How to Talk About Gaza by Erin Roycroft
“I fucking reject the word terrorist!”
How to Talk About Gaza (Or Ferguson, Or Iraq, or Whatever Terrible Thing Happens Next)
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First the four Bakr boys were killed on the beach at the Gaza Port while they were running away. Running away. This was followed by the first United Nations school bombing in Jabalya. Then there was the al-Aqsa Hospital bombing, where a patient died on an operating table during the attack. The U.N. school in Rafah was bombed with three thousand sleeping refugees inside. They had been told to leave their homes, and they were sleeping in a shelter. Ten people died in their sleep.
I started to think I might be losing faith in humanity.
I read and read and read. My eyes became suction cups on the computer screen. When I wasn’t at home, I checked my phone so often I stopped bothering to put it back in my pocket. I read to the end of the Internet and back to make sense of such senselessness, and, finding nothing but more news of dead children, I thought, Dear god, I really have lost my faith in humanity.
By some miracle, I remembered I have a body. When was the last time I ate? Stood up to stretch? Went to the bathroom?
There’s a reason the airline stewards say to put the oxygen mask on before helping anyone else. If I suffocate, I will help exactly no one.
At the height of the ground invasion, when the news media had reached a fever pitch, I found myself pointing my finger in a coworker’s face and shouting, “I fucking reject the word terrorist!” My coworker, who had rather innocently asked what Israel was supposed to do about terrorists if not drop bombs, stepped back and his naturally pink complexion flushed brighter. My cheeks flushed too. I hadn’t planned to shout. It just happened. I apologized, but I couldn’t look him in the eye for the rest of the day.
There are enough people acting like assholes right now. The realm of assholery does not need me.
Of course every Palestinian is not a terrorist. But I shouldn’t have been a dick about it. I should have explained to my coworker that using the term ‘terrorist’ is problematic because the United States has, for the last thirteen years, increasingly used the terrorist label to rob individuals of due process and their basic human rights all over the globe. I should have explained that Israel has justified their attack on the general Palestinian population by calling all Palestinian males between the ages 15-60 terrorists.
Note to self: Don’t be an asshole. Use a calm voice at a reasonable volume. Keep wild hand gestures to a minimum. Don’t call people fucking fascist pigs, at least not out loud, even if you think they are. And if all else fails, ask yourself: What Would Noam Chomskey Do?
I’m not Jewish. Nor am I Arab. Nor do I have any close friends who currently live in the Middle East. I’m a young, middle-class, white woman from Western Pennsylvania.
But I also work some portion of my day job for free, every single day, so that the U.S. government can give my money to Israel to buy bombs and guns and drones from U.S. companies. Because that’s how taxes work in a plutocracy. I try to remember this when I find myself doubting whether I have a right to speak up about Gaza.
Don’t be afraid. Or rather, feel the fear and do it anyway. It’s what I’m doing right now, as I write this. Do you know how scary it is for a fledgling writer to publish a piece on Gaza, of all topics?
Fucking terrifying.
I’m doing it anyway.
About a week into the ground invasion, I started feeling frustrated with Facebook. Anytime I posted about Gaza, my feed turned up crickets. No comments. Maybe I’d get a Like from one of the two other people posting about Gaza. I didn’t know how to take this. I have smart, opinionated friends on Facebook. Were they not following the news? Did they just not care? So I asked.
I got myriad responses, but basically what it boiled down to was fear. Fear of spinning out and becoming furious with a stranger. Fear of getting entangled with an asshole. Fear of becoming an asshole. And, especially for women and people of color, the fear that we don’t have a right to speak up.
In an interview on Democracy Now, Henry Siegman, former National Director for the American Jewish Congress who once lived under Nazi occupation, said, “I always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is not that there is evil, that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. That was not the great lesson of the Holocaust. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent, cultured people, people we would otherwise consider good people, can allow such evil to prevail.”
People cringe at the Holocaust comparisons. I get it. We’ve seen too many assholes in Facebook threads and forum posts and comment sections prove Godwin’s law true. In the next breath, though, Siegman says, “What I resent most deeply is when people say, ‘How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?’ The point isn’t, you know, what exactly they did, but the point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it.”
I have seen the evidence of dead Palestinian children in white bedsheets. I saw a video of a man reaching for a child wrapped in a sheet. The sheet was stained red. The man collected the bundle in his hands and pulled the child to his chest as though he or she were still alive. The child was inside a chest freezer at the hospital, and there were so many more dead children still inside, wrapped in bedsheets, waiting to be claimed.
As I write this, I am watching a live feed of the protest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police murder of unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown. The Ferguson police in SWAT gear, with their tanks and their high-powered guns, are indistinguishable from Israeli soldiers. I’m watching Twitter explode, and in the midst of it all, there are a few messages of solidarity from Palestinians to Ferguson. Advice from the citizens of Gaza to the citizens of the United States for treating the pain of tear gas. Think about that.
We are those well-meaning people who are letting this happen. We have a responsibility to speak out, as scary as it may be. We have to feel the fear and speak out anyway because we can’t allow this to continue.
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This article was sourced and edited by contributor Kevin Meyer, whose short fiction entitled, "When You Breathe Out," can be read here.
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Erin Roycroft is a young white middle-class woman who is getting better at owning her privilege. She writes in Portland, Oregon, and she hangs out in Tom Spanbauer's basement. Erin is currently working on a series of short stories about performing surgery on a chicken.