Israel’s Genocide in Palestine Fills Me With Sorrow. How Do I Keep on Going?

Witnessing a genocide is devastating; witnessing widespread indifference can feel painfully hopeless.

by Sophie K Rosa

17 July 2024

Photo: Reuters

Red Flags is Novara Media’s advice column for anti-capitalists. Inspired by our columnist Sophie K Rosa’s book, Radical Intimacy, Red Flags explores how capitalism fucks up our intimate lives – not just our romantic relationships, but also our friendships, home lives, family ties, and experiences of death and dying – and what we can do about it. To submit a question to Sophie, email [email protected] or, if you’d like more anonymity, fill out this form.

Dear Sophie,

How do I keep faith in humanity, function day-to-day, and not fall into a pit of depression while watching a genocide unfold in Gaza?

Some things about me that you should know: I’m a medical student in my 20s. I was raised Muslim in a Pakistani family and, though I am no longer someone of faith, I am often assumed to be because of my name and race.

As a gay man, I never felt comfortable in my local mosque, side-by-side with homophobic boys from school (former friends, who stopped associating with me as soon as I came out). But for every negative experience with Islam, there have been plenty more positive ones, and I’ll always stand with the Muslim community against Islamophobia. I also know that plenty of LGBT Muslims exist, I’ve just come to my own agnostic position.

I’m writing to you now because I don’t know how to cope with so many around me turning a blind eye to genocide.

The institutions I’m supposed to believe are fair and liberal have revealed themselves to be morally bankrupt. The university I pay my fees to has major investments in arms companies that supply Israel – investments they have not reconsidered even when their own former students have been among those murdered in Gaza.

So many businesses on my high street refuse to show any solidarity with people undergoing genocide. I open social media and come across some of the most hateful comments about Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. I see people pit LGBT and Muslim identities against each other. I felt sick to my stomach seeing the raid on Al-Shifa on the news and then attending a hospital placement as normal.

I’m trying my best to do my part: donating to charities, protesting, writing to MPs, petitioning my university about arms investments. Doing whatever small acts of solidarity I can has taken up so much of my time and emotional energy over the past few months, and that’s on top of an especially challenging workload. I try to relax and tell myself I need to disconnect from the news. But then I’ll remember tens of thousands of people are dead. I’ll remember that politicians, celebrities, and influencers I followed think what is happening is acceptable – sometimes even cause for celebration. I’ll wonder if that’s because many Palestinians look like me, have names like mine, and were raised in Muslim families, as I was. What kind of ally am I if I don’t bear witness?

I always thought I had developed a thick skin (I’ve had to, given my past) but this is all really weighing me down now. I feel like the society around me has gone unapologetically mask-off in its bigotry and I just don’t know how to motivate myself to keep going in spite of that. I can surround myself with like-minded friends and attend marches, but these moments of community feel like a candle in the wind.

I know I’ll get through somehow or other, but how do I do so while maintaining my own well-being and my faith in other people?

– Sorrow and Rage

Dear Sorrow and Rage,

I’d like to start by acknowledging that it’s been several months since you wrote this. As advice columns often disclaim, ‘this is not therapy’; all the same, being aware of the limitations of this format – including an indeterminate response time, and the likelihood of getting no response at all  – does not necessarily protect us from their emotional impact. With that in mind, I am sorry if my long response time has felt difficult. You wrote, after all, about silence on Palestine. I trust you know that my delay in writing this column has not been for lack of concern. I wish it would go without saying for everyone who claims to care about humanity, but devastatingly – as you so thoughtfully consider in your letter – it does not, so I will spell it out: I am filled with sorrow and rage about the ongoing genocide. I stand for a free Palestine. 

When you wrote this question, 20,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, following the 7 October Hamas attack that killed around 1,200 Israelis. Now, almost 40,000 Palestinians are dead. As I write this, I feel the weight of those numbers on my shoulders. Though you and I are not directly responsible for this atrocity, it would seem that anyone in solidarity with Palestine must feel – somehow at least – responsible. 

Because we do have responsibilities: to bear witness, to speak, to act. Even when it feels inconsequential, even when it feels impossible. And even when, as you write, people and institutions around us say and do nothing – or worse, support Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing. Witnessing a genocide is devastating; witnessing widespread indifference, investment and celebration can feel painfully hopeless. 

Dominant understandings of “mental illness” often equate suffering with an inability to “keep up” with the pace of the everyday. With, for example, the tasks involved with staying alive and somewhat well: with our studies, with caring responsibilities, with work. Suffering may well impede our ability to do things, but I contest that this means there is necessarily something wrong with us. While this understanding of ‘mental illness’ may be useful for the state, or even for our own self-comprehension at times, its inverse is also true. That is to say, struggling to maintain business-as-usual during a genocide could be seen as a marker of sanity – equally, madness to be proud of. As you observe – conversely – being unmoved and unchanged by genocide is a troubling kind of pathology. 

Your agony is justified. It is difficult, too – because, maddeningly, life’s demands go on as normal. As does the urgency of political action. It makes sense to fall apart, if we are paying attention. Do you think this unbinding has the potential to fuel you somehow, including in your support for Palestinian liberation? What might foster this potential? I would wager the cohesive effect of being and doing with other people – shared sorrow, shared anger, shared comfort, shared solidarity. Which groups and spaces fuel you? When do you feel the most held (together)?

It sounds to me like you’re at least halfway there. You write that “moments of community currently feel like a candle in the wind”. I wonder if, more than this, they could ignite your faith that, together, we can burn the cruelty of the world to the ground. As well as alleviating your suffering, I would hope your comrades might help maintain your faith in other people. 

You are living within reality. Indeed, we cannot – must not – disavow reality: the magnitude of the violence, the disparity of power. And in order to stay with the trouble, we need the elixir of collective action – that in which we participate, as well as others. We need it for transformation – of our conditions, of the world – and we need it to feed our souls. As writer Hannah Proctor puts it in her recent book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat:

It is imperative to organise globally for Palestinian liberation to stop the killing, to end the occupation and to make mourning a possibility. As Abdaljawad Omar argues in ‘Can the Palestinian mourn?’. ‘The very attempt to break Israel’s militarism, is an active yearning to mourn without interruption, to construct a chronal refuge where tears do not have to be defiant.’ Mournful militancy is not a lament but a demand. … Without a social reckoning, mourning is impeded, which is another way of saying: no justice, no peace.

I am thinking of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness. I am thinking of a video I saw of Palestinian children in a displacement camp in Gaza, singing about their love of peace, about the violence of Zionist settler colonialism and their freedom struggle. I am thinking of Jewish anti-Zionist organising, such as by the Jewish Voice for Peace in the US and Na’amod (Hebrew for “we will stand”) in the UK. I am thinking of the global Palestine solidarity movement, in which seemingly splintered societies unite, flooding the streets, organising boycotts and civil disobedience in the name of justice. 

“Anti-oppression activism is our remedy against political trauma,” writes Samah Jabr, chair trade of the Palestinian ministry of health’s mental health unit. “it will heal us as individuals and help us to heal the injured history of our homeland.”

Sophie K Rosa is a freelance journalist and the author of Radical Intimacy.

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