77 years and two years

I woke up at 3am and checked my phone, because I’m not always the person I want to be and I don’t always have the habits I want to have. I woke up, checked my phone, and saw that another ship from the aid flotilla to Palestine had been intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military. I saw that people I know and that people I could know had been kidnapped, and that by all accounts they are currently facing torture at the hands of the Israeli state.

I didn’t get back to sleep easily.

I assume all of you are already paying attention to the aid flotillas, ships full of some the bravest fuckers in this whole world, but if you’re not, please do. There are specific calls to action each time an activist is kidnapped.

I don’t write about Palestine a lot, though I’ve thought about it more days than not for the past two years. I don’t write about it because I’m not the voice that people should be listening to on the subject. I worry, maybe more than I should, about taking up space in the conversation.

But I do know some things.

I know it’s been 77 years (and longer) of genocide and resistance in Palestine, and now two years of a dramatic escalation in Gaza. All of this history and the present is worth understanding, especially if you have sympathy towards Zionism or in your head conflate Zionism with Judaism.

I’ve covered some of this history before on my podcast, including discussions of Israeli and international solidarity with Palestinians and the long history of hunger strikes. Zionism was consciously a settler-colonial project (because those weren’t dirty words to Europeans at the time that Zionism got its start in the late 19th century) and the first Zionist settlements in Palestine created a society (and importantly, economy) entirely apart from the existing people and culture of the area. I write “the first Zionist settlements” and not “the first Jewish settlements”, because Jews have been living in Palestine forever, including quite actively in the 19th century before Zionism.

While the Ottoman empire did not provide full and equal rights to religious minorities, it was substantially kinder to Jews than Europe was. In 1492 when Jews were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, it was the Ottomans who took them in. Gay men in Europe also ...