Using your voice for Palestine is an act of love.
In 2009, I spent a month in Palestine. What I saw changed me forever. The media I grew up on called it a conflict, but what I witnessed was something else entirely. It was apartheid. It was a brutal occupation carried out by a nuclear-armed military, forcing the Indigenous Palestinian people to live in an open-air prison: denied citizenship, stripped of freedom, and subjected to relentless trauma, control, and subjugation.
The gap between the dominant narratives I grew up on (which cast this as an ancient conflict based on religion) and the truth (of brutal oppression and genocide) was undeniable.
Israel is a settler colonial state founded through military force, ethnic cleansing, and land theft.
The founding of Israel in 1948 involved the forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians, the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages, the murder of an estimated 15,000 people (including over 70 documented massacres), systemic sexual violence, and explicit strategies to prevent the return of refugees. (Source: Nakba Archive, BADIL Resource Center, Pappé (2006))
“From the beginning, the architects of Zionism did not reject the logic of European imperialism; they sought to join it. They asked for a piece of land from imperial powers, promising to colonize it in exchange for protection.”
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
Israel’s policies have been directly modeled after the U.S. reservation system. The use of fragmented, militarized zones. The containment of Indigenous people into restricted areas. The erasure of history and the rewriting of origin stories to justify conquest. Just as Manifest Destiny was used to sanctify genocide, so has Zionist mythology been used to justify domination.
“Settler colonialism is not content with land theft - it also demands a story to cover it up. A story in which the land was empty, or always meant to be yours... From the beginning, the project of Zionism was premised on the erasure of the Indigenous Palestinian presence.”
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
Yes, Jewish people have long lived in Palestine. That truth matters. Like Palestinian Christians and Muslims, Palestinian Jews are part of the land’s history. But the state of Israel was not founded on coexistence. Many Palestinian Jews opposed Zionism for this reason. Israel was founded through a settler colonial project, one designed to erase and replace the Palestinian population in order to establish a Jewish ethnostate.
Israel defines itself as a state for Jewish people only. Jewish people anywhere in the world have the right to citizenship. Palestinian refugees whose families lived there for centuries are denied return. Palestinian citizens of Israel live under over 65 discriminatory laws. In the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians live under military rule, without rights or protection.
This is what it means to be an ethnostate: a state built to privilege one group at the expense of another.
“What if the price of the safety story is the silencing of others’ screams?”
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
“It is not antisemitic to oppose Israel’s settler colonial project. It is not antisemitic to oppose racial supremacy, even when it is practiced by Jews. And it is not antisemitic to mourn Palestinian lives... When antisemitism becomes a tool of the state to silence criticism, it makes real Jews less safe and weakens the fight against actual antisemitism.”
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
There is no moral justification for what is being done to Palestinians. We are witnessing genocide. It is deliberate, systematic, and sustained. There is no ethical gray area when an entire people is being systematically starved, bombed, displaced, and executed. 15,000 babies are at risk of dying of starvation in the next day. Silence is not neutrality. It is complicity with mass murder.
To those who feel afraid to speak, I understand. It can feel risky to say something that others may reject or misinterpret. There may be material consequences for speaking truth to power. When I first began speaking up for Palestine, I received death threats and was accused of supporting terrorism and being antisemitic. All of these are designed to keep people silent and complacent. But after 20 months and 76 years of genocide, it is unconscionable to stay silent.
I invite you to root into your devotion to justice, to truth, to life.
Your voice, your effort, your creativity, however imperfect, are needed.
We need each other now. A single voice may not feel like much. But a chorus of people choosing to speak can shift what feels possible. We are not powerless when we stand together.
While our voices and actions have not yet been able to stop the genocide of Palestinians, we must continue to create conditions for the truth to be revealed, for the status quo of complacency with genocide to be transformed.
Even when it doesn’t stop the violence immediately, our words, creativity, and actions can loosen the grip of propaganda. They can open hearts. They can move resources. They can disrupt normalization.
When I speak up for Palestinian liberation, I think of those who were murdered by Israel and the U.S.
It is estimated that the number of people murdered by Israel and the U.S. over the last 20 months is in the hundreds of thousands.
The grief of their murders echoes throughout the universe.
I speak because their lives were sacred. Because they should still be alive.
I speak because daily massacres of Palestinians are ongoing.
Because Palestinians in Gaza are being systematically starved to death by Israel.
Because I desperately want to create a future where life is honored.
If you don’t feel like you know enough to speak out, then learn.
Strengthen your ability to learn the lineages of harm you’ve inherited, so you can interrupt them. Name them. Illuminate our shared context.
Strengthen what’s needed so you can show up with more courage, clarity, and conviction.
Let your voice be part of the refusal. Speak on behalf of life. Speak for a future rooted in justice and liberation.
