Over the last 18 months – the world has watched in horror at the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Millions of people around the world protested, mock-died in the streets, wrote and sang and protested for Palestinians, with Palestinians. Our efforts driven in part by the belief that our actions would create change. If we could make the leaders understand the harm they were causing, the unbearable brutality of their decisions to unendingly supply Israel with weapons with which to slaughter Palestinians, we thought protest would at the very least slow the cruelty.

We were wrong.

Senators and representatives, Presidents and Administrations, they weren’t confused or questioning about their actions. Instead, they held – hold – an unwavering commitment to Netanyahu’s genocide. This wasn’t a situation in which decisions were made about collateral damage or moral injury, about noncombatants or slaughtering of innocent peoples.

To the contrary, our elected leaders were fully aware of their decisions, unwilling to reconsider no matter the outcry. The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of their lives and their homes, their land and their history, it wasn’t a miscalculation. It was a plan. One with a specifically desired outcome.

In these days of horrors increasing in the United States – legal citizens removed in plain sight, in situations so torturous that rumors of suicide have already leaked out – it is impossible, then, to ignore the parallel. Who will this administration kill en masse, now that we are once again aware that imperialist and increasingly authoritarian leaders will continue to wantonly kill those who they deem expendable.

This is only the beginning. One day, millions of people will look back at the genocide in Gaza and realize this is when leaders around the world, and everyone who remained silent, everyone who supported these murders, one day they will see their complicity. And they will see what their complicity led to – ever more genocides of ever more people deemed expendable. They’re coming for immigrants. They’re coming for trans people. They’re coming, if more indirectly, for women, for disabled people, for those deemed less desirable, those who they believe the world would be better off without. And still, they come for Palestinians and Palestine.

In a mere number of weeks since the new Administration took power, we see the vestiges of civil society increasingly stripped away. People stunned into silence. Afraid to protest publicly. Fearful of fighting back. Far too many are simply obeying in advance, falling into line for fear of
what might happen to them if they don’t self-censor.

But what happens if we do? Where are the millions who protested for Palestine when we need you here too, protecting immigrants, trans people, and all those deemed unworthy? All those who will in short and horrifying order, suffer the same fate as Palestinians. Where are your hearts and bodies on the line? Does our solidarity with Palestinians and each other end now, as our own safety decreases?

For those who can’t speak for themselves, for those truly in harm’s way, we need you, every single one of you, now fighting a much wider fight, one we must survive together.

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