Getting Involved & Staying Regulated

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• he connections between Indigenous history here on Turtle Island as well as in Palestine.

• I also recognize that the United States itself began as a colonial ethnostate, much as the state of Israel did, and that it used (and continues to use) the same tactics of breaking treaties, encroaching upon territories, terrorizing Indigenous peoples, and destroying their homes, landmarks, and other cultural touchstones in order to further the mythologized supremacy of its nation-state.

• I cannot help but recognize there is blood running like a river under my feet. But since I also live in a country where meaningful political participation of any kind is systematically thwarted, I often struggle to conjure up what taking meaningful steps to set things right might look like.

• But now isn’t the time to remain silent out of a fear of stepping out of one’s lane or making mistakes.

• Were all these calls, each so popular on social media, as beneficial to vulnerable people as they were effective at assuaging privileged people’s tough feelings

• Are we searching for a way to make a difference, or are we looking just to feel that we have? How do we go about getting involved, and staying involved in a way that really helps without succumbing to privileged withdrawal or numbed jadedness?

• . I recognize where I specifically am positioned to have the most positive impact, and I focus my attentions there without beating myself up much for not being capable of everything else.

• the average person who uses the internet consumes more information in a single day than our great-grandparents would have consumed in months (and more information than a 15th-century person would consume in a lifetime)

• This served as a harsh reminder that I can’t parse information very well at all when I’m swept in the heat of alarm

• In light of this, I believe that bearing witness to the suffering of Palestinians is respectful, and that amplifying their cries of grief and their calls for justice is an appropriate thing to do. It isn’t trauma porn, it is humanization. It honors the lives lost to reflect upon them, to see their faces and known their names.

• At the same time, merely bearing witness to mass death is not sufficient, and being saddened or horrified is not itself a moral act

• I learned from one of Piker’s videos that the Jewish communal farmers who live on kibbutzes in Israel tend to be overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, and that the Israeli government positions them on the fringes of the country as a kind of human shield against attacks from Hamas.

• o end this conflict with just a ceasefire would be to return to the oppressive status quo that has left millions of people trapped in Gaza and the West Bank without any power of political participation or even the right to leave, let alone to return to their ancestral homes.

• Lending these moments of destruction my attention did not feel traumatizing or grim, it felt like choosing to be a party to justice, rather than being complicit in the Israeli government’s attempts to purge all remaining gasps of life away.

• It’s more collective pain than any person can comfortably imagine.

• Small narratives of individual people breaking bread with Sacco and telling him of their murdered brothers and mothers and their recent weddings helped made it all concrete. It kept me from becoming numb to the enormity of the carnage.

• they have a massive financial incentive (thanks to the Israel lobby) to not change their allegiance

• Beyond that, when I believe the root cause of the genocide against Palestinians is the inherently violent dehumanization of the nation-state, then making appeals to another massive, genocidal nation-state in order to stop it doesn’t necessary make sense.

• When our elected representatives are not accountable to us, we must escalate and take an approach that forces them to contend with our collective power and rage

• Those who have closely studied Palestinian resistance mark the Great March of Return as an important turning point, away from more violent resistance and toward more symbolic, civil disobedience.