Our boys & men deserve to live, not just our women & children
Palestinian, Black, Brown boys & men must be honored in life & in death
People would rather see us as corpses than freedom fighters. And that repeated realization is fkin killing me. It’s heartbreaking.
“Free Palestine!” Ok, but do you know what it will take to free Palestine?
And by “us” I mean Black & Brown communities resisting colonialism. The world is used to seeing our starved, emaciated, beaten, bloodied, brutalized, mutilated, limbless, headless, rotting, dead & decaying bodies splattered across screens— this is “normal” news. However, if we dare to resist our annihilation in any way that truly threatens the violent status quo, we will be painted as THE aggressors. To garner any global sympathy, we’re always first forced to condemn some of us. These power dynamics are apparent in the media’s coverage of the horrific atrocities happening in Gaza committed by the settler colonial zionist regime as part of it’s 75-year long genocide & occupation of Palestine. The media selectively highlights “women & children” as helpless, docile, passive victims of an obscure “humanitarian crisis” or nameless tragedy. The boys & men, however, are demonized as “terr0r!$ts” while their deaths, stories & suffering are strategically erased to manufacture consent for genocide.
Today- I’m asking you to extend your compassion to ALL of us, not just some of us.
Palestinian boys & men deserve the right to live. All Palestinians deserve your compassion, not just some. The lives of all Black & Brown men are sacred but endless propaganda goes into convincing you that they are not. How?
Why the hyper-focus on “women & children”?
When the media happens to cover a genocide including resistance efforts against such violent oppression, there is always a hyper-focus on the death and suffering of women & children. There is even some socially acceptable level of global outrage, however performative, about the slaughtering of women & children. Yes, half of Gaza is children. Yes, children aged 1-15 years old make up the highest proportion of those murdered by Israel’s bombs. We should rightfully be enraged about the slaughtering of countless women & children. But, what about our Black & Brown boys & men? Why is there no global outcry or mourning for the many Palestinian boys & men who have been massacred? This is why—
1. Black & Brown men are painted as monsters while boys are framed as monsters in-the-making, both deserving of death
The selective focus on “women & children” and simultaneous erasure of the suffering, deaths, injuries and pain of Black & Brown men is part of western, imperialist propaganda. It is a deliberate, insidious, calculated attempt, by those in power, to paint our men as “terr0r!$ts” and blood-thirsty savages. For eons, our men have been painted as uncivilized monsters & innately aggressive beasts who are by nature, biologically inclined to commit barbaric acts without reason. Thus, it is implied that they are deserving of pain, torture, death or any harm that befalls on them… “for the greater good”.
The demonization of Black & Brown men is an age-old tactic that has been used to manufacture consent for genocide and to garner public support for the massacres of our communities. It is “normal” for governments, media & prominent figures to refer to Palestinians as “human animals”, “children of darkness”, “wild beasts” and frame their ethnic cleansing as a righteous war to rid the world of “pure evil”. Young Palestinian boys are seen as soon-to-grow-into violent fundamentalists and killing them is spun as a proactive way to neutralize future threats. Palestinian boys, as young as 13, are categorized & mistreated as men by the occupation forces. The goal is to make the world doubt if any Palestinian man, and by extension if any Palestinian at all, could ever truly be considered an innocent “civilian” undeserving of genocide.
“Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise…
It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.” - Hala Alyan (originally published in the NYT)
Our homelands have long been bombed, robbed & pillaged under the guise of a “war on terr0r”. The media creates, perpetuates racist, Islamophobic tropes and fabricates lies about “blood-thirsty” Palestinian men beheading babies or raping hoards of women. How could so many, including people on the so-called left, fall for such racist propaganda? Even if this disinformation was NEVER proven and has been repeatedly debunked, the damage is done. It further embeds the image of a terrifying monster deeper into the minds of a gullible public— the terr0r!$t— who sure looks a lot like my Dad, my grandfather, my uncle, my cousin, my best friends or my people.
At the same time, the media chooses NOT to show footage that captures the deep, emotional, complex stories of Black & Brown men— videos that capture their joy, sadness, grief, justified rage & anger, their compassion, generosity & care. You don’t see videos of Black & Brown men share their raw & heartbreaking experiences of being submerged in brutal colonial violence, mourning the murders of countless loved ones, passionately sharing their dreams & hopes of liberation, holding/ feeding/ soothing/ showering their loved ones with care or relishing in communal joy.
