Tuesday, December 26: You Don't Get to Freedom Peacefully
Do you condemn the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza?
The images coming from Palestine will haunt me forever. They’ve gone from occupying my waking hours to extending well into my subconscious and now dominating my nightmares. The sights, the sounds, the descriptions and the fact that so many in the west are completely unaffected will remain in my memory forever. I’m well aware that we’ve witnessed other atrocities throughout history and the world has always pretended that we’d never let it happen again. Yet somehow it’s okay for people to look away now from what’s happening to Palestinians?
The apartheid state celebrated Christmas yesterday the same way they’ve celebrated each of the past 80 days: they bombed the shit out of neighborhoods and killed innocent people under the guise of “fighting a war”. Residents of central Gaza described another horrifying night of heavy airstrikes shaking the towns of Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij. These towns are refugee camps, housing Palestinians that were originally driven from their homes in what is now Israel all the way back in 1948. Now these refugee camps are also packed with Gazans who fled the north after the apartheid state began its indiscriminate bombing.
Israel has been documented desecrating the graves of Palestinians, so that even in death, there is no peace for those murdered in the name of zionism. But please don’t fall into despair or defeatism my friends, this is the tool of the colonizer. They want us to believe that defeat is the only possible outcome, that Palestinian liberation is impossible. Remember that the only solution to zionist occupation is revolution, and revolution is exactly what we’re witnessing. Revolution of Palestinians against their oppressors, and even revolution within the apartheid state. Consider Tal Ziv, an 18 year old Israeli kid, refusing to serve in the IDF and facing imprisonment for his choice. There will be others, like young Tal, who recognize the necessity of fighting against an apartheid state desperate to sacrifice their futures for the zionist project.
"My refusal is an attempt to influence Israeli society, and is intended to avoid taking part in the occupation and the massacre happening in Gaza. I am trying to say that it's not in my name. I do not agree that people should be killed in my name. It is not in the name of my security."
-Tal Ziv, a young Israeli conscientious objector to genocide
Much like Sabreen Akhter said, I don’t simply advocate for Palestinian liberation or an end to this genocide due to some far-off possibility that my kids might ask me one day “what did you do?” I sit here every morning and write because my own soul regularly shakes me awake in the middle of the night like the ghost of Christmas past, demanding a response to my own beating heart’s question: what is the purpose of this heart? What am I doing with my one opportunity to improve the lives of the people around me? And I pose the same question to you: what are you doing?