Genocidal war: Palestinian Americans reflect on 300+ days of Gaza massacres

What have the last 300 days been like? When you lose a loved one, you go through seven stages of grief. Now imagine losing multiple loved ones, every hour, every day, for 300 days, consecutively, while living in unlivable circumstances.

The Palestinian American community in the diaspora is witnessing the destruction and murder of our Palestinian brothers and sisters through our screens in real time with no way of stopping it. Not only that, but our community bears the full understanding that it is our tax dollars and our elected representatives who are enabling and facilitating the murder and destruction of our people.

This has brought forth a level of grief and a sense of abandonment that is difficult to express and navigate. Living as a Palestinian in the diaspora has always been a challenging and unique space to be in.

Many of us spend our entire lives never being able to set foot on our homeland. We grow up hearing stories of exile and occupation that many of our family members have experienced. Others are only able to visit ever so often.

Sad wakeup call

But there is always the disconnect of never fully belonging to Palestine, and never belonging to our country of residence either. When the current Israeli genocidal war began, many Palestinians in the diaspora were forced to fully evaluate and reflect on their own placement in this space.

Our community members have had to reevaluate relationships at work, schools, and even friendships, because for Palestinians, this massacre is way beyond the red line, whereas for many others, it simply is not.

It has been a wakeup call to our community that many people we once considered friends and acquaintances have the privilege to choose to ignore the ongoing genocidal war and believe in the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.

At the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC), our staff has been able to both lead actions and support the community through a time that has been very painful, but also been a wakeup call that has united the community in ways none of us thought possible before.

Backlash

The genocide may have begun in Gaza, but once it did, the effects of it spread all over the world. Palestinians in the diaspora were suddenly faced with the threat of job loss, of doxxing, of student suspensions and expulsions, and even of violence, simply for speaking out against Israel’s actions.

We were all shocked, though many of us thought it was inevitable, to hear about the stabbing death of six-year old Wadee’ Al Fayoumi in Illinois by his own landlord, and the attempted drowning of two Palestinian children in Texas because their mother wore a hijab.

In another horrific instance, three Palestinian college students in Vermont were walking together in November, wearing their keffiyehs and speaking in Arabic, when they were targeted and shot, leaving one of them paralysed from the waist down.

We received calls from parents and students whose teachers and administrators were telling them to remove their keffiyehs, while others confidently spread hateful stereotypes about Palestine.

The PACC itself became a regular target of hateful phone calls and harassing messages. We were forced not only to try to process the reality of our friends and families suffering back home, but also to manage our own safety while actively being targeted here.

Despite all of this, the community did not back down; rather, our community only strengthened its resolve to achieve justice and advocate for freedom for our brothers and sisters on the ground.

We live in a post-9/11 world, where we are taught to shy away from our Palestinian identity.

Due to a number of reasons, including the transparency of social media and the establishment of community relationships and spaces that our people have built, we as a collective have proudly and relentlessly advocated for Palestine, and as a result, we have never before seen such support for the Palestinian struggle.

Problems at home

Still, in addition to discrimination and very real threats to our livelihoods, many community members are grappling with their own mental health.

It often goes unaddressed because we struggle to come to terms with our own American privilege knowing that we have all our basic needs met while our our loved ones back home in Palestine are undergoing occupation and genocidal war.

We feel we can’t complain, can’t get tired, can’t take breaks, or even really share any joy. Three hundred days into the genocidal war and 95 days until election day leaves many members of our community torn.

We feel we cannot allow our lawmakers to get away with their continued support of Israel with weapons sales that help murder members of our family and community. Family members who go to work, send their children to school, take care of their neighbours, and just want to cook dinner. Family members who are not trained in war or even resistance.

Meanwhile, we watch the media and our elected officials gaslight us and conflate anti-Semitism with our right to be able to advocate for ourselves against Zionism. There is no lesser of two evils and we see both parties continue to make it harder for citizens in the United States to have our basic needs met.

Our healthcare system is underfunded, we are in the midst of a housing crisis where citizens can’t afford to buy or rent, and have a crumbling infrastructure. We want to focus our efforts in caring for our families and communities here.

We want to divest from Apartheid and re-invest that money into programs for needs like mental health and drug addiction. For 300 days now, there has been no relief, there has been no pause.

The Palestinian American community cannot begin to process the grief of the lives lost in Gaza and across Palestine because the death count does not stop rising. Not only that, the details of our people's suffering have been so graphic and so visibly violent. Yet it still continues.

However, the one respite in this, is that the actuality of a free and liberated Palestine has never felt so close.