You wake up in the morning, and resolve not to doomscroll. It doesn’t do anyone any good, you tell yourself. Besides, you already know what is going on—if it were someone who were turning a blind eye to the atrocities in the Middle East, to the carnage in Gaza, it would be different. But it’s you—and it will be the same anger, the same rage. Knowing more doesn’t help anyone, and it will only make you more angry.
But then you open Instagram—I’ll just check my messages, you tell yourself. That’s when you see it, Wadea al-Fayoume a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy has been stabbed to death by his landlord in Chicago. His mother was also stabbed—she is in the hospital. According to reports, the landlord shouted, “You Muslims Must Die,” before stabbing them both.
Who is this landlord? He was an ordinary person, one who was even kind to his Palestinian tenets—he let Wadea use a swimming pool he had access to and brought him toys, and never showed any signs of being a genocidal maniac. You think about how if you had a child right now, they would be brown and bilingual, and you think about all of the Black women who have children, knowing they might be killed by the police, and you want to hug them, extra hard. You think about the “Black Lives Matter” protests, and the way that the media made “looters” into “protestors” into “Black people,” and it reminds you of the way that it is making “Palestinians” into “Arabs” into “Terrorists” and it makes you even more angry. What else would make a landlord into a murderer, a six year old into a martyr?
Meanwhile, in Europe, Palestine solidarity protests have been banned in Germany and France and you’re thinking about all of your friends there—not the European ones, the Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese ones who fled civil war, occupation and a devastating economic crisis for a shot at a normal life, one where they could go to work and come home without wondering if there was going to be an airstrike or a clash or if a barrel bomb might blow it to smithereens. Now, the Israeli flag is being beamed on government buildings, supporting Palestine is “antisemitic” and anyone who attends these illegal protests risks being ratted out at their jobs, denied housing and even rumors of having their residency permits taken away. We—in the West—pride ourselves on freedom of speech, on the hallmarks of democracy, the ability to express yourself without living in fear, and yet we have reneged on that entirely. Your friends stay home. It’s safer that way.
A woman in San Francisco is harassed wearing a Palestinian flag on her T-shirt. A Muslim man in New York City is denied housing because the landlord doesn’t want to house a “terrorist”—and its okay to just say that now. You remember the aftermath of 9/11 when you were a child, the hunger for war and the hate crimes, and now you’re processing it as an adult, and very little has changed. Antisemitic crimes are increasing as well, and no one is fucking winning.
Meanwhile, they’re running out of body bags in Gaza, and drinking sea water because there is no clean drinking water. Journalists are being killed, hospitals are being bombed and there is a near media blackout because there is almost no Internet or electricity, but what is coming out shows nothing short of carnage, genocide, slaughter. We keep trying to share the news, but the algorithm buries it—so we share our cats, our kitchen tables, our thirst traps, to show that we are ordinary people, not—god forbid—people condemning genocide.
We are depressed, make ourselves into victims of people who see us as terrorists on and offline, and then we listen to voice notes from Palestinian mothers about being strong, about being defiant and we realize that we have to be strong and defiant, too. Strong against a world that equates ordinary people with militant groups, defiant against those who are cracking down on our right to freedom of speech, strong for those who are experiencing airstrikes laced with white phosphorus, defiant against anyone who dares to say that they are terrorists, who deserve to die.