The news is personal, so I'm sharing some personal news.
It’s been almost a year to the day since my last Off the Beaten Shelf update. The last time I posted, I was burnt out and taking a week off as a birthday present to myself. Then a year went by and here I am again, another year older and still a little burnt out. But I’m writing today about something deeply personal to me and while this post does have some book recommendations toward the end, that’s not the primary goal of this post.
The news of this past week is personal. I’m Palestinian. My people are being subject to active genocide before our eyes.
To everyone who’s reached out the past couple of days to check on me, to everyone who’s spoken up for Palestine, to everyone who is listening and learning rather than spewing uninformed opinions with centrist moralizing, and to everyone who has asked me thoughtful questions via DMs, I see you, I thank you, and I love you. You are what’s keeping me going right now.
I feel I’m in a unique position because I’m a Palestinian person who was raised mostly around non-Arabs, so the majority of the people I know, interact with, and consider friends and colleagues are non-Arab. I’m also a journalist who understands the importance of media literacy. And all my immediate family members are in the US, so I’m not worried about them specifically being victims of genocide in Gaza. However, as any Palestinian will tell you, all Palestinians are family and my heart is heavy with a level of grief I didn’t know it was possible to hold.
Yet it’s because of this unique position I’m in that I feel I have the capacity to educate people right now. So much misinformation is spread through the Zionist PR machine and it’s designed to dehumanize us so the world will look the other way while we die.
Those who have reached out and checked on me know I’m not doing well. (I’m exhausted and my mental health is a mess and I’m still trying to meet the demands of capitalism.) Palestinians are not celebrating this. No one wanted any of this—yet, unfortunately, when people are forced into conditions of desperation, they do desperate things, which is never pretty. To anyone who would equate that last sentence to condoning violence, I would ask you to consider why your concern has cropped up just now when state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians has been going on for 75 years.
Ask yourself if it’s really *all* violence you’re against or if you’re just against it when non-white people do it, specifically indigenous people fighting for their freedom. Does our life not matter too?
To my friends and allies who are antizionist Jews, I love you especially. I know Zionism hurts you too. I’m sorry the world has persecuted you for millennia. I’m sorry Europe was so antisemitic that it tried to extinguish you, then instead of reckoning with its war crimes, chose to cast some of the people who share your beautiful religion across the world for someone else to deal with. I know Zionism hurts your people too because if there was no colonization, Palestinians would have no one to fight. I know you know that one holocaust doesn’t justify another and that Palestinians aren’t your enemy—Zionism is. Thank you for seeing through the propaganda. Thank you for seeing Palestinians as humans worthy of life. Thank you, most of all, for speaking up in rooms we’re not in. You have influence where we don’t. Your voice matters.
To other Arabs who are reading this, I can only imagine how triggering this must be for you, as many of you have experienced hardship in your own homelands. Thank you for standing by us and for your support these long 75 years. We see you and you’ve warmed our hearts in countless ways. I love you dearly.
To my fellow Palestinians reading this, I love you most of all. If you’re too exhausted to educate, rest. If you can’t take one more news update or video of our people covered in blood, turn off your wifi. If you’re too worried about your family and friends in the homeland to function, do anything you need to do to take care of yourself and surround yourself with people who love you and see the whole of your humanity. If you’re too afraid for your life to protest, stay home. At a time when genocide is being committed against our people, the most important thing is that we stay alive. We will not be erased.
To everyone else, here’s what you can do:
Read up on our history so you can educate yourself, then educate others. I recommend Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis; Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick; and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine by Jeff Halper as good primers.
Donate to PCRF, the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. While money may not be helpful right this minute given how the occupation is blocking all international aid, it will be incredibly helpful when survivors emerge. The survivors will be twice displaced (if not more) and will have to start their lives over with nothing.
Protest. Show your community you care.
Combat hate where you see. If someone says advocating for Palestinian makes you antisemitic, don’t believe them. As you’ve seen from this post and hopefully from Jewish people you know, Judaism is NOT the same as Zionism. Check on the Jewish people in your life (as well as the Palestinian folks you know); they’re not feeling the best either right now. (Also, fun fact, Palestinians are also Semites, so it’s ironic that the term “antisemitic” is weaponized against us.)
If you choose to speak up, and I really hope you will once you’re sufficiently informed, know that you can support Palestinians without throwing Jewish people under the bus. As a whole, they are not our enemy—Palestinians only take issue with those who choose to oppress our people.
I don’t know that things will ever be “business as usual” for me again. Once you’ve had your humanity debated like it’s a thought exercise and heard hundreds of calls for the death of people who share your ethnicity, it changes you. Even though people messed with me after 9/11 and I got profiled at the airport for a solid decade, which is really scary when you’re a child, this is the first time I’ve felt truly afraid for my life. I realize what a privilege that is, especially living in America where BIPOC folks, especially Black and Asian people in recent years, experience this on a daily basis.
Even though things aren’t “business as usual” with me, I’m still trying to find pockets of joy where I can. I just went on vacation and spent time with some friends I love deeply. My birthday is coming up and I plan on having fun with it. I’ll share those things with you online like I always have, but know that I’m only able to experience this level of joy and freedom because my grandparents, born in Palestine, made the incredibly difficult decision to leave everything they knew behind so their children and grandchildren wouldn’t have to grow up under apartheid. I will never understand their trauma and experiences as intimately as they themselves did, so the least I can do is honor their memories by fighting for the cause most important to them.
In love, peace, and freedom,
Long live Palestine,
Mandy Shunnarah
