What lies do you believe?

Identifying and refuting the lies we have internalized is a very dry powerful exercise. It is the path to change entrenched behavior, to create new realities, and to liberate our minds. Here are some lies we have absorbed about the genocide in Gaza.

It’s complicated

There are overt lies, and there are implicit ones, which can be much harder to see. One of the most insidious lies buried in the propaganda about Palestine is the idea that this issue is complicated. So many people think differently, the history is so long, the names unfamiliar, the leaders and factions and characters always changing, it’s hard to really know what’s what. Right? Wrong.

At its core, this issue is easy easy easy. In fact, strip it back. Unlearn the adjectives, the religious identities, the mental images you carry of the people on each side. Think of what you know about how much food you need in a day. Think of what you believe about who and what should not be targeted in war. Think about how easy it should be to be able to say that children should not be shot and people should not be starved and entire cities should not be destroyed. It’s very easy.

the barrier to entry is a low as your gut

That’s the thing, you don’t need to know anything about the details to know that genocide is wrong, mass starvation is wrong, bombing civilians journalists historical schools is wrong. There is actually no context that could change that fact. That’s the good news.

The propaganda wants you to believe more information is needed: “We need to look into that incident when the hospital was bombed, we need to investigate further why the ambulance workers were executed, that journalist was suspected Hamas.” All of these types of comments are intellectualizing and they are very effective at interrupting your gut response which is to be appalled, which is to cry out in dismay. If you are willing to delay your denunciation, it may never come. Another day, another horror, and we don’t yet have all sides to the story on today’s atrocity, so better not speak up.

It took me far longer than it should have to consistently speak up about the genocide in Gaza. I regret my silence and I recognize that I am the one who muzzled myself, for fear of treading on this “complicated” issue.

I’m still not an expect and I’m still speaking up because I know wrong when I see it.

Of course you can and should learn more. Reading, learning and understanding are particularly important when people, their histories, and their stories are being intentionally erased. But don’t wait to speak up, the barrier to entry is a low as your gut.

There is no hope.

This is a tough one. Who am I to say that a people so repressed should sustain hope? What hope can there possibly be when the world holds the door open for Israel to further their illegal, barbaric murderous campaign day after miserable day?

I lay my head in a home on land that was stolen through genocide 2 centuries ago. I know that erasure can have a terrifying permanence. But we must imagine, we must hope, and we must believe. We are sacrificing far more than the lives of Palestinians if we can’t even imagine their generation, a generation after genocide, a world where truth matters, where life is valued, and where the majority opinion matters.

Hopelessness guarantees one outcome. Hope at least creates the possibility of another.

The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.

Yes, this is a lie. To trust that history will not repeat, that moral evolution is guaranteed, is to be extremely naive. Yet this idea is so appealing and so powerful that we tend to believe it even if we don’t know we do. I’ll admit that I literally did not know that humans could and would act in such depraved ways, and that the world order would facilitate it. I truly did not know. How could I have been so blind, since I know the history of the genocide against indigenous people in this county, the holocaust and other man-made horrors? I must have subconsciously believed that humanity was improving.

Here’s the thing: morals don’t bend. People have to bend them, and they can go bend either way. This means that hope is justified, but it demands effort. We as a society of people who still value human life must think, and organize and work to amass the collective energy required to reach that critical velocity that breaks us out of the status quo and sends us into a new orbit, a new arc.

 

 

“We must never succumb to nihilism. We must always maintain revolutionary optimism. We must always continue to organize. Always continue to agitate. because the quicker we can create enough insurmountable pressure that causes the American State to recalculate its double suicide pact with Israel, the quicker we can save as manhy Palestinian lives as possible.”  Hasand Piker