Having Faith Means Taking Action

Notes on pairing virality with follow through, resisting hopelessness, and The Gaza Resolution.

On Friday the 27th of October, Gaza lost access to all phone and internet services. The internet black out was a result of the heavy bombardment of Gaza, which destroyed all of the phone lines in the Gaza Strip. In the days since, Palestinians have done the work of rebuilding their networks by hand; and, with the direct mutual aid of innovative organizers, have come back online through the redistribution of e-SIMs. e-SIMs can be purchased online and activated remotely anywhere in the world, and have been used to connect journalists in Gaza to cell towers in Egypt and israel as a way of circumventing the imposed blackout. For more about this initiative, and how to contribute to it, head over to this thread. 

This weekend’s blackout has illuminated and emphasized a number of things:

1. Attempts at silencing the people in Gaza have and will continue to serve the opposite goal: they add fuel to the fire and commitment of all people of conscience in taking more proactive work to educate ourselves and advocate for those who do not have access to doing so for themselves.

   
   In the past days, there has been a resurgence of information shared about the struggles in Sudan and Tigray and Congo. Because of the general under-education in the West about the ongoing devastation of colonial violence in Africa, how people who are enemies elsewhere in geopolitics team up to enact violence across the African continent (for example, both Israel and Iran sent new drone technology to Ethiopia for it to be tested in the conflict in Tigray–one of many examples of how the struggle of Palestinians is intimately connected to the struggles of Tigrayans), the mission of distributing information about these causes continues to be an uphill battle. Terminology and generalizations that people are accustomed to elsewhere do not neatly apply to these struggles, and it is essential that we use social media to plant seeds for education that also takes root elsewhere. Infographics, while accessible and essential to grassroots efforts towards popular education, can not be where our efforts to inform ourselves end. Growing in curiosity, must be paired with growing in rigor–otherwise, virality is reduced to a wave that forsakes depth in the name of scale.

   

   From “Tigray has been made a testing ground for future warfare and the limits of international laws and norms” by Teklehaymanot Weldemichel

2. The internet is not a static ‘place’–each of us inhabit different cyber territories, sculpted by both the algorithm and our own inclinations, and as such bear different responsibilities. There are a massive amount of people who are not on Twitter, who do not see the same information and footage and calls to action that many of us are consuming each day. Those of us who are on Twitter are witnessing the events in Palestine unfold in ways that people who are only on Instagram have only a fraction of the access to. Sharing information means recognizing that what might be hyper-visible to some, might be invisible to many. Each day I’m seeing children pulled out of rubble, witnessing how Palestinian men are embodying a level of care, commitment, and resilience that is unfathomable and invisibilized even in the mainstream currents of Western solidarity with Palestine. It is increasingly essential to migrate information from Twitter to other social media platforms in order to resist the apathy, dissociation & drought of testimony that plagues Instagram in particular.
   

3. Hopelessness serves to aid the oppressors in their efforts to extinguish the spirit, vision and vigor of those resisting oppression. Oppressors rely on our hopelessness to stop us from taking action–they benefit from our paralysis, strategically investing in our despair in order to demoralize us away from envisioning a world beyond the grip of their power. There are countless videos of people in Gaza who, amidst unrelenting and intensifying bombardment, are using their last moments to pray. Unlike their oppressors, who bomb mercilessly and mock the plight of their victims both in mainstream media and in soulless parodies on TikTok, the Palestinian people have retained the integrity of their spirits. Colonized people have historically been guided towards organized religion as a way to defer liberation to the afterlife. At the same time, the uncompromising faithfulness of the Palestinian people demonstrates their resolute rejection of hopelessness. This in and of itself should serve as a blueprint for us in the West, who have been conditioned to worship money and productivity at the clear expense of our spiritual wellbeing. 

In the letter I wrote about how the internet is mobilized as a tool for repression, I said that the posts will die down. Watching the last couple of days unfold, I am realizing that we can not settle for that being a given. It has been 22 days, and the mainstream media has persisted in its silence and misrepresentations, but the people have not. In Turkey, a record-breaking 1.5 million people marched in support of Palestine. In London, 500,000. In Kerala and Rome and Amman and New York and Mombasa–millions of people on every corner of the globe are showing up in any and every way they can to let the Palestinian people know that they are not alone. 

The Gaza Resolution

Published on October 28th and signed by over two dozen organizations from every corner of the globe–from Kenya to Brazil, India to Kuwait–The Gaza Resolution outlines the core of what Palestine not only represents, but demands of us. If there is anything to circulate on our feeds to pair alongside the wave of in-person action, it is The Gaza Resolution. The full statement is available here, but I have also included screenshots below for ease of circulation.

I can not remember the last time I was as moved as I was reading the Gaza Resolution. While I empathize with people expressing frustrations that African causes have not generated this scale of global response, I stand resolute in my conviction that Palestine is ushering in a dimension of transnational solidarity that deepens and demands our commitment to liberation for all oppressed people.

With Love and In Solidarity,

Neema