the livestreaming of our genocide

reflections on watching my people's genocide through my phone screen and the disillusionment of it in midwestern reality

it’s 10 am sometime in mid-october in my friday morning college class, the truth is it’s a little later cause i’m late again, i’ve been running late these past few weeks. it’s what happens when time doesn’t feel real and neither do their consequences. i feel guilty saying that my world ended at the beginning of this month when so many worlds really have ended for people far from me, but then can i say that my world has come to a pause? what unique title do you give the grief that comes with the ongoing genocide of your people? or the guilt in knowing you’re responsible?

grief has been considered isolating for far too long but how much more isolating is it for something the people around you do not know and cannot begin to understand. it does not matter that they do not know what palestine is or the longing that comes with a homeland, it is enough for them to ask and conceptualize how it may affect others. but they do not ask, do not care, do not make the connection that you  being palestinian would have any relation to the headlines plaguing every channel. maybe they do connect these dots but it is too odd a conversation to navigate so they do not. 

it doesn’t matter anyways, i am not listening. the lecture from my professor sitting fifteen feet away in our too small of a classroom to accommodate an even smaller group of students is drowned out. this small group of students who i once considered good acquaintances at the very least speak of things that have no substance. or maybe once did but the topic of grades and projects and what new restaurant opened downtown and if i’ve tried it doesn’t concern me. in any case, my body is turned away and i think i’ve made a clear ‘do not approach’ indicator with this silent language. 

the professor does not ask why i am glued to my phone in the middle of class, not even making a motion to hide it. i once would’ve never done this, respect and etiquette something i found pride in. if she asked, what would i say? should i have shared the truth with the class? tell them i saw a dead fetus on my phone screen and it won’t be the last. would i have turned my phone for proof? an image so horrific i could not help but stare in shock at something that should’ve never existed. that the shock will not wear off in the next following months everytime i am met with a similar picture. 

this is only one kind of this horror, that you will see bodies in conditions they should’ve never been subjected to and hear the screams and cries that could only be derived from a terror as unspeakable as this one. you don’t look away because the least you could do is pay witness. the people around you do not care for such actions, not only do they not feel this guilt that your greatest action is simply bearing to view crimes you’re complicit in but they do not even feel compelled to do this. do not even feel complicit, is it for you to absolve yourself of the sins you commit to others?

i will ask myself more than i thought possible if it is a midwestern thing, a side effect of a polite and shallow society to be this oblivious. i will ask myself if i am going crazy, if sanity exists in the suburbs of green bushes and picket fences. i will ponder how the benefit of the doubt in ignorance was gifted these past 75 years but i cannot reconcile those excuses with something as loud as this. i will wonder if the screens in their hands do not display pain as suffocating as the one on mine, if the tvs in their homes do not televise massacres. even when the headlines are wrong, surely you understand what palestine is, are you even curious?

i knew algorithms created echo chambers for us to exist in but i never thought this would be what made it evident. that the only difference in this genocide and all those that came before it is the means to record, document, and display it on every platform available. that this should’ve made the difference, should’ve been the catalyst for change and an end to it. none of it helped – i will come to find out that this is to be named “the most documented and denied genocide” that despite the endless evidence, it’s credibility will be questioned. those who are still quiet, do you scroll when you see a dead child or is your feed better curated to weed out atrocity from crossing your vision?

did you know that conversation died at our dinner table months ago? the happenings of daily mundane routine irrelevant in the wake of our people that we cannot reach suffering. sometimes we share the latest news we have on gaza, we may have all seen it and pitch in, or one of us might have an update a step ahead. other times we are silent because the hope is fading and the reality is too bleak to speak of into existence. my mom tries not to cry when she talks and it reminds me to bite my lip and tongue so that i maintain my own urge to do so until i’m in the confines of my room or probably the shower – i used to never cry but i do it a lot now. 

my dad is tense and angry, not at us, he’s good at not raging but it’s an under the skin type of discomfort, the kind i can tell he wishes he could shake off but there’s no balm for this. i think he wants to cry but doesn’t let himself or maybe he does but like me, privately. he doesn’t use social media so his news is restricted to the non-western sources he consults and his disgust and frustration grows more evident. i thank God he does not have an instagram feed like mine, as tough as he acts he has a soft spot for little kids and if he saw their bodies unimaginably mangled i’m not sure there is a comfort i could ever provide. he’s the only one of us lucky to have ever been in palestine, childhood trips to and from, i think sometimes that makes him more deeply connected. if you’ve felt the soil on your feet do you become more rooted to the holy land?

no one at my job asks or speaks of it. i’m at a blue collar type of place, the people are hardworking and self sustaining. they talk ill of the government sometimes and i wonder if this too will come up. i ask myself it is appropriate to point out the connection to the government’s indifference of their wellbeing and to it’s sending of their tax dollars to a genocidal machine. i stay silent. 

