on new year’s eve, at the threshold of 2024, i want to send my love and duas to the people of palestine, especially the beautiful children of gaza and their extraordinary families.
it’s been emotionally shattering to bear witness to the sadistic violence unleashed on them by the israeli government, its army and mercenaries, so i cannot imagine the horrors they have experienced on the ground. they are being subjected to hunger and thirst, bombs and snipers, torture and detention, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. they have lost families, bloodlines, homes, limbs, the very contours of normal human life that anchor our reality. there are no words. language fails to capture such extreme loss and torment.
yet palestinian communities have been able to come together, under perverse circumstances, to help one another: dig children out of the rubble with bare hands, bake bread in makeshift ovens and feed neighbors, console grieving fathers and kids with mangled limbs, bury loved ones as well as the bodies of strangers. i marvel at young journalists in their 20s, in the springtime of life, who refused to leave gaza so they could continue to tell their people’s stories and stop the genocide.
against these scenes of human compassion and courage, we’ve seen the deranged cruelty and arrogance of mainstream israeli society. it’s not just israeli politicians lusting for a gaza holocaust, it’s israeli soldiers hoping to kill more babies, and israeli teenagers drunk on racism and supremacist vulgarity. the difference is clear. settler colonies are ungainly cartoons disoriented by their own hubris. harmful to others, but ultimately also harmful to themselves. a kind of self cannibalism.
as humans, we come to this world with one and one certainty only. that our time on this earth is limited and that we will die – sometime, someplace, somehow. why not lean into that knowledge and live a life of connection and generosity. we can learn so much from indigenous communities.
