Intro written on July 20, 2024
It’s Day 287 of the genocide in Gaza; 78 days short of a year.
Today, I woke up to an Instagram post sharing the experience of two American surgeons who volunteered at a Gaza hospital. Juri, a Palestinian girl they operated on was missing two inches of her left femur along with muscle and skin on her back thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, the bones in her pelvis exposed. As they examined her, maggots fell out onto the operating room table.
Nine months of countless images of unbearable suffering later and, yes, it can still get worse.
I’m sitting in a café in Cartagena as I write this. I didn’t travel for almost a year—an unusually long time for me. For the first few months of the genocide, it just felt too ungrounding for me to be away from local actions for Palestine and community.
But after nine months of integrating into my life those actions, the process of confronting the horrors of the genocide, and the reaching out for supports to not completely fall apart, traveling now feels like an opportunity to re-anchor myself.
To disconnect not from the atrocities, but from the everyday grind under capitalism that (purposely) redirects our time and energy away from the pursuit of collective liberation.
Here, I’ve reclaimed enough brain space to reflect on the question: How do I move forward in my activism work given that we're still demanding the bare minimum? I share my thoughts—whatever has surfaced from the fog—in this blog post series.
In Part 1, I explain why I care so much about Palestine. Since I started speaking out and taking action for Palestine, a few people have asked what drives me?
At face value, it may seem like I have no stake in what transpires for a people on the other side of the world. (Already, I hope that assumption feels problematic for you.) But for me, the genocide in Gaza is entirely connected to my life.
In Parts 2 to 4, I share my process of sustaining activism work for Palestine and other causes. Part 5 gives my take on what I as a future therapist, and the therapy field generally, have a responsibility to do in the midst of a genocide. And Part 6 ends the series with my reflections on how I’ve decided to move forward at a time when all can seem lost.
As always, this is my one personal experience and perspective. I will undoubtedly continue learning new things that change, expand or add nuance to my current stance. So, please read this as where I’m at in this one moment in time. (You can follow me on Instagram at @janicehoimages for more ongoing updates.)
Caring is not logical or transactional
Where the Orange Trees Grow, @safialatifpaintings
First off, in my view, the Palestinian cause is worthy of fighting for in and of itself.
I believe if everyone got more educated on both the history and current situation of the Palestinian people, and touched into their humanity, it’d be a no-brainer.
Of course, certain obstacles get in the way of people accessing both the education and their humanity.
Regarding the history, the so-called “state of Israel” (in actuality, “Occupied Palestine”) has invested a substantial amount of money and effort into hiding the ugly truth of its existence and legitimacy, or lack thereof.
People all around the world have been indoctrinated with the Zionists’ propaganda, called hasbara, which aims to “justify, rationalize, and support the actions of ‘Israel’ and its ideology of Zionism and to attack those who criticize or resist them” (Al Mayadeen).
This is carried out through talking points, spin and misinformation, including positioning Occupied Palestine as a God-given Jewish homeland, conflating criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, and painting the state of Israel as the exemplar of democracy in the Middle East.
(Learn more here: The war that canonized America's hasbara playbook and here: Examining ‘Ten Myths about Israel’, by Ilan Pappe. You can also see how overt the Zionists are with their propaganda here: Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus.)
When it comes to the current genocide, the messaging is that it’s a conflict, a war—justified self-defence against “the terrorists” who apparently comprise all Palestinian people, including unborn babies in the womb.
Aiding and abetting the perpetuation of this façade is Western media, which has done a beyond unethical and biased job of reporting on the genocide, reducing what any informed person can see is a blatant attempt to exterminate an entire peoples to “the Israel-Hamas war.” In Western reporting, historical context is completely avoided and “Palestinians simply and passively ‘die,’ while Israelis are actively ‘killed’” (Institute for Palestine Studies).
Those who support the Zionist regime have a huge stake in preventing the masses from gaining awareness around the Palestinian struggle, because a state founded on ethnic cleansing always stands on shaky ground. But if you want to know the truth, it's actually quite easy to find many well-documented resources that shed light on it.
And given how much attention the Gaza genocide has received globally over the past almost one year, a still-uninformed person has to ask what other obstacles stand in their way of accessing this readily available information? (If you want to dive deeper, check out the list of resources here or here.)
