The pain of solidarity in a time of genocide

Amy Abdelnoor The Electronic Intifada 1 August 2024

A sign with the faces of Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in clown make-up. Sign says: Same circus, different clown

London has seen near-weekly mass demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Vuk Valcic ZUMA Press Wire

A serendipitous conversation months ago led me to a group of women united by their overwhelming need not to remain silent in the face of what will surely go down in history as the most unconscionable immorality of our lifetime.

Not only are the people of Palestine undergoing what is widely considered a genocide, but in the words of Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh it is the first “in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time.”

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish-born lawyer, is a special adviser in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The women I met came together a month into this live-streamed genocide with a growing sense of exigency both to bear witness and to take some kind of action for Gaza, for Palestine, for Palestinians.

Joining their group, I felt a very palpable sense of relief. Here, I could speak freely about the acute pain caused by the dissonance I was carrying. I could talk openly about the mental strain of having to exist in the everyday here, in the normality of daily Western life and its undisturbed routines, while watching the acute reality of the people of Gaza struggling to hold onto the rags of existence there under abject, relentless and increasingly depraved and macabre attacks from one of the strongest militaries in the world.

As a collective, we are highly aware that anything we do or achieve could be construed as a proverbial drop in the ocean in comparison to the tsunami of wrongs meted out on Palestinians and requiring urgent attention.

In the face of Israel “‘intentionally distort[ing] rules of humanitarian law” with impunity, in the words of Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur, what possible difference can we make? We are not only living miles away from Palestine but also are far removed from those in political power and from the international legal structures created with the intention of holding states and individuals legally accountable under an agreed set of standards.

Visions of hell

I am not alone in asking myself this question on a near-daily basis. We are all struggling, individually and as a collective with the overwhelming imbalance between the weight of our understanding of Gaza and the comparatively negligible insignificance of our actions.

This was particularly clear recently when I caught the edge of a conversation between friends reuniting after some months. Among the normal niceties and “how-are-yous,” one responded that while things in the world aren’t great, she was fine. In her daily life with family, friends and work, all was well, for which she was grateful.

This gratitude in and of itself seemed to be a salve. After all, given that our relative insignificance means that nothing we can do could possibly effect the kind of change that is required in order to address the gross violations of Palestinian human rights, the solution is surely to thank whatever powers there may that one was born on this little patch of land with this color skin and not in another patch of land with a different color skin.

When it came to my turn for the “how-are-yous,” I arranged my eyes, cheeks and wrinkles into acceptable shapes and made my mouth produce acceptable sounds. Internally, my chest contracted with the now-familiar visceral pain of bearing witness to what is happening to Gaza and the discord between this and having to pretend a series of emotions I was quite simply not feeling at that moment.

I have started to feel my body thin out in these moments, as if the ends of my fingers are dissolving into the air around me. I squeeze my feet in my shoes to make my toes acknowledge the existence of something rooting me to a physical space. Sometimes, I excuse myself and beat a retreat into a private space to breathe through the sheer mental contradictions of this frankly unconscionable reality. I don’t even have to close my eyes for the macabre kaleidoscope of images to play out.

The dual narrative is constant. Every moment of the day is punctuated by parallel moments of a nonexistence in Gaza: kissing my children goodnight, I think of the father who buried his family in the rubble of his home, sleeping next to the dirt covering their dead bodies every night in order to be with them.

Or an image surfaces of a mother clasping the limp body of her child, kissing the little girl’s now-lifeless face. Or I see a boy kissing the feet of his father who was crushed to death when their house was shelled.

My daughter finds a Band-Aid for a cut on her leg, and I see a child with two amputated limbs or recall the father-surgeon amputating the leg of his niece without anesthesia.

A bowl of food stands uneaten in the kitchen, and I see images of the emaciated rib cages of children who are dying from Israeli-made forced starvation. I feel too hot or too cold at night, and I think of families sleeping ten or more in one tent; I feel the warmth of this last relatively sultry week in London and imagine the brutal 104-degree heat of a Gazan summer endured under canvas without any or adequate drinking water.

A spider crawls from a crack in the wall of my house, and even as I see flies feeding on the infected wounds of Palestinians whose health care system has been decimated by Israel, the image is superseded by flames raging through the tents of people displaced one, two or more times in the last eight months. The fire ravages people to a crisp or to cinders.

