The toll of bearing witness to genocide

Shifting from individual responsibility to collective action

Every day I see cries of “What do I do? I don’t know what to do anymore.” There are countless people who care deeply about the Palestinian cause and who have been consumed by the images from Gaza and the knowledge that this genocide is being perpetrated by Israel with U.S. bombs. And, over the past several months, they have been confronted by the brutal truth that the conventional avenues used to pressure politicians have done nothing. Public opinion has shifted dramatically, but the mass protests and the emails and the phone calls and the Uncommitted campaign and the disruption of speeches have not changed the decisions made in DC. Right now northern Gaza is being starved to death. Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be killed between today and the end of the year. The genocide continues to accelerate.

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

Since October 1st of this year the Israeli military has ordered about 400,000 people in northern Gaza to leave their homes, while simultaneously blocking food and medical supplies from reaching them. We have to confront, once again, the horrifying fact the U.S. could stop this and chooses not to. We have to confront the fact that Israel’s assaults on Lebanon, where they have already murdered thousands of civilians, also could not continue for long without U.S. support.

And we have to confront this collectively. Every time I see the “I don’t even know what to do anymore” sentiment, I get it. I have felt my wheels spin in anger, in horror, in despair. At the moment I am feeling the tremendous weight of exhaustion, of hopelessness. I am determined to keep struggling until we’ve done everything within our power to bring the genocide to a halt, a milestone we can only know when the bombs and billions stop flowing from Washington to Israel. But I don’t want to pretend that it’s not hard to continue on.

There are countless reasons to oppose the IDF’s relentless and expanding slaughter. For so many people around the world the single most compelling and motivating catalyst for fighting for a free Palestine and against Zionism has been the horrifying images that pour unceasingly out of Gaza. Tents and their occupants bombed, children beneath mountains of rubble, schools and hospitals reduced to dust and limbs. And I think I’ve failed to reckon with the full impact of this nightmare.

Given how bearing witness to Israel’s genocide pales in comparison to what is happening in Gaza itself, and now Lebanon, I’ve been reluctant to spend much time assessing us, assessing those who struggle from places of relative comfort and safety. It seemed secondary, at best. I adopted the mentality that we must focus exclusively on the actions we can take. But sidestepping how we feel, ignoring our despair or exhaustion or the many other reactions we have to bearing witness to a genocide was misguided at best. Trying to put my emotions to one side didn’t stop them from ravaging me, a process I have now seen repeated again and again in others.

Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash

One phenomenon we’ve probably all seen by now is people not knowing what to do with their pain and anger. As this particular rage has built and built within countless people, most of us aren’t equipped to handle it. So what do we do? A model we’re used to is escalation. In particular, ratcheting up our rhetoric is a formula we’re accustomed to for expressing political rage. We condemn atrocities in strong language, then in stronger language, and so on and so forth. But with this genocide our rhetoric rightly reached a fever pitch many months ago. We have now seen horrors beyond imagining again and again and again. So we reached for the strongest language we could find some time ago.

Now people find themselves with nowhere to go. Some still reach for stronger and stronger language and find themselves saying outlandish things. A much bigger group sinks into despair, or cynicism, or begins to look away from the horror in an effort to spare themselves. Each response is understandable, but none are ideal. Ideally we would be finding ways to not only continue but increase our struggle, increase our fight against the profit-hungry war machine that churns out bombs and bodies as long as the money keeps flowing.

After turning this over, and over, and over in my head these last few weeks I think we need to start at the very foundation of our response to the atrocities we bear witness to. We need to start at the beginning of our despair, which is the sentiment: “What can I even do at this point?” And we need to accept that, as individuals, we can do little. I, or you, alone can do very little to halt a genocide. But that is not cause for despair, it is cause for acceptance. Once we accept that as individuals we are virtually powerless, we begin to free ourselves. The despair we feel is tied to the feeling of responsibility, individual responsibility for atrocities that are far outside our control. And we should feel some responsibility, particularly for the actions of our government, but our whole framework for responding to these events is broken.

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

We are so conditioned to individualism that we take the horrors of the world and ask “What do I do?” And we should take action, of course, but our framework for assessing actions should be collective rather than individual, but so few of us are really, meaningfully, plugged into groups that allow and encourage us to take meaningful collective action. In short, we are not conditioned to think in the collective and we rarely have the infrastructure to act in the collective.

It might seem counterintuitive, but that slight shift from “What can I do?” to “What can we do?” can be the first step towards individual action. When we fixate on our personal culpability and responsibility, the weight of the world can sit heavy on our shoulders. When we realize that we are part of a larger whole, and that the only way for us to be effective is to be part of something larger than ourselves, we can plug into existing organizing efforts and try to do our part. We may still be worn out and pessimistic, but we rightly understand that our actions alone mean little, while our actions as part of a collective could mean the world.

This is no silver bullet. It is just one shift of many that we need to make. To shift from individualism to collective thinking is necessary for change on the scale these times demand, but it’s also necessary so that we aren’t crushed by the weight of events. We are not heroes meant to defeat evil in hand-to-hand combat. And, despite what we might’ve absorbed in books and movies, the tides of history don’t turn on individual acts of heroism. Bravery matters, and small groups of organized people, like the folks at Palestine Action, have shut down weapons factories that supply machines of death to the IDF, but even these small acts have researchers, lawyers, fundraisers, planners and more behind the scenes. Meaningful action requires organization, and collaboration.

Just days ago we saw another perfect example of what a collective response can produce. Unionized Greek dockworkers blocked 42,000 pounds of ammunition destined for Israel from being loaded onto a ship. The move came after the union declared in a statement that, “It's time to shout loudly that we won't allow Piraeus port to become a war springboard.”

Union dockworkers block ammo bound for Israel at Greek port

This is the sort of power the working class can wield if we organize. This is a glimpse of our power to respond together in ways we simply could not do alone.

So we are called to courage, and we are called to work with one another. We are called to form groups and movements that work together in a wave of people power, a wave that rises as numerous organizations knit us together and combine us into a force so large that it can shake the foundations of society, stop genocide and war, and bring justice to this unjust place. Together we are something more than the sum of our parts. Together, we have a chance.