October 7th as in Free Palestine
Being all for others is liberation
A silent no
A Jewish student of mine and I got into it the other day. He felt much as I did growing up in a Jewish family. The whole “chosen” thing and the constant centering of Jewish trauma and Jewish fear did not sit well with us.
But he also said, “I haven’t heard you mention anything in the last month about the loss of Jewish life on October 7th.” This also did not sit well with him.
After all, it was October 8th, 2024. Wouldn’t the past week have been the time when it was appropriate to once again express sadness for the loss of those 1200 Jewish Israeli lives one year ago?
A silent NO surged up within me.
Driving home, I couldn’t fully articulate why this NO was gripping my chest so tightly in its fist.
A genocide within a genocide
The exchange with my student took place during the week when Israel launched a genocide within a genocide in North Gaza.1
The horror has only intensified.
This past week, more than 30 Gazan families burned alive inside of their tents after being bombed by the Israeli army wielding U.S.-made weapons. Videos of burning families have been circulating on social media.
Listening to their screams and watching their limbs waving and blackened in the flames, even the word “holocaust” seems inadequate.
Speaking from Gaza on the Electronic Intifada’s weekly livestream, 21-year old journalist, Abubaker Abed said, “We need a new vocabulary for the horrors we are experiencing in Gaza.”
Abubaker sat in near darkness. Tearfully, but also with a brave smile on his face, he confessed that he had only eaten three meals in the past seven days and that he felt sick and his immune system was in trouble. He had lost a lot of weight.
As I write this
As I write this, North Gaza is surrounded by land and air. 400,000 people are trapped.
No food has entered the area since October 1st.
Israel has destroyed all of the infrastructure for the delivery of water.
Israel has destroyed all but one of the medical facilities.
Israel is detonating robot vehicles filled with explosives in places where people are sheltering.
Anyone who tries to leave their shelter to find food or water is shot on sight.
At least thirty families sleeping in their tents have been burned alive.
Injured people hooked up to I.V.s have been bombed and burned alive in their beds.
Even if we refuse to see or hear, these deaths are haunting us all. This violence and extreme cruelty is ripping us all apart. It is ripping the United States and Israel apart.
Palestinian-American professor and human rights attorney, Noura Erakat wrote this week:
Genocide is suicide. We are watching US empire and US society imperil itself. The expectation that we can commit genocide that only becomes more cruel and EXPECT to be safe, healthy, stable, "normal," is the apex of imperial arrogance.
Queer as in Free Palestine
I was so moved during gay pride this year by the declaration “Queer as in Free Palestine.”
Queer as in “yes we suffer oppression, marginalization, silencing, and violence, but we can be all for Palestine right now.”
We can set aside marking our own circumstances and reiterating our own history in the face of the overwhelming suffering of others.
We can recognize when this is called for, and we can have the generosity and heart to set ourselves aside and be for others in their time of great need.
The morning after my conversation with my student, I realized that the crux of my NO is this.
In the face of 100 years of violence and land theft and ethnic cleansing and genocide;
In the face of the current beyond urgent horror taking place in Gaza;
In the face of the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel and the acquiescence of most of its population to genocide and apartheid;
In the face of my own government’s material complicity in this genocide;
In the face of the thousands upon thousands of dead, shredded, tortured, abused people and the thousands upon thousands of pleas for help that have crossed my screens since October 7th, 2023;
In the face of 200,000 Palestinians murdered directly or indirectly through the denial of food, water, and medical care;
In the face of the existential threat that the continuance of colonialism and fascism poses to all of us;
The best that I can offer right now is to set myself aside and be all for Palestine.
I believe that the capacity to set ourselves aside and be all for others is paradoxically also what we need for ourselves in order to have a chance that the humans of this world will survive.
October 7th as in Free Palestine
Being all for others is not putting our own pain alongside that of others and demanding equal time.
Speaking about it further with my student, he noted that after generations of being schooled to think of one’s own trauma and the threat to oneself as being worse than that of others, it’s hard to be fully for others.
Even so, many Jewish people around the world have put themselves aside and taken great risks to call for an end to the genocide, to the Zionist project, and to Western support for Israel.
I know that many Palestinians are deeply grateful for this. So am I. And as a child, I was terribly proud of those Jewish activists who participated in the civil rights movement and even lost their lives doing so.
The act of putting ourselves aside to be all for others is good medicine. In fact, my spiritual tradition defines self-realization as a natural state of being all for others.
When we manage to embody this, we can break through a lot of conditioning and experience the sweet flow of openheartedness even in the midst of tragedy.
This is such an opportunity, and I believe it could help to shift Earth culture away from the death cult we have now become.
I am of 100% Jewish ancestry, although I do not practice Judaism. I am a lesbian, and I am a woman.
Jewish as in Free Palestine. Queer as in Free Palestine. Feminist as in Free Palestine.
October 7th as in free Palestine.
Free Palestine.
Free ourselves.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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“A genocide within a genocide” is a phrase coined at the start of the ongoing siege in North Gaza by Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya, the deputy permanent observer to the UN.
Wow, what a heart opening, even if hard conversation you must have had that sparked this post for the benefit of us all.
Hope, this can be a drop in the bucket towards reducing the artificial “demand” people express for equal air time for expressing the Jewish losses on Oct 7th, at least for a time until we have all grappled with what we have done to the Palestinians, for the last 100 years, and for the last one year all the same.
Mhm. What i have seen in my years of doing anti racism work, trauma work, ghost work, nondual work, is that the hardest things for many is to give up whatever they think gives them special exemption and exceptions, which usually boils down to “internalized trauma porn” and a “trauma identity”. These are the subterranean mechanisms of the oppression Olympics and of toxic identity politics, especially amongst the so called left, liberals etc.
I am always waiting for the shoe to drop on people who say that they practice, but are only ever chasing more and more comfort. Pain is also wisdom, but who is really walking that walk?
Wild.
Much love in this bardo realm