I see a mother carry the ash of her six children in two hands. She had left them in the tent to try to find bread.

Silence

As Israel’s genocide thunders on unchecked, the images from Gaza become even more disturbing and ever more appalling; the testimonials from Palestinians seized and taken to Israeli prisons become increasingly unspeakable.

The torture of Palestinians, including children, at the hands of Israeli soldiers — and in some cases, Israeli doctors — is demonstrative of sadism so inhumane that I recoil physically. I begin to write it down but the words “beatings to their genitals” and “electric probe” make my skin crawl; bile rises in my throat, and I retch.

The silence around Gaza has become both louder and, to those of us committed to bearing witness, more disturbing. At a recent gathering of longstanding friends, it felt uncomfortably as if the G words (Gaza and Genocide) were taboo, as if a memo had been passed around before we congregated reminding us all that this gathering was Fun with a capital F and therefore — regardless of the conversation turning briefly to the farcical forthcoming US elections and to our Britain’s impoverished choice of potential leaders — shhh, let’s not mention Palestine.

Our collective have discussed this silence, the attitudes of those around us to the genocide, and our own choices and behaviour, trying to make sense both of why we feel so strongly the need to take action for Palestine and how other people respond to us because of this.

We are all women with differing backgrounds: one, an Indian-South African who has lived through apartheid, is able to express her activism, which has been a way of life to her, through the need to call out oppression and racism.

Two more, as Muslims (one Pakistani, one Iranian/Indian heritage), perhaps feel the responsibility of the Islamic umma. Two are white and British: one, with years of activism against Iraq, child slavery and poverty under her belt, sees this as a life of speaking out against injustice; the second feels that Gaza has awakened an understanding of oppression and racism that, by her own admittance, she was possibly not openly addressing.

I, with mixed Lebanese-British heritage, can locate my emotional response in my direct experience living and working with Palestinians in Lebanon and the West Bank.

While our metaphorical journeys to Palestine differ, we are in no doubt of the moral injustice of what is happening not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank. We are all well versed in Zionist history, the US-Israeli political alliance and the British role both in the creation of Israel and the part its two leading political parties, as well as the international media, have played in maintaining the status quo of a violent settler colonial occupation for decades.

Our collective response is an overwhelming need to bear witness: anything else would be a betrayal not only of Palestinians but also of our own moral compass.

The mirror

How, then, do we reconcile this very strong sense of what we should each do with the lack of action we witness in the people with whom we interact, by choice or necessity, on a daily basis?

How does our urgent appreciation of the imperative to be activists appear to those around us?

Are we deliberately or by implication taking a moral high ground? If so, is it right that this is the case?

Or, whether right or wrong, is the apparent existence of a moral hierarchy between those who choose to act and those who choose to acknowledge the evils of the world and content themselves with the articulation of their own gratitude for their blessings, enough to tarnish us with a moral hubris that by extension distances us from the very people whose behavior we would like to affect?

These questions are not easy to answer, and the notion of some sort of moral hubris sits uncomfortably, given that our overwhelming drive is also the moral urgency to address historical and current injustices that are possibly unprecedented in terms of the political, military and economic support they are being given by the UK and the US governments, among others.

The need to bear witness, the need for each one of us to hold ourselves accountable, is not a choice, but a necessity: we cannot conceive of behaving in any other way.

Somehow, we have to find a path forward, one on which we are exhausted neither by the sheer onslaught of the violent and abject horror show being live streamed from Gaza nor by our understanding of our own inadequacy in feeling this, given that the violence we are witnessing is barely negligible in comparison to the actual reality for Palestinians for whom every second is an acute fight against the most advanced military for existence.

Nor are we put off, finally, by the silence, apathy or indifference of the people with whom we interact on a daily basis, people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have not chosen or been able to respond to this genocide with our urgency.

Struggling with the latter in particular, attempting to understand why we are acting and others are not and striving to develop ways in which to engage some of those others in a cause that we feel is ultimately not only about liberation but also, on a personal level, liberating, we arrive back where we started, asking ourselves why we chose not to stay silent.

And we arrive at the words of Pastor Munther Isaac of Bethlehem, cited by Ní Ghrálaigh at the International Court of Justice: “I want you to look in the mirror and ask: where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?”