Photographs of Life in Palestine (ca. 1896–1919), The Public Domain Review
In short, the reality many are opening their eyes to is that the Zionists have been executing their settler-colonial project to establish a Jewish-majority state in now-occupied Palestine (colonially called “Israel” since 1948) since the late 1800s, when Theodr Herzl—an Austro-Hungarian Jew known as the founder of modern political Zionism—put that plan into motion with the backing of the imperial power at the time, Britain.
So, no, it did not start on October 7.
Any settler-colonial project—such as that of the U.S., the U.K., Canada (see “Colonization”), and Australia—necessitates the ethnic cleansing of the population indigenous to the land (in this case, the Palestinians), because why the fuck would an entire population willingly give up their homeland to another group of people?
The Zionist movement/“Israel” has since done all the things colonizers do in forcibly taking over a land and erasing its native inhabitants and their culture, such as depriving the indigenous population of their rights (including, in this case, through establishing an apartheid system and illegal occupation), dehumanizing the oppressed group so as to normalize their eradication, and actually exterminating them—which we have been witnessing in real time, live-streamed on social media, every day for almost a year now.
Some people say the history is complicated.
In my view, it may be complex and long, but it isn’t complicated.
And a genocide is never difficult to grasp—at least not when it comes to how we counter it. Nothing justifies the wholesale slaughter of a peoples. Ever.
Thus, as fellow human beings, we have a responsibility to do whatever is in our power to end a genocide when we see it being carried out.
Which brings me to the second thing: the obstacles that prevent people from connecting with their humanity enough to know on a non-intellectual level that supporting a ceasefire (i.e., the end of a genocide) and a free Palestine (a peoples’ right to self-determination) is not up for debate. (More on this in Part 3.)
Between shifting the mind and the heart, learning a different way of relating to others is perhaps the harder part. It takes more than just reading a book and accumulating intellectual knowledge to tap into the innate care we feel for others simply because they are human.
But I believe acting from a heart-led place is ultimately what sustains our work for collective liberation versus mostly mind-muscling our way forward.
Fighting the same oppressors
Korea-Palestine Solidarity, Palestine Poster Project
On another level, I see what is happening to the people of Palestine as completely connected to my own life.
Social justice is a core value of mine. And over the years, my biggest social justice cause has been the fight against racism in so-called Canada (and the U.S., because what happens south of us hugely influences our culture, politics, and so on).
I experienced both overt and indirect racism as an Asian person growing up in Toronto, and saw other racialized people around me endure the same—and yes, in one of the most multicultural areas of the city.
I observed the differences in who held positions of authority (and who didn’t), who were represented in media, ads, books, and toys (and who weren’t), and who seemed to live in the wealthier parts of the city (and who lived in more rundown spaces).
Studying sociology and criminology in undergrad helped me put words to these experiences. Both fields of study critically analyze our social structures and systems, and call attention to what I already knew intuitively as a young person: that equality didn’t (doesn’t) exist in Canada.
Adding to the oppressive experiences of being a racialized person as well as a girl/woman in a racist, patriarchal culture was growing up without financial privilege.
I believe that not having money in a capitalist culture is one of the greatest affronts to a person’s dignity and incredibly traumatic.
Not because money has some inherent value that I think all people “deserve,” but because accessing basic necessities of life like proper housing and food—which everyone has a fundamental right to—are so dependent on having money. And that access to money is unequal across groups, with racialized groups more likely to be poor due to systemic injustices.
(To add some nuance, I think living in a capitalist culture is traumatic, period. Even if you are on the privileged end of things, your humanity can’t escape untouched by this or any other form of oppression. It’s just that for those on the unprivileged end, certain impacts are of a different traumatic variety.)
While I am relatively more financially privileged now, experiencing the opposite for many of my formative years made it impossible to ignore the oppressive weight of living on the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder.
When you’re barely making rent some months, living in unsafe and unstable housing, eating cheap, unhealthy food, and feeling the constant exhaustion in your bones from working multiple minimum-wage jobs to exist, it brings you eyeball to eyeball with the systemic inequalities here in ways I think many people with money are blinded to.
Water bath punishment, Canada's Penitentiary Museum (during a 2010 visit for work)
During my Master’s of Criminology program and subsequent eight years of work in the criminal justice field, it became increasingly obvious to me that our identities under these oppressive systems—including race, gender, sexuality, etc.—play a huge role in people’s chances of being well, autonomous and safe.
And that none of it is by accident.
