers in the eyes and speak their minds. This is their resistance. This and joy, and so many other small and big, kind and noble and scary and selfish and selfless things, just like everyone else.

Consistently, the message I’ve received from Palestinians and “traitor” Israelis all over the world has been the same: it is a wasted energy to focus on changing Israeli minds and hearts; the majority “don’t stand a chance against the indoctrination of the government” and their required (re: forced) military service. Despite some incredible Israeli organizations on the front lines of this work, many of those who speak out against the occupation risk not only their lives, but full expulsion from their families and communities.

But those of us in the West whose tax dollars fund apartheid risk what, exactly?

It’s personal for each of us—both the consequences of ignorance and resistance. I guess I’m just asking that the next time you’re doom scrolling or feeling guilty for performative or even lack of performative activism, or maybe feeling powerless to all the different atrocities in the world, consider the untapped power of your passport, or your position in your Western community. So many of us are quick to re-share compassion and solidarity with Ukraine and then fall silent on issues plaguing brown people across the globe. Is it because there are too many issues to choose from? Because you’re nervous to make a mistake? Because you’re…Islamophobic? We, too, hardly stand a chance against the indoctrination of our government.

As a non-Jewish American, I often feel paralyzed by the thought of accidentally perpetuating antisemitism, of failing to recognize tropes and dog-whistle language I can’t possibly catch without the lived experience of enduring those specific microaggressions on a daily basis. There are so many ways to inadvertently perpetuate violence, to psychically other ourselves at the edge of class solidarity, but this centering of a separate narrative during an incomparable crisis is to perpetuate an issue that hurts every party involved.

Another giant Banksy in the West Bank

So if you have the financial means, the PTO, or you’re young enough to qualify for “Birthright,” go see for yourself. Find a tour that advertises both sides or even just the one you can’t find in your Twitter feed. If it’s any comfort, I pulled off visiting East Jerusalem and nearby parts of the West Bank without giving Israel more than $70.

I think it’s also probably worth noting that Palestinians are THE friendliest and most welcoming people on the planet (sample size: 30+ countries). You can easily have meaningful interactions anywhere in public, no matter how mundane or impersonal the activity. When visiting Jordan (a country of majority Palestinian refugees, where, just as a btw, homosexuality was decriminalized ten years before the first US state followed suit), it took several days to adjust to the whiplash of genuine warmth and generosity from every stranger I met. Unlike in the US (or…at least the Bay Area), where it’s definitely not okay for privileged folks to ask for a free education from oppressed groups, if you say, “I genuinely want to learn,” you will find so many people who are eager to share their experiences with you, who will invite you into their celebrations of culture and joyful resistance as well as share honest recountings of trauma. 

If, for whatever private reason, you decide to compartmentalize this fight, to tell yourself it is not yours, that you would rather spend your time on earth reaping the benefits of class warfare and dissociative comforts of the Global North, you’re in good company, and there’s still an endless slew of connected causes worth advocating for. The absolute bullsh*t that is Real ID is directly related. Children’s mental health advocacy is directly related. Even the framing of rhetoric for seemingly unrelated issues, like transphobia “versus” the misogyny plaguing people assigned female at birth, is analogous in the ways we make room to center our most marginalized communities without denying the existence of contradictory truths.

Also tangled up is the struggle to claim identity among non-white populations all over the Western world, the self-sabotage of cancel culture, the harms perpetuated by philanthropy, Indigenous sovereignty and disregarded wisdom, gentrification, medical racism, the prison industrial complex, educators’ right to educate, artists’ right to make art, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental racism, climate justice, and the [insert color]-washing and narrative skewing of “terrorism” and resistance.

Garden of Gethsemane. No, I’m not religious, and yes, I ugly sobbed.

Swiping through Instagram stories and seeing what gives each friend meaning reminds me that our collective liberation is contingent upon each of these parallel fights. We vote with our dollar and attention, so here’s a list of further reading/watching/buying/sharing/learning:

Learn more:

art, etc:

Ways to support:

Accounts to follow:

Destinations, Not EuropeLeah Sanginiti1 Comment