One of the most painful aspects of being an organizer, or simply someone passionate about justice, is the overwhelming absence of remorse that often surrounds me.
During all those moments in my life where I stood up for justice, shed tears, and condemned violence, those around me didn't seem to share the same sentiment. Why? Did they feel the same way but struggled to express it tangibly? Did they act on their beliefs in their private lives without feeling the need to be vocally expressive? Did they grasp that the personal is political?
Or astoundingly, perhaps they simply didn't care in the same way I did and preferred to protect their privilege and power.
There exists an erroneous belief among us that caring means relinquishing a piece of your power. Growing up in Pakistan, I encountered this belief early, particularly in how domestic workers were treated. I was taught to be suspicious of them, and that they were less human than I was. The prevalent belief was, "Don't be overly generous with them; they'll get used to it." While I still chose to share the privileges with them that I could (not without a scolding for being too “open” with them), I had to unlearn the belief and re-teach myself that I'm not superior, and the only true difference between us was my heightened privilege in a society where there is overwhelming poverty.
This perspective on kindness and generosity robbing you of power and privilege is one I encountered in my socio-cultural upbringing. But who, or rather from whom, do you think they learned this? Who has influenced the upper echelons of families in the Global South? I'm inclined to point fingers at the British, as I often do because they propagated the idea that my people were superior to one another. The reality is, when you're that privileged, you're often more aligned with the colonizer and their culture than your own. I'm privileged to have been exposed to powerful Pakistani women, organizers, and feminists at a young age. Many others who surrounded me growing up, however, would rather appease the white gaze than support the oppressed.
When you refrain from taking sides between the oppressor and the oppressed, as in the case of Israel and Palestine, you are automatically siding with the colonizer. When you refuse to pick a side, claiming to be apolitical or asserting that it doesn't concern you, you are, by default, accepting the genocide of innocent people and their homeland. It wouldn't surprise me if some of our ancestors groaned in the afterlife over how dispassionate many of us have become. Perhaps there are some who are proud of my ability to code-switch and fit in neatly, albeit tokenized and fetishized, among white folks. I've never truly felt uncomfortable around a white person because I'm so skilled at assimilating. It's quite embarrassing, actually, how adept I am.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36.
However, it wasn't white people who taught me about solidarity, community, or anything truly intimate in this world, apart from my intellectual pursuits and many of my intellectual tastes, which, regrettably, have been shaped by the dominant culture of whiteness. It was Black and Indigenous organizers I've had the privilege to learn from and work with during my time on Turtle Island as a settler. They're determined to decolonize, and I'm truly blessed to have learned the essence of decolonization from them. Real decolonization, not the academic theory often espoused and reappropriated by many white scholars who don't truly understand what it entails.
Those scholars are often guilty bystanders. For true and pure allyship from white folks makes you feel seen by the white gaze in a way you've never felt before.
Hauntology, a concept popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, pertains to the idea of the past "haunting" the present. The ghosts of our colonial past. Eve Tuck extends Derrida's theory of Hauntology by using the term "dispossession" to describe the ongoing violence experienced by Indigenous people in Canada today. Dispossession of land affects past and future generations, leading to economic and land loss, as well as the loss of memory and memories. Both history and contemporary society have shown that the ghosts of the colonized will always prevail over the collective colonial conscience.
Memory is powerful. It can twist us in knots, but the imagination can untwist the knots, the memory, rework it into blankets that protect us, designs that promote, carry, and create new being. Re-membering is significant, holy in its duty, recollecting bits of engagement, social interaction, success and failure. The imagination can transform memory from depression to a simple incident … from perverse to natural or from failure to opportunity if you are moving toward the good life. It can inspire us to re-evaluate our intervention, alter our course, and create a new beginning.
— Lee Maracle, Memory Serves: Oratories, 2016, p. 31.
You cannot commit murder, pillage, vilify, and destroy a community without expecting revenge, resistance, or repercussions. I wish the colonizer's playbook understood this.
In the paper Decolonization is not a metaphor, co-authored with K. Wayne Yang, Tuck and Yang explore the theory of "settler moves to innocence." This theory unravels the harmful and futile strategies and discourses often employed by settlers to distance themselves from the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. These strategies may include claims of allyship or attempts to alleviate settler guilt. However, Tuck and Yang argue that such approaches can be problematic and unproductive. They're often empty gestures and words that come from the mouths of white settlers but are rarely, if ever, backed by real, tangible repatriation.
Without giving up their power, privilege, or land, such performative allyship rings hollow.
What is happening to Palestinians globally and to those who call Gaza home is no different from the settler colonial violence perpetrated against Indigenous people on Turtle Island, or the numerous nation-states once colonized by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Danes, Norwegians, and more. Colonizers are primarily white, and Israelis are no different, given that a majority of them are white European Jewish settlers. There are innumerable parallels between Palestinian apartheid and South Africa's. There are unsettling similarities between Palestine's settler occupation and Kashmir's.
However, there is hardly a distinguishing feature between the settler colonization of Palestine and that of Turtle Island (North America). Unlike the European colonizers of the East, Israelis believe that the land is their birthright. They don't fetishize or exoticize Palestinians, as the French did with Algerians or the British did with Indians. They have stolen everything from the land to the food to the dignity of Palestinians, just as was done to Indigenous people. They loot, pillage, and destroy without forming any relationships. They want to extinguish them. They do not see them as human, rather as “human animals,” as said by Israel’s Defence Minister himself. There is no difference between the colonial and genocidal violence of the past and that of today.
