For Your Own Sake, Please Care for Palestine

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25-05-2025

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For Your Own Sake, Please Care for Palestine
Anwesha Rana
37 minutes ago
It's the human thing to do.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
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What do we mean when we talk about resistance?
The process of colonisation is a violent one. Can resistance be non-violent? It has been proved again and again through the ages – colonised nations did not regain independence by asking their oppressors politely, and politeness is not the peak of civilisation anyhow, regardless of what regency-romanticised television might tell you.
This piece does not say anything that hasn't been said – yelled, pleaded, sobbed – through the last 20 months. The words here serve only the purpose of keeping myself sane, even if it is only for the few minutes in which I am writing this.
'What are your thoughts on the question of Palestine?' Many public intellectuals have been recorded responding to this. What is the question of Palestine? Palestine has the right to exist free of oppression and colonisers have to leave. There has to be a trial for war crimes and there have to be massive reparations, although nothing will quite be enough. That is all, broadly speaking. The question is not of Palestine, but of the rest of the world, especially the world of the civilised and the great and the developed. It is a question for them to grapple with: what are you?
As everybody with a conscience and access to the internet has pointed out, this atrocity is not new. What is new is technological reach that has made it possible for a genocide to be livestreamed. The genocide plays in our houses and twisted news of it plays in our office cafeterias. It is everywhere at once and somehow we are all navigating it. My Twitter (now X) feed is dead babies dead babies dead babies cute cat demolished houses. Some of us cheer at the sight of death, some of us lose our minds as we try to make sense of anything. For all of us, life goes on.
Displaced Palestinians flee from Khan Younis, Gaza, amid the ongoing Israeli military offensive in the area, on Monday, May 19, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.
Life goes on until a Real Terror visits our own doorstep. In the age we are in, it feels like the terror must necessarily be at my doorstep for me to feel anything, or to care. Over the last many months as we saw Palestine reduced to rubble, many tried to explain that Palestine is a global cause. It gives us reason to worry about everything. While they struggled to get this point across, a parallel strain ran through our lives where we said that we are tired of caring, we have empathy fatigue, what can we even do for a State where international law has failed? It seems to me that what we can do is care. If it hurts us to see dead babies, we must endure it still in solidarity with those parents who have had their child die in their arms, or those who have had to piece together body parts of their babies. I am not a parent, and the state of the world doesn't inspire me to be one, but does one need to be a parent to feel the terror and horror of disease and death as they chase children? I don't think I need to be anything at all besides being human to understand suffering, to realise that the world order has collapsed, and that individualism will not save us.
Palestine is a cause for everyone. If we don't care, we should. Even if we think dead babies are a hyperbole and we want things to be personal enough for us to spare a thought, there is plenty to be worried about. We should care because Palestine has exposed so many truths about global affairs and the world order that do directly impact us. Let us take a step back and look at the things that have unravelled in politics, society, and environment since the 2023 genocide of Palestine began.
'Anti-semitism'
First, the concern of anti-semitism. Religion has long been the most powerful tool in the arsenal of politics. Anybody speaking up against Israel's atrocities in Palestine has been branded anti-semitic. In trying to assuage its own complicity and guilt in the Holocaust, the West has now comfortably adopted a stance that can only be read as full and unconditional support of Zionism. The Holocaust is cited as an example to serve the political needs of many, but I am certain that there are many like me who don't for a second believe that any Zionist has the interests of Holocaust survivors in their heart.
As the West is quick to counter any condemnation of Israel's genocide machine, the problem they help us see is that of equating Judaism with Zionism. Those who protest Israel, its politicians, and civil society that has gleefully celebrated the annihilation of a people are protesting against the terrors unfurled by a state. That does not mean that the protest is against the Jewish. Is it not anti-semitic to draw this parallel at all? The consistent demand has been to hold Israel accountable for its crimes, and is in no way a call for boycott and harassment of all Jewish people everywhere in the world. That false equivalences serve those in power is obvious enough, evidenced in the many instances where, facing protests from Jews themselves against support of Israel, many powers of the West have been quick to threaten, harass, and even arrest those Jewish citizens. Whose interest is being safeguarded, really?
Palestinians look at the damage after an Israeli army airstrike in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, April 28, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.
Whither institutions?
Second, the absolute collapse of institutions. The ICJ, UN, UNICEF, and all other similar bodies don't mean anything – their significance was diminishing anyhow, but the last twenty months have very quickly exposed their weakened structures. They are no more than vestigial organs of a rapidly disappearing inheritance of the twentieth-century world order. I will not stay long on the subject of their ineffectuality. Let us look, instead, at the disintegration of the university, not only in the West but also closer home. All protests have been silenced, protestors arrested, students suspended and threatened, assaulted on campus, faculty harassed and hounded…name an injustice and it can be found having been executed by the university administration against its own people.
