Gaza: The Heart of the World
Nakba Day - May 15, 2025
Words where there are none
I’ve been trying to write this for days as the genocide in Gaza becomes an unmitigated holocaust and the intensifying anguish and death and forced starvation stream across our social media day and night.
Every day for the past 18 months, we kept thinking it could not get worse. And then it got worse, both in practice and in what was revealed that had been hidden.
The torture, sexual abuse, starvation, and murder in Israeli detention centers.
The assassinations of Palestinian journalists, medical workers, and relief workers.
The wanton and even gleeful murder of as yet uncounted tens and tens and tens of thousands of Palestinians and the forced starvation of two million people happening before the eyes of a seemingly paralyzed world.
The mainstream press continuing to spread propaganda and serve as a mouthpiece for a genocidal state.
The unhinged Jewish supremacy narrative of Zionism and its “greater Israel” agenda freed from any guardrails of international law or threat of action from its allies in the West.
The complicity of successive U.S. administrations and the U.S. Congress and Senate, even by most of those claiming the mantle of progressivism.
The craven complicity of universities and the illegal suppression of free speech and the right to assembly.
The evidence and anguished pleas of Palestinians in Gaza and the diaspora streamed to us live from the killing fields suppressed on social media.
The silence of so many.
Divided and unifying
The world is divided even as something yet-to-be-named is unifying.
We are divided between those who are complicit by their explicit support for the Zionist project, or by their silence, and those who are organizing for a new world order free from supremacisms of any kind.
Some of our movements have been around for decades or even centuries. Some of our movements are relatively new. But right now, the many movements of those of us organizing for a different world order are decentralized.
We are speaking and writing and making art. We are marching and boycotting. We are building encampments and hunger striking. We are being bombed, beaten, jailed, and deported. We are losing jobs and credentials. We are gathering in ever-greater numbers.
But we have few representatives in governments. We have many names and no centralized leaders. Is this itself the beginning of a new world? Where will the power to truly unseat the old supremacist, colonial order derive from? I don’t know, but I can feel a groundswell of force coalescing.
I do know that we cannot give up. If there is anything speaking to us out of this time of the deeper revelation of the cruelty of human beings, it is a command to stand up and follow whatever we call heart, or wisdom, or God.
And this is not an abstraction. We are seeing this command issued day after day by the embodied example of Gazans living through a holocaust.
We see them not abandoning their most cherished values or their God. We see them holding community and engaging in brave acts of mutual aid. We see them fighting against all odds.
We see them, in the midst of unimaginable deprivation and pain, reaching out to help us. And we hear them, the voices of exquisitely vulnerable humans the same as our own.
The heart
Angela Davis said recently that Gaza has become the center of the world. The center is always the heart. The center is what we protect, what we nurture, and what we follow if we want to realize the potential of the life that we have received.
Gaza is not a single issue: it is the whole issue condensed to a single small strip of land.
All of the supremacies we propagate against each other, against other animals, and our living world—stand revealed in Gaza, and they are revealed to be connected.
Standing up for Palestine, speaking out for Palestine, and fighting for the liberation of Palestine is the beginning of the end we’ve been longing for.
So we find ourselves in a very difficult moment, a moment of grief, a moment of witnessing the apartheid and the genocide unfolding in a way that we had never imagined before. But at the same time, we recognize that Palestine has never given up. Palestine will never give up. And this is precisely why, even in the worst possible material predicament, with the Israeli bombs having destroyed virtually the entirety of Gaza, we see the Palestinian people who are refusing to give up, who will not give up on their people, who will not give up on their history, who will not give up on their culture, and who will not give up on their ability to express solidarity with other people who are struggling all over the world.
And so, it’s a moment that is a bit difficult to digest, but I do think that even as we cry, even as we express solidarity amidst the suffering, we should recognize that this is a moment we’ve been waiting for, where people all over the world are recognizing Palestine as a litmus test and are recognizing that the people in the Sudan will — in Sudan will not be successful, people in Congo will not be successful, people in Haiti will not be successful, if they do not follow the leadership of the Palestinian people, who absolutely refuse to capitulate and genuflect to Zionism and to global capitalism and to racism. — Angela Davis, Democracy Now, May 2, 2025. Link
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?
Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter on Substack to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.