As I write this, boys & men in Gaza are doing everything they can to care for their community in the face of unfathomable genocidal violence— digging through rubble day & night to find the bodies of all the loved ones or neighbors or friends who have been massacred by Israeli strikes, cooking mass meals using the street scraps they can find, journalists in tears still going live to document the genocide minutes after learning that their wives & children were all murdered, singing & reciting poetry or verses from the Quran while performing surgery on horrifically wounded people without anesthesia who are bellowing in pain, soothing their children that it will all be okay as they lie bloodied on a hospital stretcher with all limbs severed by Israel’s shelling, setting aside the grief of losing ALL their family members so they can perform mesmerizing circus acrobatics to briefly distract orphan children at shelters who’s entire family line has been wiped off, the new fathers soothing their fragile premature babies taking their last breaths after being unplugged from critical life support machines as Israel cut all electricity to Gaza, the medics performing CPR on wounded people & animals with every ounce of energy & care they can muster despite watching 1000s murdered before their eyes that they couldn’t save, the fathers who chose to starve to death so their children could eat the little food left, the injured brothers carrying the dismembered body parts left of their loved ones… These boys & men are angels.
Black & Brown boys & men deserve dignity, love, compassion. They deserve to be honored in life & in death. Palestinian boys & men are sacred, their lives are holy, their anger & rage are justified and they have the right to fight back against their communities’ annihilation… by any means necessary. You cannot selectively highlight the plight of some of us while erasing the suffering of the rest who are instead painted as terr0r!$ts.
2. Women & children are painted as the perfect, innocent victims as long as they don’t fight back
Firstly, the “women & children” narrative inaccurately clumps femmes/ women/ anyone perceived & categorized as women or child into a monolithic victim group. In reality, Palestinian “women & children” are a diverse, core part of resistance efforts and are just as dedicated to dismantling the zionist regime as men are.
Those in power leverage the “women & children” narrative to exotify helplessness and paint a picture of the “perfect victim”— a meek, docile, powerless victim who is both incapable of fighting back AND does not want to. Like many colonized peoples, Palestinians are told that they may garner some crumbs of sympathy & media attention ONLY if they appear to be completely helpless, submissive, compliant, feeble, willing victims who simply accept the 75-year long genocide, colonial occupation & apartheid inflicted on them. However, if they are seen as victims of genocide who are also capable of resisting & are actively fighting back, they will be demonized as terr0r!$ts, blamed for their own oppression & condemned.“Don’t you dare fight back” — that’s the message the hyper-focus on women & children is relaying.
3. The “women & children” narrative is part of pink-washing
Empires like the US & Israel love leveraging jargon on women’s rights or queer liberation to frame some Brown & Black women/ children/ queers as helpless, voiceless victims oppressed by their own fundamentalist, violent boys & men. The oh-so-progressive, “free” West that massacres marginalized people worldwide designates itself as the savior who will liberate us from ourselves.
Israel’s pink-washing campaigns run ads with slogans like “H*mas, IS*S and Iran kill women and gays”. The reality is Israel, backed by the US & other imperial states, indiscriminately kills, maims, displaces, tortures and dispossess Palestinian women, children, queer folks, men alike because they are Palestinian. The sin they have committed is being born Palestinian where their mere existence is unwavering proof to the world that Israel is occupying, destroying, desecrating & colonizing a land that is not theirs. When colonial empires come for our communities, no one is spared.
The difference between Palestinian women & children and Palestinian men isn’t the amount slaughtered but rather which deaths are framed as justified and whose deaths are mourned.
“The original sin of over one million Gazans—the one that makes them available for killing, maiming, and homelessness from the air, ground, and sea—is having been born Palestinian. The word “Palestinian” produces them as a threat and as a target, while the words “man” and “woman” determines the way their death can circulate. Palestinians had no choice or say in being born Palestinian, under settler colonial conditions or in refugee camps scattered across nation state borders. They did not pick up and move to Gaza on their own volition. To paraphrase Malcolm X: They did not arrive or land in Israel. Israel arrived and landed on them.
