Getting Involved & Staying Regulated

Finding your place in the fight for Palestinian lives — and remaining there when it gets tough.

A photo of the October 28th protest for Palestine in Chicago, image by author.

Like a lot of people, the genocide currently happening in Gaza has stirred me to take action — but has also frequently left me at a loss as to what I might do.

As a white American, I recognize that a portion of my tax dollars go toward supporting the Israeli government’s bombings, raids, and ground invasion into the strip, and that my own government and its military has a hand in the attacks that have left (at the time of this writing) over 8,000 people dead.

I am staggered by the sheer scope of the bloodshed, and the wanton brutality of it. Children photographed seeking cover from air raids are found dead by journalists mere days later. Hospitals in the Gaza strip overflow with bodies, both dead and ailing, who are in that position because of the Israeli government’s choice to cut off water, electricity, fuel, and other necessary resources to the region while they batter it with munitions and gas.

I also recognize that the United States itself began as a colonial ethnostate, much as the state of Israel did, and that it used (and continues to use) the same tactics of breaking treaties, encroaching upon territories, terrorizing Indigenous peoples, and destroying their homes, landmarks, and other cultural touchstones in order to further the mythologized supremacy of its nation-state. The violence of history echoes, the tactics of the Trail of Tears, Apartheid, and the Holocaust effortlessly mimicked today by nationalist governments, each form of oppression linked to those of the past by a chain of white supremacy and capitalist greed.

I’m living comfortably in a warm, well-supplied apartment on North American land that has been steadily covered by European plants and populated by European people over the course of the last few centuries, all while Indigenous peoples throughout the world have their languages, practices, homes, and families destroyed. I cannot help but recognize there is blood running like a river under my feet. But since I also live in a country where meaningful political participation of any kind is systematically thwarted, I often struggle to conjure up what taking meaningful steps to set…