What remains

When was it too much for you? Decades ago? 2006, 2014, 2021? When they killed Shireen Abu Akleh and then beat the pallbearers at her funeral? In October? When the hospital was bombed killing hundreds, or when every University in Gaza was destroyed, or the water treatment buildings, or the sewage plants, or the mosques, churches, schools, shelters, UN facilities, aid worker vehicles, ambulances, refugee camps, or when all that was gone, when they simply bombed the tents?

What is there to say after all this? As I’m writing, we’re less than two weeks away from October 7th. By some estimates there could be as many as 200,000 dead in Gaza by now, the Health Ministry stopped being able to update their numbers months ago. The entirety of the Gaza strip has been turned to rubble, 35% of the buildings were destroyed back in February, who knows what that number is now. The scale of the destruction I really cannot fathom. Israel now faces north, killing over 500 in Lebanon in just a day with a wave of air strikes, and Netanyahu is in the city I’m writing this from to address the UN.

In any sane world, this fascist state would be toppled by a coalition of countries that can’t stand to see this go on any longer. There are millions, billions, of us who can’t stand to see it go on but we don’t have our hands on the levers of power. All these demonstrations, as John Berger would put it, “..express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realize them have been created.” But by the time those conditions are met, it will be too late. It was too late a long time ago. For a year we’ve seen massacre after massacre after massacre, whole family trees being erased in an instant with the flick of a pilots wrist. How many in the time it takes to write this? 

What else can we do? We do not live in a democracy, nothing the mass majority of people believe in and want translates to any change in policy whatsoever. Biden could make one phone call and end this, but he doesn’t, he sends them more bombs. Now his successor will continue that legacy. All you can say to the people of Gaza is,

I’m so sorry we failed you.

We need a ceasefire immediately and so much more than that we need a complete arms embargo, complete denormalization, high court war crimes and genocide tribunals, a return of the land and a changing of everything that allowed this past year to occur. In years and decades to come when we look back on this time, do not give those responsible an inch. They are butchers through and through, every single one of them. They have helped kill an entire people. Time will temper people’s memories but not ours. Their rose tinted glasses are soaked with blood.

I’ve spent the last year at every protest, gathering, speech, march, vigil, and sit in I could get to because I don’t know what else to do. We owe the people of Gaza at least that, to be there and to care and to yell until your voice is gone that you want their suffering to end. 

I know I’ll share the earth with a free Palestine.

You can’t give up on them.

Thank you to my friend Zach, to the Palestinian Youth Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, Al Awda, and everyone else who has not let New Yorkers and the world forget what it means to be human.