What can you do to help people escape Gaza?
We might have figured out driverless cars and AI journalists (we haven’t, really, I just have a chip on my shoulder), but we haven’t figured out a way to help people escape a massacre.
“Can you help my family escape Gaza?”
My Instagram feed is filled with fundraisers—people trying to fundraise for themselves, fundraise for their loved ones to escape Gaza. You see, it now costs up to $10,000 (per head) to pay an Egyptian “broker” to put your name on a list, to allow you to cross the border, away from the bombs, away from the genocide. Safety is so close, but so far away—and the cost makes it even further, if not impossible for some people to even dream of crossing.
Somewhere on an alternative Internet, there are influencers posting pictures of brunch in Dubai and business coaches teaching me how I can make $80,000 per month by posting on social media. But my feed is fundraisers, last ditch efforts to try to use the power of technology and collective action to try to escape a genocide.
This is 2024.
I’m struck that in our modern world—a world, in which we can easily create a fundraising page to garner donations from anywhere in the world—we still need to bribe border guards. We might have figured out driverless cars and AI journalists (we haven’t, really, I just have a chip on my shoulder), but we haven’t figured out a way to help people escape a massacre (when it could be as easy as simply crossing a border). We haven’t figured out a way a way to stop the massacre from happening either, to let people stay in their beloved home, their beloved country and keep simply living their lives in peace. Instead, our country simply keeps sending weapons—humanitarian aid drops, from time to time, yes, but nothing compared to the tax payer-funded bombs that have left them homeless and starving in the first place.
Just in case you were wondering why a Palestinian person cannot simply leave Gaza the way that I can simply leave the United Kingdom, or that you can probably just leave wherever you happen to be reading this from, here is a lesson in sieges that I hope you will never implement. Ever since Israel withdrew troops from Gaza in 2005 (until then, it was occupied à la the West Bank), it has been under a complete aerial and land siege—Israel controls the borders of what comes in and out, and Palestinians seeking to travel need to gain permission from both Hamas (who technically governs the Gaza Strip) and often either the Israeli or Egyptian authorities, depending on which border they’re crossing. It has effectively made Gaza into an open air prison, even in the best of times, and in the worst of times it means that Gazans are being bombed with no escape route and that Israel has the ability to tighten the siege—restricting everything from medicine and humanitarian aid to concrete and building materials—from being able to come through.
Now, is the worst-case scenario.
It shouldn’t have come to this. Earlier this year, I wrote about how Palestinians do not want to leave Gaza—not only is it their home, but leaving Gaza will be a sign of forced expulsion, a second Nakba that leaves the last shred of Palestinian land that they could live on up for the taking. Just in case you still thought that Israel was a benevolent occupier who would never do such a thing, last week they opened fire on a group of people who were waiting for food distribution and soldiers are posting pictures of themselves triumphantly posing with Palestinian women’s underwear after they raid their homes. Others have claimed that the beaches of Gaza are “so nice that Palestinians don’t deserve it,” and plenty of Israeli developers are already fantasizing about building beach condos on Palestinian land, once it is free of Palestinians. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it all over again.
Of course, it is a question of will, not way—and when there is a will to massacre a group of people, there is no way to save them. Instead there are “brokers” who trade in desperation and get rich off of the way that borders that function as prisons, promising freedom for a price. It is the same way that coyotes have long profited from the deadly desert that scorches people trying to cross the US-Mexico border (as planes fly overhead) and smugglers count out the cash payments of refugees who are desperate enough to cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy boats that have killed tens of thousands before them. Politicians like Rishi Sunak and Kamala Harris bemoan how “dangerous” the smuggling industry is, and instruct migrants to “stay home,” but the ironic thing is that they seem to have missed the fact that it is their dangerous policies that make borders a maze for some people to cross to begin with, and that by doing away with borders themselves, you could make the smugglers’ business model obsolete.
So, I ask of you two things—first, if you can, help my friend Molly and I fundraise for her friend Rajab and his family (pictured above). Rajab is a fixer, a sort of guide for foreign journalists who has helped many of our friends when they visited Gaza, and as journalists in community with each other, we feel a duty to help him and his family right now. Here is a video update he sent about the situation in Gaza:
Will you join us?
Second, Response Crisis, an organization that facilitates translation services for asylum seekers, needs urgent funds to pay Arabic-speaking translators to help people from Gaza seek asylum abroad. Could you throw a few funds their way?
Even if you cannot donate right now, sharing both of these within networks of people who might be able to donate is incredibly helpful—as is, continuing to talk about Gaza. Talk about the genocide—of course, but also talk about the people who are surviving it, people like Rajab, people like the literal millions who are crowded into Rafah right now, wondering what comes next in a world where no one seems to particularly care if they live or die. Talk about their lives, what they are and what they could be if we simply did care enough to stop this, to not have to stop-gap this with funds to pay for a freedom that should be free, and how we could work towards that world, nevertheless.
Until next time,
Anna