What we are doing may not be for everyone — and indeed, it is for a reason that history records the names of those for whom action was imperative in moments of extreme crisis — but it is for each of us.

And so, waking in the morning to reach for our phones, dreading what hideous images of decapitated children, burned bodies, dismembered mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and grandparents the night will have sent to our flickering screens, we scroll through the reels sent from those on the ground.

And while our hearts burn with the pain of bearing witness, the knowledge that we are able to face our own consciences makes us turn our faces to the world, crying, with renewed determination: None of us is free until Palestine is free.

Amy Abdelnoor is an Arab-British writer and teacher who lived and worked in the West Bank and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; her work-in-progress, inspired by her experiences, was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.

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Comments

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Samina Ali replied on

Beautifully expressed. None of us is free till Palestine is free. I have been writing too on how I have been unable to garden or to nurture anything but human beings around me who are less privileged than I am. I live in the global south and everyone seems like they are from Gaza. The young boys, little lost girls, struggling grannies, bewildered aging men. I am inhabited by the images, just as much as you . The pain doesn’t go away.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

Thanks for your lovely comments. I'm so glad that my article spoke to how you are feeling. Do follow me on SM platforms to hear more in due course about my forthcoming book and for links to other self-published articles. Amy

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Sherrill Hogen replied on

Dear Amy Abdelnoor, This is the first writing of yours that I have had the privilege to read, though I read constantly about Palestine, having been there multiple times and having very close friends in Nablus. You express so well how I and many of my colleagues feel - helpless but determined to do Something ; wanting to do so much more and grieving for the pain we witness in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. So, thank you. I hope to see more of your writing. Sherrill, Western Massachusetts, USA.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

Thank you - I'm so pleased that I was able to put your feelings into words. Please do follow me on social media for news about my book (news coming soon!) and to read more of my self-published articles.

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Ariel Ky replied on

I was recently on a long phone conversation with a friend in which I was telling her well I was doing personally, but that I was always distressed about what was happening to the Palestinians. She challenged me, saying that I should not focus so much on the painful events of the genocide. That I was giving it too much attention, and that I would do better to take a break from all that. I haven't been able to digest this admonishment and advice, so reading this wonderful articulation of what it means to bear witness reached into the dry cracks of my being. The actions that I take may be insignificant, chaff in the wind, but I write almost daily, across the Internet, in comments and blogs, in support of freedom for Palestinians and to end the genocide that Israelis are carrying out. And I research, looking for others of like mind, looking for possible solutions.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

Yes, it's so hard. I hear what you are saying and it feels a privilege even to be able to feel this at a distance from Gaza. Please do follow me on social media platforms- news of my book coming soon and you can read other articles I've self-published. Amy

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Lavinia replied on

Thank you so much Amy for your article. I discovered EI during this genocide. I am a privileged woman leaving and working in South of France. And I feel guilty. So guilty when I feed my kids, when I play with them in the park, in this beautiful summer where the water is clean, the air is fresh and olive trees are not uprooted by boombs. I work at the hospital. Clean , new one, nobody sleeps on its corridors, we repare the smallest of wounds of kids with care not to traumatise them . People are talking about holidays. They don’t even know how privileged they are. They just think it is … normal. The images of Gaza invade me, I can’t believe these things are happening under the same sun, only 4 h away. I feel strange to be the only one to feel strange. I feel no matter what we do , it is not enough, it is just a drop in the sea. I look back to the dark hours of history: in the end beauty and truth prevails . I hope because I don’t want despair to paralyse me. Thank you for your article. It shows me that in this big tribe of humanity , I am not alone .
Our pain is nothing compared to the pain of parents , of children from Gaza.
But we can support each other. To stop the deafening surrounding silence on Gaza.

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Anonymous replied on

I'm glad that writing this article at least helps people all over the world realise they are not alone. It's very hard - and often lonely - bearing witness and trying, little by little to educate people about Palestine and Palestinians, but so important. Do follow me on social media if you use those platforms. Amy

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David Knoppert replied on

Dear Amy,
Thank you so much for those very meaningful and personal words. You have eloquently expressed the feelings that so many of us experience each day. I agree with Lavinia. I too struggle when so many others do not seem to notice, or really care, what is happening. I look forward to reading your soon-to-be-available book.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

As I've said to others who have commented, I'm really glad that my words have resonated. I'm looking forward to my book being out in the world! Amy

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Ghost replied on

"Or, whether right or wrong, is the apparent existence of a moral hierarchy between those who choose to act and those who choose to acknowledge the evils of the world and content themselves with the articulation of their own gratitude for their blessings, enough to tarnish us with a moral hubris that by extension distances us from the very people whose behavior we would like to affect?"

