Reflections on Day 195 of Gennocide

Hello Friends and Family,

On Thursdays I am fasting and using the money from lunch and the time gained to reflect and write to you, donate to UNRWA (still defunded by the US) and pray with Sabeel’s wave of prayer. (The last 2 weeks are attached) You can read last weeks reflection here: Reflections on Day 181 of Genocide. Below is this week’s reflection:

25 years

Last week, I celebrated 25 years of life. The median age in Palestine is 19. Half of the population in Gaza is under 18 and 70% of the population is under 30. This week on the Time To Say Goodbye podcast, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa noted that what sets Gaza appart is the immense toll on children. He recounts the pain of seeing two children who were “brain dead” after being shot in the head by the Israelis. The nurses could not believe that the military would target children, but the CT scans showed the bullets in their brains. My students in my world history class are 15-16 years old. They are alive. But for their entire lives, Israel has instated a deadly blockade on Gaza which set the stage for this current genocide. The ongoing genocide and events in my personal live make me increasingly grateful for life. The privilege to breathe and eat and laugh and love. The responsibility to build a world hospitable to life.

4 hours

Yesterday, the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce grilled the Columbia president for four hours. At one point, Republican Georgia Congressmember Rick Allen cited a christian zionist interpretation abrahamic covenant stating “Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God, of the Bible?” (DemocracyNow!) 

Side Note: Allen’s Christofacist bent jumped out at me given previous reflections on Christian zionism and as I have been thinking through the meaning of local venture capitalist Gary Tan’s event with Peter Theil in a couple weeks. 

President Shafik threw student protesters and professors under the bus but also failed to defend academic freedoms, setting a dangerous precedent of anti-Palestinian backlash in this new Mccarthyism. Also this week, USC cancelled its Valdevictorian’s commencement speech and Google fired 28 employees for speaking out against Project Nimbus. Google employees had staged a sit-in after it was revealed that their employer was being paid 1.2 billion dollars to deploy google photo facial recognition software on unconsenting Gazans and likely host the AI software being used to target civilians and conduct airstrikes on Gazans in their homes. Previously, this newsletter was drafted using the Google Suite but I am now in the process of moving my drafting process off of Google docs and into locally stored markdown files and other open software. Last night, I floated the idea of moving off of Discord to a more secure platform to my Valorant 5 stack. One person stated that they didn’t worry about whether or not the government had access to their information. I used to think this way, but recently a teacher in Berkeley and Oakland was fired (using non-reelect) for helping to organize teach-ins against genocide. I know teachers in SFUSD who are under investigation due to bogus claims of anti-semitism. Tonight, teachers in San Francisco will host their own teach-in to stand against genocide. We cannot afford to be afraid of those who wield power to deffend settler colonial genocide, but we can be wise in protecting ourselves.

195 days

Today marks the 195th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Still I struggle to make sense of such senseless violence. When one of my students was asked to provide a motivation of the Israeli soldiers’ behavior in an activity he wrote “They’re terrorists. They kill any Palestinian they see.” The educator and the master’s student in me squirmed. Could I lose my job for what a student wrote? I already felt like I was doing the content a disservice by not providing sources about the IDF’s failure to achieve their military goals due to sustained armed Palestinian resistance. I also wondered if I should push the student away from the analytical frame of “terrorism” given it’s flimsy definition and the carceral politics of imperialist ‘counter-terrorism’ policy. Yet it has been 195 days of nonstop terror. Last month, Al-Jazeera reported “countelss accounts” use of torture by the IDF to coerce confessions that justified more slaughter. Today UNRWA published their report. An army that “defends” stolen land by slaughtering families in their homes, bombing refugees, demolishing hospitals, and torturing detainees is certainly using terror to achieve its goals of ethnic cleansing. Google executives who profit off this slaughter and intimidate their workers seek to sow terror to protect their assets. Zionists in the Bay Area who look to punish anyone who speaks out about Palestine weaponize a conflation of anti-semitism with anti-zionism to spark fear in those opposing genocide. Perhaps my overeducation prevents me from seeing this with the clear, youthful eyes of my student.