Living steadfast, and with love

I have written paragraphs of this post so many times in the last weeks, and stopped, each time lost in my anger, or my outrage, or my deep sadness. Stopping because I had nothing more to give than my anger or my outrage or my sadness, and none of these things were adding anything good to the conversation.

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The last 10 years of my life have been years of deep learning and unlearning in the ways and powers of the world. I have lived, and continue to live, a life of political privilege, in which it is easy to not see the struggles of others, or to see those struggles and feel sympathy without seeking to understand the structures that are perpetuating them. To see someone’s fight for justice as being “political” or fringe or “too much” or “sad but not something I can engage with” and then keep giving my care and focus to the things close to me that feel tangible. I understand this. I do this.

I would say my learning really started when I went to Alaska. When I heard the stories of the medical testing on the Inupiaq people in Kotzebue, when Sammy* told me as we were out doing an ice survey that he was one of those who was given the radioactive iodine as a child. When I learned of the ever changing laws against subsistence hunting which destroyed food security and culture for the benefit of the commercial fisheries. When I saw the impact of fossil fuel burning on people who have lived with the land for thousands of years. When they told me of their exchanges with Māori in New Zealand, learning from the kōhanga reo movement, and asked me “do you still have a Māori queen?” and I didn’t know that there was ever a Māori queen. I read about the violent, land grab, resource extractive colonisation of Alaska, and the violent, land grab, resource extractive colonisation of the rest of what is now called the United States of America. And I knew none of this was right. I also knew I was deeply ignorant about the same tools used in the colonisation of my own country.

I came home, and was in a place to start learning about our own history here in New Zealand. I was welcomed into a Te Reo class, and through language learning and in relationship with my classmates and teachers, I learnt about the New Zealand Wars and about the Tohunga Suppression Act. I learnt about the fight for Te Reo Māori in the 80s, and I started to learn about the cultural, linguistic, economic and legal subjugation of Māori that present day New Zealand is built upon and perpetuates. I also stepped into the world of tikanga, I learnt about deep resilience, and I learnt about whakawhanaungatanga. And I built on this learning with the guidance of my wonderful, critical, practical, decolonial colleagues at my job over the last four years, who showed me ways that you could work from within an organisation to operationalise equity. But all of this is incremental, and none of it is absolute. It morphs and it grows, and we blunder and we learn and bit by bit we build a sense of how we want to be in the world.

It’s also true that this last year has been one of especially aggressive learning and relearning for me. Learning about Palestine has been another, critical, and at times, painful layer of this self reformation. It has been unique for me, in that this is the first time that I have seen such forced, extreme suffering in real time, and such a wildly disconnected response from those who hold power. But though this is the first time I have seen it, it doesn’t make this the first time such gross suffering has been inflicted on another people to the sound of the much of the world’s silence. Not even in my lifetime.

I see all those for whom this is not new, those who have have always known in the depths of their flesh that all human life has never been equal, those whose people have been the fodder of the wars of imperial countries, those whose land has been stolen and whose language has been stamped from their throats, and those whose children are not safe from the police.

And in my distress at this fracture, I have found a warm, steadfast, educated and brilliant community, who have lived this for so long, and who have seen me and said “welcome”.

I give huge gratitude to my friends and colleagues, Māori and Pākehā, the Inupiaq elders in Alaska who I studied alongside, and those my life has brushed into communion with, who have invited me into this incremental learning with compassion and patience.

And so now, offering a bit of myself and our experiences of the past few weeks, I reach for the voices that have had decades of practice of speaking to this fight with intellect and eloquence. And through their work, and through my relationship with you, I offer you an invitation.

