A Need to Speak

This is the video I refer to in the post. Please watch (there are no graphic images, it is just very moving): https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBULsD3O5r5/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Words continue to feel meaningless but not saying anything surely is more damning. Excuse a few heartfelt musings from me. 

Last night I was listening to my late Granny reading a poem in which she recalls how she has always been aware that she and Anne Frank could have changed places. They were only seven weeks apart. 

But for the happenstance of where I was born, it could be me in Gaza. It could be any of us in the Middle East. That’s the foundation of empathy I suppose, and humanity is the ability to care about something outside of ourselves. 

These are not simple issues. That’s why they’re ongoing. Humans are complex. International relations is human complexity on a grand and incomprehensible scale. What is simple, as far as I’m concerned, is that the genocidal killing of innocent civilians must stop. 

Never again means never again for anyone, and saying that you wished less people were dying should not be a controversial topic. 

I have varying, moveable, largely ignorant views on this all. I think one of the biggest problems we face nowadays is the inability to have conversations with people that disagree with us. Often we are encouraged to jump to the conclusion that they are a bad person for holding a view we see as wrong, rather than a person with a full life of difference to us and the capacity to love. We must believe in the capacity to change. We must learn how to have complicated, uncomfortable conversations. People will never truly grow if they are afraid to ask questions. And I could be wrong on all of this too – that’s the point. 

There are people dying as we speak in Gaza, and now Lebanon. 

I am a pacifist, I personally consider any avoidable loss of life a tragedy for all. I feel so sorry for all the families and friends that lost someone on October 7th 2023 – but especially because their relatives’ memories have been used to inflict pain and torture on millions of people. The people that lost their lives deserved better than that. My heart also breaks for the families grieving in Gaza on October 7th 2024, as Isreal continued their ground invasion in the north. And for every life lost, every life lived in fear in the intervening 365 days. 

I cannot deal with the noise of a fan in the background, or a car backfiring, or music playing too loudly. I cannot help but think of all the autistic people in Palestine. The 24/7 drone, the constant bombing, screaming, unpredictability. I can only see it as psychological torture. 

And while I’m at it – the trauma that will endure, the pain and grief that will continue to cycle, all of the psychological toil and aftermath reaffirms what I have long thought that the western system of individually pathologising people fails to encapsulate the pain, triumph, and humanity that mentally ill and mad people struggle with. Are we going to be diagnosing every single Gazan with PTSD? Or bipolar, as I am diagnosed, which is thought to have traumatic stress as a triggering cause. I hope not. That would seem an insult to the suffering they faced. I hope we learn from this – if for no other reason than I want to see some good come from all this evil – to see human distress and our capabilities to heal and love as more complex than a psychiatric label. 

But I digress. Because in order to heal, to have a chance at healing, they need to be alive. 

Who am I to say, but maybe in order to have a lasting peace we need first to stop killing? 

I don’t usually post my political views on my accounts in this way, and I rarely directly expand on my views on my personal accounts. I don’t want to risk my very being becoming polemic, or contributing to division. But I’m sat here tonight after welcoming a new year group to my university course, safe on my sofa, having been able to access medicine after I was sick all last week, and I’m sat here watching a live stream of what is plausibly a genocide (as far as I’m concerned, it is). And I can’t help but think of how my gran was so haunted by the very fact that the holocaust happened. And I can’t help but think how brave she was, and how maybe if I was a little braver I would do something more, and how maybe doing something more just starts by opening my mouth (or putting words on paper as it may be). 

I want to believe in hope. It affects my own survival if I don’t, trust me, I can forget sometimes. I don’t think we live in isolation. I think what we all do matters. A smile can change a life, a conversation can change a world. And I feel powerless with this. So I said something, maybe to ease my own ego, who knows. I hope it means something somewhere. 

The UK is still supplying arms to Isreal. The very least we can do is write to our MPs and ask them to stop doing that. And to ask them to do more to put pressure on Isreal to abide by international law – which they are not, that’s not up for debate. 

UNWRA and Oxfam have appeals for donations to try and help in Gaza, Lebanon, and across the Middle East, as do individual families. 

Thanks for reading my little rant. Sending you love and support, fellow human x