#you will see the moral bankruptcy of using us to advance your own political agenda or so help me

[palestinenatural]

went to a talk circle about palestine today out of curiosity -the pro-palestine movement in my country is in diapers and I wanted to check out the few groups organizing it- and. jskdk lol lmao. it was announced as a space to talk about palestinian politics and create posters for the protests this week but maybe ten people showed up. and they all wanted to sort out their personal feelings about the news and congratulate each other on how well-informed about the occupation they are and they kept relating it to local "liberal" movements that have nothing to do with SWANA politics. and they wanted to upload this to social media. they couldn't get past recounting the horrifying suffering in gaza,,,,their idea of "coming up with solutions" was to print some catchy slogans on a t shirt and do "geopolitical analysis" which truly did not go deeper than "it sucks that the usamericans keep intervening in other countries it's very sad and unfair."

we were the only three palestinians in attendance so we were like oh we have to guide this discussion it's so embarrassing that this is the best allyship our country can offer bdjfjf so we went hey isn't it outrageous how nearly word for word western powers are reusing lies they made up about Iraq in the 90s and ppl aren't realizing? what can we do to help them discern and remember these things? and they answered that actually ppl aren't falling for it bc social media is so descentralized these days. so we were like ok if you say so! hey in our experience the general public in this country does not even know where palestine is and they only hear about us when the violence of the occupation gets worse, so their only image of us is as terrorists. and some guy was like um no actually I don't see palestinians as terrorists so that can't be true. and we were like our literal lived experience has been that people's 1st question is "your surname is weird where is it from?" and their 2nd question is "oh you must have family in isis right?" you HAVE to believe us (the palestinians) when we say that this country is not ready to hear about support for the resistence -they don't know where any of these places are, they don't know anything about our society or language or art or music or literature or scientific production or history! cultural relations between both countries are non-existent so it would be an excellent first step to promote knowledge of these things. It's difficult to feel empathy for a people you only see as violent, or as perpetual victims, but these kinds of restrictive narratives do make it easier to accept the dehumanization of the population. the occupation has been so successful bc they know how (and have a lot of help and funding) to market themselves to the world, how to share their culture and achievements beyond the violence. that's why it took us until 2023 to begin organizing an allied movement! no one knows anything!

and these fucking people. said to my face that we can't share palestinian culture bc us influence is just too great :( :( even though I had provided firsthand evidence to the contrary. and they went right back to discussing how palestinian resistance movements relate to our local history. shut up shut up shut up!!!!!!!!! why are you here praising indigenous liberation movements if you won't listen to the indigenous participants!!!!!!!!!! and you can bet they didn't let me speak for long enough to suggest some starting points for learning about our culture and history beyond the occupation. since they want to see us as poor little cardboard victims they can whip out whenever they need to shore up support for controversial local politics so bad