And on October 6 I knew almost nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue.
All it took me was five days of obsessively learning as much as I could take in—reading, listening to audio, watching videos, etc.—to see clearly what was beginning to unfold before the world’s eyes. In all honesty, I truly don’t understand why I could figure out in only five days what too many people haven’t yet figured out after years of being aware of far more than I ever was before Oct 6. I’m not being condescending; if anything, besides being confused, I am alarmed.
I know I should have been writing months ago—or rather, posting my writing that I have actually been doing bit by bit. Aside from personal life and health issues, in all honesty this genocide and ethnic cleansing and all of the media surrounding it have been mentally and emotionally consuming in a way that so often leaves me in a kind of mental paralysis. And it’s been a little traumatizing too. If I do sleep, I wake up tossing and turning and my first awake-aware thoughts are of the Palestinians, of Gaza… I cannot help it, I think about almost nothing else but the Palestinians—yes, the West Bank too, I know.
I don’t know why I have become consumed by this. There is no rational, logical, historical reason that I care so much. I can rationalize it, of course, that’s easy. The question is, why this issue? Why the Palestinians? Why have I not been this moved and mentally and emotionally consumed by some other atrocious current injustices? I have not a single connection to Palestine or any Palestinians, or to Israel or Israelis; and I am an atheist, though raised in a Roman Catholic family, both immediate and extended on both sides. I knew pretty much nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue my whole life. The only thing I had learned about 15 years ago from a friend who’d been there is that it’s an apartheid state. That struck me and stayed with me. He was trying to explain to me what it was like, and trying to be careful because he knew how delicate the issue is for so many people; but I think he must have seen the genuinely thoroughly puzzled look on my face, and then he used the word apartheid, and that was all I needed to hear, then I understood—shocked, as I wasn’t expecting it, but I understood nonetheless. And so that stuck with me, the word apartheid being attached to Israel.
There is no logical beginning to writing my thoughts on the Palestinians and the current affairs and state of things in Palestine. Anywhere I try to begin, I end up adding prefatory tangents to either contextualize or give background or depth or chronological order or to lay out the perspective from where I am coming. It feels like such a swirling mess inside my head and in my heart. It’s like a whole section in a library has been thrown on the floor: a whole section of stacks of rows of books pulled from the shelves and tossed on the floor: this is what it feels like inside my head, navigating my own mind.
But my heart? Navigating my own heart feels like…
Perhaps if I come up with a suitable metaphor one day I will add it here.
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