The emphasis on the killing of womenandchildren, to the exclusion of Palestinian boys and men, further normalizes and erases the structures and successes of Israeli settler colonialism. “Civilians” and “non-combatants” are chosen. Men are always already suspicious, the possibility for violence encased in human flesh. The individual and personal extinguishing of female lives and the lives of children is massified and spoken of in statistics. Palestinians are framed as having the ability to choose whether they are a threat to Israel, and thus deserving of death, or not, and thus deserving of continued colonization clothed in the rubric of “ceasefire” or, even more elusively, “peace.”" — Maya Mikdashi, 2014, article published in Jadaliyya
If you care about Palestinians or any Black & Brown colonized community, you shouldn’t just show compassion for those of us framed as “innocent victims”, you should care deeply about those of us that are demonized as aggressors
People feel comfortable condemning unpalatable acts of resistance… despite never having lived under a brutal occupation, blockade, apartheid or battling a genocide orchestrated by a colonial state destroying your indigenous lands, determined to wipe out your people. Even the useless UN states in its charter that an occupying force has no right to claim “self-defense”. It is THE aggressor. Most importantly, resistance is justified when a people are occupied.
It is not allyship, solidarity, kindness, or bravery to feel selective sympathy only for those victims of genocide that are labeled as “innocent” by western media which happens to be funded by those committing the genocide. It is not empathetic in the slightest to condemn Israel in the same breath as condemning Palestinian resistance. It is cowardice. Equating the violence of the colonizer with the desperate, justified resistance of the colonized is not a neutral stance, it means you’ve sided with the genocidal, occupying settler colonial state.
So today— I am asking you to do something truly COURAGEOUS & KIND. I’m asking you to extend compassion to all Palestinians, including the freedom fighters who are doing everything they can to resist their communities genocide. I am asking you to TRY to put yourself in the shoes of the young Palestinian men fighting back because that is what real compassion for an oppressed community looks like.
Cultivating compassion for Black & Brown freedom fighters
It’s not just 1 group, but a plethora of diverse Palestinian resistance factions that have come together, united in their efforts to liberate their homeland. The media focuses on demonizing 1 group because it’s easier to concoct the image of 1 evil boogeyman that Israel is targeting who is supposedly hiding in every single home, school, hospital, street & shelter in Gaza.
Most importantly, there’s plenty of footage that “humanizes” members of these diverse Palestinian resistance factions that the mainstream media will never show. There’s videos of them engaging in daily acts of kindness & community care. The bulk of the activities of these groups are community service and mutual aid programs that try to feed, clothe, educate & provide medical care to their people. They are trying their best to materially support the daily survival of their people who are trapped in poverty, lacking access to basic resources, cut off from the rest of the world & carpet bombed constantly by a genocidal regime. In such crushing conditions, community care clearly has to also involve targeting the root cause of their suffering or else the outcome is total annihilation of your people. They don’t have a choice. Their only choice is to resist or die.
There’s also recent videos from Gaza of resistance fighters treating hostages with compassion— feeding everyone, reassuring the settlers that they will not be harmed, rocking/ holding/ feeding/ playing with their babies, etc while clarifying this was their only chance to exchange a handful of them for the many thousands of Palestinian prisoners (including many children) who have been arrested, tortured & incarcerated indefinitely without recourse. There’s many videos of freed Israeli hostages explaining that their captors were kind, generous & considerate — and Israel has fabricated lies to misrepresent these hostages’ experiences and tried to suppress the circulation of such videos including bribing meta to censor social media. In one of the videos, after an elderly woman was already released with her daughter, she pauses, turns back around & intentionally reaches out to shake the hand of the freedom fighter that facilitated their release as he respectfully returns the gesture.
There’s plenty of footage of young men in militant resistance groups detailing the suffering, death & destruction that defined their painful childhoods while explaining that they are not “out for blood”, they are desperate for their people to be free & for their sacred lands to be liberated which can only happen by dismantling the zionist state. You can see their sorrow, grief & hurt as the world dehumanizes them for not willingly accepting genocide. They explain that they are motivated by a deep love for their land & people. These videos show that many of them turn to religion for solace & as a guiding framework for principled resistance against oppression, much as I do, ensuring that even their militant struggles are rooted in care & a desire for collective liberation, not senseless violence for the sake of demented pleasure. If the media showed you this complexity, you’d see these young men as human beings worthy of dignity, care & safety and that is something these empires cannot afford.
