Okay, so here are some of my thoughts. I definitely am not upset by anyone who is sharing their solidarity or pain for the people in Gaza. I do the same. That's what people should be doing. I don't think I said at any point in this post that people shouldn't.
I understand that it reads differently right now. Even though to me it feels like one long day I know it's been more than 3 weeks and thousands of people have died since and there's urgency right now. That's why I said I started writing this on October 7th, because it was such a bizarre experience to see my people slaughtered by the hundreds, and before anything even happened in Gaza (although, as I said, we knew it was coming) since it took the military over 24 hours to even gain control over the Israeli towns and get to the survivors who were hiding, while all of that was still unfolding I was already getting messages from people who I thought were my friends telling me it's privileged of me to "criticize how Palestinians are resisting". People who never have and never will experience such loss were telling me I shouldn't criticize Hamas. I know not everyone is like this, that's why I said I'm thankful for those who managed to navigate this with more humanity. But it did happen. Or people just staying completely silent or sharing cool memes about decolonization, as I said, without expressing any understanding or pain for what we were going through.
The topic of Israel as a colonialist project is something I've been trying to dig into more, since it never used to bother me when that was said, now I feel weird about it. I'm finding myself thinking about it more, about what does colonization mean when not done on behalf of an existing state, when done by refugees, and what does it mean about the Jewish ethnic identity. Does it mean only some of us are considered indigenous to this land, or that none of us are, or that we're not indigenous to anywhere? I don't know. But I would be happy to hear how you see decolonization, in actuality and as a real process that could happen - what would it mean? What would it look like? To me this is what matters most.
I just want to add - didn't write this as a manifesto, it's not encompassing my entire world view or all my thoughts about this topic. That would require too many words. I wanted to address this specific thing that happened to me and people I know, because I felt I needed to write it to be able to move on and refocus myself on what's important to me.
Sorry if this is messy, hard to organize my thoughts at the moment.
