Being Human

In these times

It doesn’t feel right to have feelings right now. While the world is on fire. While children are being slaughtered. It feels perverse to go on about how it’s impacting oneself, from the comfort of our homes. I’ve spent the majority of every day trying to send out information about what is happening. Trying to keep people aware, trying to keep people encouraged, trying to do my part to keep up the fight. I’ve had nightmares every night for two weeks now, and I wake up gasping and crying and then I remind myself that I get to wake up.

Today I called my partner crying. I ended a close friendship that had meant a lot to me. My friend is Jewish, and I knew that she had a complicated relationship with Israel. She knew that I always stood for Palestinian liberation, and that I had close Palestinian family. This was something that, with care, we had always been able to talk about. She is someone with a fundamental knowledge of how systemic oppression works, and I had always thought it had allowed her to hear me, even when she didn’t want to.

Shortly after the Hamas attacks a few weeks ago, she reached out to me in anger. She said that she had never seen me speak out against antisemitism. This was patently untrue and she knew it. She had been a good friend to me for years, she read my work. She knew it was untrue and apologized quickly for saying so. I was deeply hurt, but I also knew that she was in a place of hurt. I told her that we would try to talk this through when things had calmed down. That I still loved her and would continue to.

I think I said that with hope that she would see. That her better nature would take over, that her fundamental knowledge of how systemic oppression works, and her general love for people would kick in and allow her to see that this genocide had to stop. But I think part of me was hoping that she’d see it all would have to stop, that the violent oppression and occupation of a people wasn’t okay. That the safety that she associated with the existence of the state of Israel couldn’t come at the expense of the life and liberty of the Palestinians.

But this morning on her social media she was arguing against the use of the word “genocide” to describe the thousands of Gazans slaughtered in mere days, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the denial of food and water, the destruction of homes for over a million people. It wasn’t a genocide, why? Because there were still so many other Palestinians left in the world.

My heart, having been broken so many different ways in these last two weeks, shattered anew.

And I felt so silly for being sad about one friendship. And for being so hopeful in the first place.

One of my Palestinian cousins has been combing through photos of dead Palestinian children. Diving into her worst nightmare and deepest trauma in hopes of being able to convince the world that this is real, that this is happening, and that it has to stop. I asked her how she was holding up and what I can do. I ask how her father, my uncle, is, in having to relive the Nakba that he already survived once. These questions feel so cruel and I don’t know what else to say.

My friend - my former friend - and my cousins were all at my wedding last year. They stood by each other and cheered and laughed and danced. My cousins wore beautiful Palestinian clothing to the wedding. One of my cousins gifted my spouse and I two keffiyehs. I keep playing these moments in my head, when they stood next to each other and I was so glad to have them all there on one of the happiest days of my life.

I am a Black woman. I know what generational trauma is. I know what it feels like to be targeted. To be unsafe everywhere you go. I know what genocide is. And I know what oppression is. And all of it makes Palestinians my family even if they were not my family by blood. I know that I am not free if Palestine isn’t free. I know that my former friend is not either. But right now she has chosen fear and bigotry over what she knows to be true, and she has made us all less safe for it.

She’s not alone in this. She’s not the villain in this. She is someone deeply harmed, just like so many of us. And she’s someone making the same devastating choices that so many others are making right now. Choices that are allowing a genocide to occur right before our eyes. And I cannot judge her more harshly than I would others. I do not think my judgement is helpful to anyone at all. She will have to live with this, with what she has helped enable. And my heart breaks for the moment that she will realize it, and breaks even more at the thought that she might never realize it.

My partner is, of course, deeply affected by everything that is happening as well. He is doing all he can. He is crying with the knowledge that it all seems like so little in the face of such violent devastation. He has his own nightmares and his own heartbreaks. And yet he sits on the phone with me as I try not to cry and tells me to not brush away my grief. He tells me that I need to mourn this friendship that meant so much to me.

I am willing to lose so much more than friendships in this fight, but I don’t want to. I really, really don’t want to. And I will take this moment to be selfish, to make this about me when it isn’t about me. To say that this is all tearing me apart, that I am gutted, that my heart is broken. Because I am a human being in this, as much as I wish sometimes I wasn’t. And as much as I want to be able to say, “good riddance”, I’m going to miss my friend.