Dear Friends,
Please read this powerful essay and appeal by Tamam Abusalama, a Palestinian woman who lives in Brussels, and take it to heart. Provide an honest answer to her question: Ask yourself: what have you really done to end your individual and collective complicity? Have you truly done everything in your power, or have you hidden behind your individual mental health fatigue? Have you been an advocate and an activist on behalf of the Palestinian people who are the victims of the Israeli-sponsored genocide in Gaza?
If not, feel free to contact me via email. I’m happy to offer suggestions. There is so much that you can and should be doing!
MAA
On 3 years of a livestreamed genocide:
The EU is not separate from Tel Aviv. It is not different from Tel Aviv.
It continues to protect and enable Israel while Palestinians are killed, starved and displaced. It speaks the language of human rights while helping to sustain the violence carried out in its name.
You have seen our women, men and children killed and starved: in hospitals, schools and refugee camps; in their homes and in the streets; while sleeping, walking, fetching water or waiting for a sack of flour.
You have watched children pulled from beneath the rubble. You have watched settlers burn Palestinian olive trees. You have watched Gaza being destroyed in real time and still been told to wait for “peace”, to celebrate a ceasefire dressed as a slower genocide, to mourn quietly, to regulate our emotions, to accept lessons on how to fight our coloniser and to trust institutions that have failed us.
Three years on, we Palestinians remain suspended between disbelief and grief. But we are not defeated. We are still fighting for our freedom, our rights and our humanity on behalf of all of you.
And yet many of you still want decolonisation to remain a theory: something to discuss, cite and teach, but never a material process that demands the dismantling of your individual and collective complicity and supremacy.
You still want solidarity to mean music festivals; to claim that joy is resistance while you spend your days inside your comfort zone: curating playlists, not pressure; collecting wristbands, not consequences; mistaking celebration for strategy and comfort for courage. You still want to have a beer or smoke a cig to forget that all of us are complicit, in a way or another.
So today, do not ask us how we are doing. We are exhausted, but we are not defeated.
Ask yourself: what have you really done to end your individual and collective complicity? Have you truly done everything in your power, or have you hidden behind your individual mental health fatigue?
Today and every day, glory to the martyrs, to the prisoners, to the people who remain despite the world’s collective conspiracy to erase us.