The colonial machine doesn't operate on empathy or understanding; it's fueled by greed and the desire to take, extract, demolish, and destroy. The lack of remorse is terrifying. I fear the world I live in because there's an alarming number of influential people, celebrities, journalists, and reporters who support the colonial machine that is Israel. People we, as children of the colonized, have been forced to look up to, blindly admire and respect. For over two centuries, my people have been told to look, speak, and act like them. It's shocking and distressing to see how many people in the world believe that Palestinians should die.
Palestinians, who have historically defended themselves with stones—rocks off the ground, from the rubble of their neighbours’ graves—are expected to die.
I neither expected nor expect more from white individuals who are distanced from the situation. Their opinions, which attempt to neutralize the situation and advocate for ceasefires and peace between Palestine and Israel, puzzle me. I have no desire for their guilt to be thrust upon me. I find the "humanistic" approach employed by many white individuals and those who have embraced Western values over the past week to be exasperating and unnecessary. It brings to mind the prevalent belief that white individuals perceive themselves as more progressive due to their emphasis on "neutrality" and "non-violence." Interestingly, the concept of non-violence was developed by an Indian man who acknowledged the Palestinian's right to armed resistance.
There have, of course, been anti-Zionist Jewish individuals who expressed beautiful, heartfelt sentiments, but this is not about them. Social media has the potential to highlight narcissistic tendencies, and when someone is accustomed to having an opinion on everything because their voice is the loudest in the room, they will opine on everything remotely relevant on their feeds, even when it doesn't concern them. I'm tired of witnessing this false pretense, guilt-ridden performance, and selective allyship. Where is the allyship for the people of Afghanistan, Armenia, Sudan, and even the many Muslims being killed in India? Did you bother to learn that the “Woman Life Freedom” slogan so many white women aestheticized, is actually used for Kurdish—not Persian—liberation from the Iranian regime’s oppression? That’s what I thought.
Race is a construct, a manufactured and insecure system of classification, but colonial whiteness brought it to life. It has been widely used to determine who gets to live and who deserves to die. In the current global case of genocide, it seems to be Palestinians. Palestine lives appear not to matter, as proclaimed by the same people who posted black squares in 2020 with the caption #AllLivesMatter. This isn't an individual attack but a collective one. I don't doubt the loyalty and tireless efforts of many genuine white allies worldwide. However, other than some groups, like the Irish, and indeed, the ancestors of many Jews, many white folks won't understand the plight of being a racialized person constantly under the threat of death. The same logic applies to men who won't grasp how challenging it can be to survive in this world as a woman, or how the generationally wealthy can't comprehend the hardships of being poor or working-class. Protesting is useful when creating awareness, but now much of the globalized world is aware of what is happening in Gaza. It won’t achieve more than it already has.
Your allyship must speak louder than words, reposted stories, and placards.
I say this because violence is often unseen. It's not always overt or direct; it can be soft but is still violence. While we're now aware of the hard power Israel has historically wielded over Palestinians, it's crucial to understand the subtle, soft ways in which the Zionist occupation has tried to gaslight Palestinian resistance and torture them without making it exceedingly obvious. One example is the border checkpoints, particularly in the West Bank. Israeli guards often order Palestinian citizens to stand behind an imaginary line, threatening to forbid them from passing through if they don't comply. This arbitrary threat can prevent Palestinians from going where they need to or from crossing the border at all on that day. It seeks to punish them and convince them that no matter what they do, they may face punishment. No matter what they do, they're wrong; subhuman. This tactic, as explained in the essay Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine, creates unruliness and justifies external control:
The imaginary line and the overconstructed terminals thereby join other ‘failure’-inducing factors in the occupation, from the inaccessibility of the legal system to the ever-shifting regulations, to produce such unruliness, which then justi¢es external control. In other words, it justifies the occupation, always ‘temporary’(Azoulay and Ophir, 2002), presumably, until the Palestinians can prove that they can control themselves, yet always perpetuated by rules that can never be abided by, the transgression of which serves as evidence of Palestinians’ inherent inability to do so.
— Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine, 2011, 74-75.
Solidarity is the unwavering commitment to stand with and support those who suffer injustice, amplifying their voices and advocating for a fair and equitable world. It means extending your heart, hand, and home to those who are suffering at the hands of others. Solidarity involves fighting for their right to be free and live in peace, recognizing that tomorrow it could be you, your people, your community, your homeland. Solidarity is about understanding how the oppressed are being subjugated, whether through visible, violent power or subtle, silent methods.
Solidarity entails protecting the marginalized from gaslighting and forced silence and using your voice to speak for them when they cannot. When they are being excluded from daily life, it's your human duty to prevent their extermination as if they were pests. When influential sources try to manipulate and indoctrinate you against a group, you must question why and resist until you know the truth for yourself. It means moving beyond savourism and guilt, and collectively disrupting the system that is allowing genocidal violence to take place. It means providing reparations, too.
Solidarity means facing violence head-on, never turning away from it, and vowing to do whatever it takes collectively to prevent it from happening to anyone ever again.
Recommended Reading
Settler Moves to Innocence: A Transnational Legal Glossary
Decolonization is not a metaphor, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli
The Question Of Palestine, Edward Said
The Wretched of The Earth, Frantz Fanon
More people should read this.