i am still glued to my phone screen. it will take me a couple more months to not scroll aimlessly in search of a solution i cannot find. despite knowing it’s unproductiveness i will fight it out with zionists in comment sections like there’s any convincing i could do to someone so apathetic. i simply need an outlet because i haven’t found anywhere to scream yet. i will post some tiktok videos to say what’s on my mind and then delete them because it feels useless and i don’t want to be perceived yet. i will begin to write again for the first time in years and then not because the words become lost on me. 

back at work again, one of the men with odd boundaries who is all too eager to share his videos with me will show me one of a man dying in a bike accident. i will say i am sick of seeing dead people on phone screens. he will ask what i mean and i ask if he knows what’s happening in palestine, he will act like he doesn’t hear me and share another video i don’t want to see. 

another coworker will work the closing shift and ask if he can question me on something as we stand there alone, i say yes reluctantly and brace myself for a berating of some kind, he was a bit high on authority and always ready to reprimand. he doesn’t this time, instead asks ‘where are you from again?’, i’ll say ‘palestine’ and he’ll respond with ‘right, i thought so’ and i’ll say ‘hmm’ because i don’t know where this is about to go. turns out he plays soccer with a man, name mohamed but i don’t know from where, and they’ve become facebook friends. he posts so much about gaza and the man in front of me is confused by the entire situation. he asks me to explain and i force myself to not rejoice. 

i’ve repeated the sentiment that those complicit can at the very least educate themselves but when the opportunity arose i’d lie if i say i wasn’t ecstatic. finally, someone curious enough, but how do i summarize 75 years of ethnic cleansing into footnotes? i begin to spiel and our last customer walks in, he says ‘we’ll finish the conversation later when we get the chance’. i wonder if he heard the hitch in my throat at one part of reciting the facts, i hope not, the last person i need to know that i’ve been crying for months is him. two shifts later we get to continue the conversation and it ends in a disappointing, ‘yeah, i just wish our country would stop intervening elsewhere’ i wonder what more i’d expect from an american, at least his unempathetic sentiment grasped one part of the problem and he’ll never bring it up again. i’ll never utter the word palestinian in that store after this and quit a short few weeks later. 

one of my professors will hug me after class and ask how my family and i have been doing. she’s a sweet lady i’ve had teach me a couple of times over the years and someone i aspired to. she gives advice and comforts of how the way i’m feeling is normal. a few weeks later i will sit at a table with her and some acquaintances between classes and she will talk candidly about how she is ‘definitely voting for biden’, i keep my mouth shut, someone seconds her and talks of their fear of what could happen if he doesn’t win, someone else says they’re ‘not big on politics’. i get out a short ‘i don’t know what i’ll do’ and don’t say that this conversation makes me never want to talk to them again. my professor will empathetically say that my ‘situation is difficult’ and i will say ‘yes, it’s hard to know people in government see my people as human animals’ she will look horrified and ask who said that, i’ll respond with ‘i think a senator in florida’. she laughs and says ‘of course it’s florida, they’re all the same’, i don’t laugh, it’s not just florida, it’s everywhere, it’s the man you gleefully pledged support for and everyone who has come before and after him. but i do not elaborate and i accept that allyship is not my friend here, silence is.

i graduate from that place a couple weeks later and barely keep in touch with any of the people there. i do wonder from time to time in the following months when it becomes inescapable if they ever did learn what palestine was. if my face ever came to mind when they brushed it off as some ‘far away situation’? if the percentage of their tax dollars ever had them question its outcome since the potholes on these roads haven’t been fixed yet? i wonder if my professor ever got to seeing every other politicians rhetoric, when the quiet parts were spoken loudly, and their masks slipped. does she still think it’s only florida? did she only accept biden’s faults when he was no longer a candidate? is she rooting for kamala, our girlboss first female president? genocide a ‘difficult situation’?

i tell myself do not bother, these people will not and cannot get it. i find myself in a place somehow more disconnected from the world than the last. i am going to scream. someone get me out of this middle of america hell. i no longer have stilted dinner conversations to look forward to when i need to vent or an arab and muslim community to provide some comfort when i get the chance. i spend five days a week in a spiral of college classes filled with starbucks cup and people who i swear have never been able to find the middle east on a map. i am on a campus walking and then appears some military clad uniform peers. have i reached the seventh circle? I am surrounded with ‘never forget 9/11’ drivel and more memorials for tragedies that feel far in the wake of current ones. no one mentions the current ones. i make my finals on palestine and my parents worry about getting ‘too political’, my art professor gives me an A, i think he might get it. 

my phone is still on and the genocide hasn’t stopped, neither has those documenting it. they’ve tried to put a stop to this. killed journalists and their families, made threats enacted. the world is awake and knows but they haven’t been stopped. i try to consume media critically so that i can be productive to a cause bigger than me. try to create thoughtfully. but sometimes i cannot help but stare and let the shock force me to stand still. there are few horrific images i have yet to see, i cannot imagine what it is like to have lived them. i saw a boy burning alive a couple of weeks ago and cannot forget the scene. i think i should be thankful i am not desensitized after all this time but what can i do with this? the genocide has not been slowed and the livestreaming of a new one has begun, when will us bearing witness begin to pay off?