Monday Matter: A message for the hurting

Your biweekly Foreign Bodies roundup (public)

Every other Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz. Today’s issue of the Monday Matter is public.

A message for the hurting

For those of us being made to feel crazy right now:

I have been unsure about how to or when to write about the violence plaguing our world in this moment. The last time I was forced to wade through such heaves and sobs, such feelings of deceit and dejection, this anger that’s so quick to harden to hate — I was just a preteen, reckoning with a post-9/11 America, wearing what felt like poison-skin.

I understand the histories of Israel and Palestine are “complex” (edit: never mind it’s actually not complicated at all once you’ve done the learning) but I do understand we are products of what we are born into or taught to believe as truth, which, again, is why the work of learning is essential. But one aspect of all this that terrifies me is our inability to contain multitudes for ourselves and for each other.

We can hold space for grief, let it encompass us, maybe even paralyze us for a while as I think grief is meant to do, slowly seeping into our hearts to be forever absorbed, swimming to the surface every now and then, always lurking, forever teaching.

We can also, I believe, remain cognizant of how the collective grief of a historically wronged people is being weaponized to fuel even more grief without their consent or endorsement.

We can try and understand, even still, how a nation’s flag or hashtag might unintentionally dehumanize or alienate the consistently dehumanized and alienated.

We can recognize that one’s mourning, when truncated and discarded amid talks of war beyond a layman’s understanding, can harden a heart. I feel the pain of Jewish and Israeli friends, just as I hope the world, especially the people I share air, time and memories with, would try and feel the suffocating damage resulting from decades of injustice inflicted upon our Palestinian friends. This has been said a hundred times over by artists and writers and poets, the only ones offering the kind of refuge I’m so desperate for these days.

Watching and reading reports from Western leaders and Western media, my loved ones and I have been made to feel like we’re going fucking crazy. We feel betrayed and gaslit by the newsrooms we’ve championed, by the lawmakers we’ve voted for, by the countries we made our homes, whether out of desperation or desire. I feel foolish for it, but I refuse to lower my expectations.

There is really not much I can say or do to take away the collective pain that anyone who’s been shaken by colonialism, apartheid, injustice — and of course, the countless allies rising up around the globe who recognize this historical wrong for what it is — is feeling. I just hope you know that I am with you in your hurt and in this fight, that I’ll always be here, searching for the words that might inch us forward, together.

How I’ve been coping

I really, truly, have not been coping well. But here’s some word vomit: I’m being honest with my friends if I’m just not in the headspace to be there for them and exactly why — no ‘I’m tired’ or other excuses. I’m contextualizing whatever I see because I believe our only way out of this begins with understanding. I’m indulging in pets and family time and also indulging in libations, unfortunately. I’m reading poetry, particularly by brown and Black writers writing from the depths of colonization and oppression. I’m watching global protests against genocide and for Palestine. I’m talking to my brother. I’m talking to my writer friends. I’m reading and loving my anti-occupation Jewish friends. And I’m remembering to move my body, eat my meals, make time for therapy and do whatever it takes to wake up to another day.

What I’ve been reading

• ‘We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other’ (Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents Mag): “The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straitjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace.” Editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents Arielle Angel on Jewish grief, the roots of this violence and “on recommitting to our movements in this moment.” Read here.

• To Our Land (Mahmoud Darwish): “And our land, in its bloodied night,/is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far/and illuminates what is outside it…/As for us, inside,/we suffocate more.” A snippet of poetry from late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was born in Galilee, a village occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Read the full poem here.

• Letters from Gaza (Protean Mag): “With the power plants shut down, even the last vestiges of electricity—car batteries, personal generators—are running out. The internet has been cut, and now, with the Israeli government poised to expel Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets with a presence in Gaza, communications from the strip, already chillingly few and far between, may cease altogether. As the Israeli military prepares to ramp up its genocidal assault on Gaza, every message that Palestinians manage to transmit may be the last.” In partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Protean Magazine has been translating these messages “so the world can see the humanity buried under the rubble and the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian struggle.” Read here.

• A Jewish Case Against Zionism (Joshua P. Hill, New Means): “As a child I did not question that Israel had a God-given right to exist. I did not question what I was told about heroic fighters defending the nascent state of Israel from the attacks that began with its founding in 1948 and continue to this day. I did not question the inevitable drum beat that came through in each discussion after Hamas of Hezbollah or others attacked. And it was easy and natural to support all this as a child when your teachers were telling you about their families hunkered in shelters in Tel Aviv. But then I got older.” I’ve been following Joshua on Twitter for a while now. And I’m grateful for his perspective. Read here.

• Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse (George Abraham, Guernica Mag): “Teaching poetry while witnessing the horrors of ongoing murders of Black Americans by the police, anti-Asian violence surging in the pandemic, and medical apartheid policies of the Israeli state in the vaccine rollout, I often returned to Franny Choi’s ‘The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On’ to open my lectures,” writes Palestinian American poet George Abraham. “The poem travels from the apocalypse of boats to the apocalypse of bombed mosques; from radioactive rain to settlement and soda machine (a reference to the Palestinian boycott campaign against the settler company SodaStream). In naming the collective(s) built in catastrophe’s shadow, the poem offered my students and I new possibilities of language for our grief, and for our survival of an apocalypse which mutates daily and without warning.” Read here.

• Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes From Here (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker): “It’s really important for us to go back to centering the primary cause in any anti-colonial struggle, which is colonial violence. It’s crucial to ground the discussion in that context.” A Q&A between Chotiner and Tareq Baconi, the president of the board of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. Read here.

• A Textbook Case of Genocide (Raz Segal, Jewish Currents Mag): “Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” writes Segal. “In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent.” Read here.

• News sources I’m looking to for updates and analysis: AlJazeera.com, Haaretz.com, Jewish Currents Magazine.

What I’ve been watching/listening to

• Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the longest ethnic cleansing operation of the 20th/21st centuries

• Jon Stewart opening up about Israel/Palestine with Talib Kweli on the People’s Party podcast

• Al Jazeera English live on YouTube for news broadcast and analysis

Resources on Israel-Palestine

• Decolonize Palestine: a collection of resources for organizers and anyone who wants to learn more about Palestine, including a reading list

• Breaking the Silence Israel: A group made up of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) veterans that talks about Israel’s occupation with nuance

• Media Resource Guide on Palestine and Israel from the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association

• Jewish Voice for Peace: the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world

• Death toll reveals the scale of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A troubling infographic from the New York Times

• How the Israel war, blockade affect mental health of Palestinian children: An explainer from Indlieb Farazi Saber of Al Jazeera featuring insights from psychologists and psychiatrists

How to help

• How to Help the Victims of This Week’s Deadly Attacks: An org list from Harper’s Bazaar for anyone looking to fund aid to Palestinians and Israelis

• What you can do beyond reading the news about Gaza, shared by Nikita Gill on X/Twitter

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