These Brown & Black Palestinian men engaging in armed resistance are not monsters— they were children trapped in a brutal cage without the option to escape, growing up drowning in colonial violence their whole lives, under endless bombs & missile strikes, starved, beaten to pulp by Israeli soldiers & settlers alike who stole their homes and burned their sacred olive trees, watching their community suffer endlessly, chronically ill & disabled by Israel’s bioterrorism that poisons their air/ land/ water long after the bombs flattened their neighborhoods, mourning death after death of massacred loved ones… their reality is unfathomable. These young men are an indigenous people desperately seeking freedom from their colonizers, hoping that a future generation can experience a free Palestine knowing they will not. They craft resistance tools from scraps made with their bare hands while being up against the nuclear-weapons carrying might of the Israeli army/ navy/ airforce, the U.S. & every imperial state hellbent on annihilating them. These men also have diverse interests & love for poetry, art, music, calligraphy, embroidery, cooking, farming/ land tending, dance, traditional medicine rituals, spiritual practices etc.
This does not mean they are perfect, it means they are human. Why are these Palestinian men dehumanized & punished for being the children that happened to survive genocide long enough to do something about it? My question is- how can you NOT have compassion for their struggle?
If you were in their shoes, subject to the same violence with no end in sight, growing up as children holding the mutilated bodies of countless dead & injured loved ones, trying every tool at your disposal hoping to protect some loved ones while grieving the martyrs you are guilty of out-living… then you too would do everything you can to free your people.
And if you are thinking “I would never do that” even if you were submerged in the same exact brutal conditions as them, then is there something innately biological about you that makes you more “moral”? And so is it their Brownness, Palestinianness, Arabness, Muslimness, etc that makes them “innately” violent?
I don’t want you to sympathize with just our women & children. I want you to sympathize with those young men taking up arms to fight for their community. I need you to understand their complexities, hopes, suffering and the violent oppressive context that necessitated their resistance. If you care about Palestinians, about any Black or Brown community, then your compassion should extend to all of us and the only thing you should be condemning is the colonialism that is the root cause of all suffering.
We will honor Black & Brown boys & men.
Those of us organizing for the liberation of our communities also use the “women & children” angle in an attempt to garner sympathy for a people who have been long considered unworthy of life. We’re trying to show the absurdity of a violent colonizer claiming to be a victim defending itself while it massacres women & children. We’re hoping that tens of thousands of dead children may garner sympathy for Palestinian suffering as a whole, hoping the world will see this is not a war or a conflict but a brutal 75-year long colonial occupation, genocide & apartheid. But it is time for us to be principled, bolder & firmer, not reactionary & fear-driven, in our work.
We will not condemn us. Any of us.
We can only be free if all of us are free. These empires have made us fear that we will also be smeared as “terr0r!$ts” if we honor our men. But no more. Don’t let them bully you into silence. Let love for our communities, rather than fear, be your guide. The suffering, deaths, stories and lives of Palestinian men should not be excluded from our narratives. It is our responsibility to honor all Black & Brown men, including Palestinian men, in life & in death. I refuse to erase the suffering of our boys & men or distance myself from them to beg for crumbs.
It is our responsibility to openly, unabashedly, proudly center, appreciate, admire, support, uplift, grieve & mourn Black & Brown men. We have to share the names, stories & experiences of Palestinian boys & men who deserve to be understood & honored at a time that the dominant global narrative is fixated on dehumanizing them. Their sadness, grief, rage, anger & pain deserve to be honored. All Palestinian boys & men, including those fighting back, deserve to live— with freedom, safety & dignity, and the lack thereof has necessitated their resistance. They erase & dehumanize us enough as is. We will not further contribute to the erasure of any of us.
We fight until all Palestinians are free. We honor the divinity of all Palestinian lives and in doing so, we honor all of our communities.
Palestinian men and women and children are one people—and they are a people living under siege and within settler colonial conditions. They should not be separated in death according to their genitalia, a separation that reproduces a hierarchy of victims and mournable deaths. Jewish Israelis (including soldiers and settlers) occupy the highest rungs of this macabre ladder, Palestinian men the lowest. This hierarchy is both racialized and gendered, a twinning that allows Palestinian womenandchildren to emerge and be publicly and internationally mourned only in spectacles of violence, or “war”—but never in the slow and muted deaths under settler colonial conditions—the temporality of the “ceasefire.” To insist on publicly mourning all of the Palestinian dead, men and women and children—at moments of military invasion and during the everyday space of occupation and colonization— is to insist on their right to have been alive in the first place. — Maya Mikdashi, 2014, Jadaliyya
Thank you for these thoughts, I desperately needed to read this and re-frame my calls for Palestinian liberation, not just in the name of women and children, but for ALL.
Crying. Powerful. Heartbroken .