Right off the bat, I want to say that I am not an expert on this subject. I do not have the most robust information and education on the history between Palestine and Israel. It is truly only within the last week that I have learned everything that I know today. So, before I even begin, I want to say that this post *will most likely* have wording, statements, and perhaps “facts” that are not 100% correct in their entirety. I want to apologize for my ignorance, but I suppose that’s exactly what I want to talk about.
The world has watched Gaza and Jerusalem suffer bombings, air strikes, brutality, deaths, and in a nutshell, inhumane treatment during Ramadan, a sacred Muslim holiday rooted in devotion, worship, prayer, and fasting, over the last week. It has shed immense amounts of light on the ongoing occupation between Palestine and Israel, which has been perpetuated and tantalized by Hamas, a terrorist group.
The death toll has increased day by day, and right now, almost 30% of those deaths have been children. Besides that sickening statistic, the majority of deaths have been innocent civilians— a fact that cannot be disputed.
I have watched video after video, listened to news update after news update, and read resource after resource on the massacre at hand. It has consumed the majority of my mental energy, and I am bewildered by the gut-wrenching footage I have seen of the events taking place. There is no possible way that I can turn my head and forget about what my eyes have seen.
I am fully aware that tension between Palestine and Israel has been ongoing for generations. I know that their history is convoluted and long.
The last week has reminded me of when the BLM movement gained an enormous amount of momentum and recognition after George Floyd was killed by the knee of a police officer. For anyone who hadn’t heard of BLM before Floyd’s very public death, they, at the very least, had heard it after. For those who were outraged and appalled by how cruel his murder was, they went as far as understanding the significance and purpose of the BLM movement. It was a mass awakening on a scale I had never witnessed before.
To be very honest, I was so angry when this happened. I silenced all my group chats, deleted social media apps off my phone, and felt enraged for a long time. Was I devastated and disgusted by Floyd’s death? Absolutely. I have never fully watched the video because it makes me wonder how I can be the same species as the man who was suffocating Floyd.
But what I was truly angry about was the fact that it took 9 minutes of video evidence of a man being ruthlessly killed by a police officer for so much of the US to wake up and pay attention to the importance of BLM. I could not fathom how so much of America was blind to the atrocities taking place and that it took a relentless, disturbing video to finally drill into people that this. is. reality.
How and why did it have to get to that point for the US to address, on a mass level, the systemic racism that’s engrained in our country? I could not wrap my head around the fact that catastrophe had to happen for change to ensue.
Although I was very angry, I had to slowly and silently teach myself that it was more important to focus on the fact that people were waking up to the racism in America, despite how it happened. We could no longer save George Floyd, but we could catapult this awakening and change the course of history. That is what I had to teach myself.
How does this have anything to do with Palestine and Israel?
I am now on the other side of what I was once so angry about. I am shamefully apart of the mass of people who are being awakened to the barbaric events that are happening in Gaza and Jerusalem and between Israel and Palestine as a whole. It took until last week for me to dive into as much as I could to educate myself on the issues occurring. I was terribly ignorant (still probably am) and unaware of the history between the two.
To make matters worse, my grandfather worked at the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq for a number of years and has traveled throughout the Middle East, including Gaza. He has tried to have numerous conversations with me over the years about the occupation, and I never paid attention to what he was saying because I thought it was irrelevant to my life and a world away. I pretty much tuned out his comments, nodded my head, and took the first chance I could get to escape the conversations. “How did it affect me?” is what I thought.
Fast forward to today. My sister’s boyfriend is a Muslim man who was born and raised in Jordan, a small country in the Middle East that borders Israel. His entire immediate family still lives there while he resides here in the US. He happens to be 100% Palestinian.
This man will one day be considered my family— he already is, in my eyes. That means my future nieces and nephews will be Palestinian, and although they aren’t born yet, I know I will love those children like they are my own. They will have a history to understand, and a family who should understand it, too.
When you break it all down, you can clearly see how a world that once felt so far away is a lot closer to home than it first seemed. Even though I am an American citizen who is safely at home in her little suburban town, that does not mean I am excused from understanding what is happening in the world, especially given the ties I have.
Being even more honest, I’ve had a complex with that, too. After I realized that this issue was a lot closer to home than I initially realized it was, I thought, “why did I have to relate this back to me in order for me to care?”
And that, is where the issue lies.
Look, none of us are perfect. We are all trying to handle what we can. We have a lot on our plates, and we have to deal with complicated emotions, situations, realities, and relationships. I get it. I am human, too.
All I want to draw attention to is the fact that just because you are not directly affected by or involved with an issue that may not feel close to home does not mean that you cannot be an ally, a voice, an activist, or at the very least, educated. You do not have to be actively involved in every single social issue out there, but you have to understand that if you have freedom and safety, you have the choice to be involved in amplifying, improving, or accelerating the status of a cause that may need your help.
We are living in a world where empathy is often overlooked because it seems like a rather useless tool in a time when bombs and missiles are being launched into residential neighborhoods. People think that if you’re not donating money, signing petitions, actively volunteering, or writing letters to your state representatives, there is no use getting involved. I will argue that doing any of the previously mentioned is honorable and needed, but I will also argue that if empathy were more abundant in the first place, a lot of issues may not have gone to the extreme. If we existed in a world where there was a surplus of empathy, would we see what we see today?
I urge you to stand up for what you believe in, get involved in a cause you care about, and give your energy and expertise to something that you do not directly benefit from. Remind yourself that everyone who lives a world away is still awakened by the same sun and put to sleep by the same moon, but above all, humanity depends on humanity.
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