Gaza

and the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Syria and Lebanon and Iran and American universities and the halls of Congress…even my beloved family. All besieged

Palestinian artist Suhad Khatib

Twenty months ago, I began posting on Facebook, which I rarely used, about my anger and despair over the plight of Gazans. I posted so much that my dearest friends worried about me. I got off FB and post now on Substack where the discourse on the grave injustice inflicted on Palestinians for almost a century is rich, well informed, and centered in a larger discourse about the planet - who has power and why, who pollutes and who gets sick from it, why Black and brown lives are so easily expendable, and on — the issues that have always been important to me.

I wasn’t wrong when despair poured out of me 20 months ago. The wiping out of Gaza was obvious from the beginning to those of us watching Gazan journalists who documented children with limbs shredded by American-made weapons, families flattened in collapsed buildings, and IDF soldiers laughing as they blew up Gaza. The violence is loathesome as is the Islamophobia and anti Arab racism. I listened as my lifelong friends Said and Doha and Walid and a new friend, Jumana, shared their trauma as Palestinians living the relentless Nakbe. Last semester I had discussions with my students, some of whom couldn’t study because of family in Beirut, in the West Bank, and Israel. Students on medication because of anxiety and fear of Islamophobia. I spoke up in an academic climate where doing so is rare.

My own son whose father is Jewish stopped speaking to me as he tries to sift out his ancestry, including a grandfather who ran the British blockade to bring Jewish refugees to Haifa in 1947. A heroic story my son heard as a child…that I hear quite differently, knowing my beloved friends fled Haifa’s ethnic cleansing at the very same time.

Now a dear colleague is praying that her family in Tehran will be spared the strikes and car bombs. I can’t imagine her distress. I hope now, that those who somehow were able to go about their lives without letting Gaza blacken their dreams, who said, “It’s complicated,” who said, “Both sides are responsible,” will look back and re-assess even a tiny bit. It did NOT begin on October 7th, and it will not end with bringing hostages home. Because it has never been about that.

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