I have been trying to put this into words. I come from a place of privilege and have been working to open the hearts of people around me. In this effort I do grapple with the sensation of futility, as well as the worry about my efforts turning into mere moral posturing / moral theater. It's so important those who are becoming interested in activism perhaps for the first time like myself check back in with these assessments of ourselves with honesty so that we are not using that "salve" of gratitude to only placate or accidentally only address our own suffering.

Thank you so much for the beautifully painful writing, saying a lot that needs to be said, it gave me pause to reconsider which efforts are worth structuring for my privileged peers (basically, is it possible that some pains we may not want to apply salves or excessive gratitude to? at some point, we should also allow for pity and discomfort of the hard truths of genocide, yes?)

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Oliver replied on

Thank you so much for this article. I think you have managed to capture so well the frustration and anger felt by many, especially in the UK where in certain areas it can sometimes feel quite isolating.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

It can feel isolating - I agree. I'm glad this article has resonated with so many people, so we know that there is a community of like minded people around us.

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Steve replied on

You have captured and expressed my thoughts and put them down so well.

Thank you for this painful but beautiful article.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

I'm so pleased that it is landing with people and helping somewhat. Please do follow me on social media and look out for news of my book.
Amy

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Carol Scheller replied on

Thanking life for all its blessings while feeling wrong to be hungry, to be able to take a shower, to go to sleep without dreading what may happen to me during the night, constantly in thought with the people I love in Gaza, so undeserving of the hell they are living while I continue to interact with people who have no idea what I am feeling, and respecting that they are living their own lives in their own world ... this is what you put into words here.
Heartfelt thanks.

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Steve Anthony replied on

Dear Carol,
I'm 71 and have read the news of all the previous invasions of Gaza but it did not affect me. Since the 7 October something switched in me because I have Instagram/Facebook, YouTube accounts and can see the horrific live scenes unfolding in Gaza. I have a few friends delete me because I assume they don't like my Gaza posts. The others don't respond to what I post because they live comfortable lives and are like I was years ago and are happy to ignore what is happening in Palestine. I would immediately travel to help if it were possible ... this is what really plays with my mind, being unable to do anything concrete to help other than donating to UNWRA etc. There are so many people out there who feel the same way but can do nothing because our Governments are supporting the Israeli genocide. Heartfelt thanks from me as well.

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Amy Abdelnoor replied on

It is so hard, I understand and have the same experience with people who find my activism difficult. It's good to know that, despite our governments, so many people are standing with Palestine. It's up to us - through boycotting, through divestment, through our activism. Do stay in contact over social media and look out for news of my forthcoming book.

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Marie Brown replied on

I just found your article and wanted to add my thanks to the others. Thank you for clearly putting in to words what so many of us around the world feel. I truly started researching the history of Palestine in March right after I lost my best friend in a horrific car accident. I haven't felt ready to face the pain of losing him and allowed myself to study everything I could find on the history and present day Palestine. It was truly eye-opening for me to realize I had never been taught the truth. My big American conservative Christian family loves Israel and has bought the hasbara hook, line, and sinker. I'm ashamed that I was 42 before I learned the truth but thankful for writers like you and sites like EI, +972, the Intercept, Mondoweiss, etc. for refusing to compromise on the truth. I wish there was so much more I can do. I can continue to bear witness and share the stories of the Palestinians. I spend time on news sites commenting with the truth where I can. I won't get invited to speak to Congress or reach thousands of followers on a blog but I can continue to counter lies with the truth and facts, point people to independent news sources, and remind people that the Palestinians are not just numbers but human beings who just want the chance to live and take care of their families. They want a chance to feel safe... simple things that most of us take for granted. If my words reach just one person and they can reach one more who will reach one more then I have done something. At the very least, we can together show the Palestinians that they are seen, heard, and they matter.

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