Through both reading the research and sitting in courtrooms, volunteering in a jail for a year, and visiting some of our federal prisons, I learned much about politics, policing, the courts, prisons and other systems that showed me that what we’re told stands for justice operates quite differently in reality—especially when it comes to Black, brown and Indigenous people.
I discovered the origins of policing in Canada (and the U.S.) are rooted in slavery and colonialism. And I learned that Black people especially are subjected to “discriminatory street checks, stops, searches, charges, arrests, and use of force”—police practices that persist to this day (OHRC). Cop shootings of civilians are disproportionately against Black and Indigenous people, and almost never result in the subject police officer(s) being held accountable (CCLA; OHRC).
I also saw (I’m sure just a fraction of) the dehumanizing and trauma-inducing conditions that incarcerated individuals are subjected to. I learned that most people behind bars in our city jails actually haven’t been convicted of the charges they’re locked up for.
I read about Indigenous communities declaring a state of emergency repeatedly for decades, due to the ongoing impacts of colonization on their people. I heard politicians announce ad nauseum their commitment to repairing the wrongs that “Canada” had inflicted on Indigenous people. But years later, basic necessities of life like access to clean drinking water in these communities are still absent.
I have never felt proud to be Canadian knowing the ugly truth of this country’s (ongoing) history.
Visiting an Indigenous community during my work in the criminal justice field
My education taught me to scrutinize the often unexamined “legitimacy” of both government and the law. Further, I learned to critically analyze the way media and politicians portray racialized people, for example, as “superpredators”; hypersexualized; and adult-like, and therefore more threatening and culpable, when they are only children (“adultification”).
To this day, these various fear-mongering and dehumanizing tactics continue reinforcing popular demand—and with that, huge amounts of public money—for harsher sentences, the continued use of prisons, and more policing. All to the detriment of investing in community supports that are a fraction of the cost but shown to be more effective in keeping communities well.
For me, these learnings were not just intellectual. They shook me to my core and significantly influenced how safe I felt in my environment. I also experienced a lot of rage and grief that I didn't have the supports to process back then.
By 2016, I was burnt out and deeply jaded from trying to help change the system, which felt like pushing a heavy boulder up a steep mountain. That year, I left both my career and the city. I avoided the news for a long time after that.
Over the next few years, as I built my freelancing career, my life became more nomadic and my community more virtual than rooted locally. I also started down my “spiritual development journey” which led me to discover how white supremacist, capitalist and colonialist practices and ideas also pervade the so-called “wellness” and therapy spaces (more on this in Part 5).
Once your eyes are open, you truly cannot unsee this shit.
And the shit is everywhere.
This being what I knew about the world, when I eventually came to learn about how the so-called state of Israel has been colonizing Palestine; depriving the indigenous population of their basic rights and needs to maintain control over the people and the land; inflicting state-sanctioned violence to repress anyone who threatens their colonial, white supremacist agenda with little to no accountability; using the education system, the media and political spin to convince the world of its legitimacy and to endorse its subjugation of a dehumanized and “threatening” racialized population, it immediately felt all-too familiar.
It was the colonizers’ playbook in play.
And what I’m understanding more and more is that colonizers don’t just copy the playbook in an isolated fashion, but rather, they join forces to carry out their respective colonial projects.
The Palestinian people’s most obvious, immediate oppressor may be the Israeli government and military, but when we widen the lens, we see that what enables “Israel” to commit such atrocities with little impunity are the interconnected global forces of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy. And those are my oppressors too.
As Ijeoma Oluo has said, “Those that seek to oppress us can see their shared goals. They see how their futures are connected, and they absolutely work together.”
It is us who needs to open our eyes to the connections, including understanding that also intertwined is our collective liberation.
So, back to the question of why do I care so much about Palestine?
My question is why wouldn’t someone care?
Is it because they haven’t learned enough of the history (yet) to know about the egregious violations against humanity that “Israel” has committed against Palestinians for decades?
Is it because they haven’t done enough of their own internal anti-racist/anti-bias work (yet) to see Palestinian people as equally human and deserving of life, love and self-determination?
Is it that they do feel care but don’t have the supports needed (yet) to more deeply engage with the genocide and move past the obstacles stopping them from taking action?
If any of these questions activate you, maybe you'll gain more clarity around them as we continue with this blog post series. Stay tuned for Part 2: “Sustaining Activism for Palestine.”
