The View From My Window in Palestine
ve succumbed to my current irrelevance in the big project of peace with justice in Israel/Palestine.
Please don’t email or text me messages telling me I’m a good person. I don’t feel bad about myself–I feel bad about the world.
Even though I genuinely believe that crisis offers the most fertile opportunity for meaningful change in the mainstream narrative that constrains people’s understanding, I simply can’t make a dent there.
Fortunately, there are those with the brilliance and the platform to make a difference. I’m thinking about people like Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd) and Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart), outlets like IMEU (@theIMEU) and Aljazeera (see @AJUpFront) and young people’s movements like Palestinian Youth Movement (@palyouthmvmt ) and If Not Now (@IfNotNowOrg), among other truth-tellers. If you only follow two, follow the brave Gazan citizen journalists @ByPalestia and @NourAlsaqqa.
My niche now is smaller, but also important. To those of you who are only connected to the Middle East through me, I’m sorry I’ve been silent this week, leaving you to try to make sense of the senseless with few resources beyond the racist and distorted CNN and New York Times.
I don’t imagine I can change your minds, but I hope that I can support you in your sincere efforts to learn, and I hope that by sharing my perspective and my anguish, we can at least stay in relationship. Or, dare I hope, perhaps we can work together to demand that world leaders end oppression and war?