The fact of it, that a site of education can so carelessly submit to power without a single thought spared for its people, should terrify us all. If institutions meant to nurture us are so easily capable of handing us over to be brutalised, should we not be terrified as to what other manners of injustices are possible? This isn't even an exercise in imagination. Anything that you will hypothesise has already happened. Difficult as it is for me to believe, being anti-genocide is somehow a radical position. Trickling down from this, we have seen the fate of pro-Palestine activists, students, scholars, artists, actors, poets – not just at the hands of power but, perhaps more concerningly, from their fellow citizens who have given themselves over to propaganda easily and dedicatedly.
Palestine is also a feminist issue, albeit a largely unacknowledged one. The feminist world has celebrated International Women's Day (its appropriation from what was originally the International Working Women's Day is a matter for another discourse), asked to address the gender pay gap, held panels on breaking the glass ceiling, and offered discounts on the perfect pantsuits for the girlboss feminist. A curious silence, however, on Palestine. Little to no visibility of women's bodies in offering support for the people of Palestine and standing in strong solidarity with the women of the land who have starved, lost their homes and families, and been absolutely stranded as they struggle to find the most basic of necessities. My understanding of feminism says that it is a struggle against any and all oppression. What do we say, however, when the strongest institutions and powers have decided that this isn't oppression at all?
From a thousand real instances, we know that institutions will not protect us, governments will easily discard us, corporations will continue to benefit from us, and there will be no corner for us to hide in or seek comfort from.
Also read: Stories of Pelf and Plunder: On the DRC and Palestine Documentaries that Went to the Oscars
Against knowledge
Third, we should be concerned about the dangerous levels of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that have been exposed. We have arrived at a stage where anything that doesn't serve the purpose of mindless hatred is questionable and condemnable. Think of your WhatsApp groups. Lunchtime conversations at your workplace. The 'harmless' joke from your acquaintances at family gatherings. Tweets from handles of Indians who believe only in Hindu supremacy and thus float on a sea of misinformation, bigotry, deep misogyny, and, the crown jewel of Indian existence – Islamophobia. Now think of what, if anything, makes us uncomfortable in these spaces.
Zionists operate with impunity. There is no consequence for actions.
Social media is overflowing with those who do not engage with any literature, do not believe in facts, demand no accountability for administrative failures, and remain unbothered by their own realities of despair so long as they can celebrate the oppression of others. They are not fringe elements. We should be worried because social media use is a real reflection of who we cohabit with, and what (and who) they are willing to sacrifice in the name of undivided statehood. The troll who easily writes slurs and threatens people with rape online is a real person that lives amongst us. While it may be three users threatening somebody, check the number of likes on their tweet. The number should be a red alert for civilisation at large. What Zionism's unchecked violence has promoted is this sort of absolute lack of regard for human life.
This image provided by World Press Photo and taken by Samar Abu Elouf, for The New York Times, won the World Press Photo Award of the Year and shows Mahmoud Ajjour (9), who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, finds refuge and medical help in Doha, Qatar, 28 June 2024. Photo: AP/PTI.
Whose earth?
Fourth, the strange dissociation of environmental concerns from the genocide. There have been impossible levels of ecocide perpetrated by Israel through the genocide. The amount of bombs dropped on Palestine has accelerated the climate crisis. Israel has also gone about destroying olive groves and fields, and we have not cared. Greta Thunberg, once beloved by media, has been at once shunned and hounded for her support of Palestine. The refrain has been 'Isn't she a climate activist? Now she is getting into politics?' Where does one even begin to explain that the climate crisis is a political issue? Nothing is devoid of politics. Our existence is political, as are all our choices, beliefs, and actions. Likewise, at home, those questioning the harm caused to the environment because of hyper-developmental projects that benefit only mega conglomerates, are branded anti-national and declared to be enemies of the state. This, of course, links to another wide array of issues in Indian socio-political life, including consumption of meat, exploitation of farmers, the brand-image of veganism and vegetarianism, with Identity being at the centre of it all. At which point should we care?
Even if we don't have the space in our minds and hearts to care for anything outside of ourselves just because we should, we can perhaps do better by ourselves by caring. The experience of Palestine is too vast and cruel for us to comprehend in its entirety. What we can conclude, however, is that states are self-serving and we are mere foot soldiers in their wars. The moment we cease to serve their purpose, we become discardable. Any state that does not respect any form of law and order, does not respect us as individuals. It will not protect us. We should care because it is the human thing to do. Delusional as it may be, I hope that our friends in occupied territories everywhere will be closer to freedom sooner than it seems possible at this moment. I hope that none of us have to personally experience anything close to fear of the kind that is unfolding in the world, but that we choose to care regardless.
Anwesha Rana is a publishing professional.
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