A poem for Palestine

Honoring the Light in each one of us

the world remembers “never again”
yet forgets that we are all one people
who never again must be divided.

never again must i mistake “both sides” for bold truth.
never again must i succumb to the narratives of abstraction:
the quibbles of nations, rather than the grieving pains of people,
people who are, deeply, my own.

what does it mean to be foreign?
i am myself “foreign” to some people.
a light-skinned Asian in a mostly-white suburb,
a native-born American in a world so much more diverse and
dancing than the melting pot could be.

foreign is a construct;
our commonalities would overwhelm us with joy.
we fight so much over just 0.1 percent of difference,
genetically; we are fighting our own family.
not that the differences aren’t significant, for they are.
but i believe that we share
a capacity to love
all the scintillating constellations of humanity,
a capacity for jihad
against any pulsing ball of light dying out.

i shall not let
the scintillating people of Palestine
die out.

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I’m sending this to my full email list because the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza right now cannot be ignored.

If you are struggling to make sense of this moment, struggling to sense your place in all that is happening, I feel you. I’ve been struggling too. But that is not an excuse for inaction.

I do not pressure you to take any action if you do not feel ready for it. I do believe in “freedom of conscience,” as one person advocated for at my Quaker meeting yesterday immediately after two people spoke for action supporting the liberation of the Palestinian people. The person’s implicit protest of the two previous speakers irritated me, partly because of its implicitness, but after I contemplated it more, I found that the message had a certain truth. Even the truest of actions, done with indifference or distaste, is internally false. Just know that our media landscape today makes the purest of intellectual freedom inherently impossible; even if you don’t consume the news directly yourself, you are influenced by those who do.

I plead with you to connect with your deepest, truest individual sense of conscience, morality, humanity, and make the action that resonates with that which is Light within you.

Resources

For learning

Decolonize Palestine https://decolonizepalestine.com/ (Check out their reading list)

Field Notes from Palestine

Vox video from seven years ago on Israel-Palestine conflict

Visualizing Palestine https://visualizingpalestine.org/

Challenge Islamophobia https://www.challengeislamophobia.org/

Teach Palestine https://teachpalestine.org/

For action

Tool for calling Congress (they provide you with a script, though personalized messages are most impactful) https://act.uscpr.org/a/callforgaza

If you prefer to write to your members of Congress, Friends Committee for National Legislation has a tool: https://fcnl.quorum.us/campaign/51886/?utm_source=fcnlaction They also have great resources for learning about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Places to donate to support Palestinians https://buildpalestine.com/2021/05/15/trusted-organizations-to-donate-to-palestine/

Global list of protest actions for Palestine https://samidoun.net/2023/10/calendar-of-resistance-for-palestine-events-and-actions-around-the-world/