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The day Mohamed’s family had to flee their home we were in Pamukkale, the “cotton castle” of Turkey. Odds are, if you’ve ever been to a Turkish kebab shop in New Zealand you’ve seen a faded cardboard print of Pamukkale, the glacial blue of the water sun-bleached to almost merge with the striking white of the carbonate pools. This place is the closest to a magical fairy wonderland I’ve ever been, the travertines cascading down the hillside like a warm weather snow cover, dozens of hot air balloons awakening in the blush of the morning sky like cartoon overlays on the landscape. Below the restored Roman ampitheatre of Hieropolis, Mohamed was taking calls from his family about when and how they would leave Nabatieh, and how they would stage a family intervention to get his grandparents — steadfast that they would stay — to leave their home and go with them. These are people who have fled before. They know what to do, they are pragmatic, and they do not panic. The family network mobilises and they discuss the options. Calls happen in the background, to the brother, to the aunt in the diaspora; voice messages are sent back and forth. They decide to wait till the morning for the streets to clear; the risk assessment under bombardment. We were soaking in natural hot pools atop submerged Roman columns, and eating an overpriced tourist trap hamburger.

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This last year I have felt the fracturing of words from their meanings.

Massacre, horrific, terrorist, accountability, Rafah is a red line…we do not bomb hospitals.

And I have felt the fracturing of images from their gut-felt consequences. The fracturing of trust in the collective experience of empathy.

video by @whatlivmakes

And as I read history I am sunk into the knowing that this fracturing has decades of precedence.

As nouns and adjectives fail to land in a world where we are saturated with the supremacy of one kind of people over another, I know that it is the story tellers who can mend our relationships with knowledge and consequence.

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We had flights for Mohamed’s family to come to Turkey for a holiday on the 29th of September, four days after they fled their home in the south, twelve days after the pager attacks that started the onslaught of Lebanon. We have obviously since cancelled these flights.

A day after they left their homes, we took a bus from Pamukkale to a small village in the south of Turkey, where we are staying and volunteering with a retired couple and their family. An attempt to wait, to stay close, to find some stability, and step away from the dissonance of watching bombing campaigns on your family with a side of tourism.

Our days consist of biking to the aunt around the road to pick up milk for Ümmu and her sisters to make into yoghurt, painting Selma’s new house white in the relentless sunshine, and lending our bodies to the cotton harvest, literally jumping on the mound of freshly-picked balls to compress it for the next load. (We did some body slams for good measure, because, when else?) We eat homegrown, homemade soul food with several daily all-in family tea breaks, the tea poured Arab-style/Turk-style/West Asian-style into small glass cups, to be refilled many times with the dance of tea and water pot. The act of refilling being a quiet daily affirmation of relationship. Today, I picked an orange from the tree and ate it before the sugars had stopped flowing from the stem to the flesh.

AND.

AND I wake to check the news, scanning the sites I know for familiar villages or suburbs in Lebanon before Mohamed wakes up. AND northern Gaza is being sieged again, people told to flee or be killed, or be killed whilst fleeing (to where?) with hospitals being told to evacuate, again (to where?) all after we saw the pictures of the decomposing bodies of the babies abandoned in incubators after a previous forced evacuation; AND journalists are being shot in the neck and I see a picture of a man with a press vest lying flat on his face, over and over in different iterations, or the 19-year old photojournalist, Hasan Hamad, who was threatened by the Israeli military to stop his coverage before his home was bombed and what his father could collect of his bodily remains, I saw being tipped out from a shoe box and a plastic bag onto a white martyrs shroud to be buried while his father wailed in a pain I cannot fathom; AND after 99 US medical professionals told the Administration that “every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even daily basis”, the US Administration sends another nine billion dollars in weapons; AND I watch babies screaming in fear and parents screaming for their babies, and babies who no longer have any parents to scream for them; AND Palestinian psychologists are having to counsel terrified children about their emotions, saying that fear is a gift from God to keep us safe; AND 550 people, including 50 children, were murdered within two days in Lebanon and the BBC opened an article with “Israel’s leaders are jubilant”.

And we fracture.

And we harvest and peel persimmons, cennet elması, briefly boiling them in water infused with oregano on an outdoor fire before tying them up to hang on the clothes line; a full persimmon dehydrating in the autumn heat within 15 days, the golden globes swinging in the soft breath of the breeze, sharing the line with the washing, their yellow as vibrant as the blue of the concrete house they hang from.

And Mohamed tells me in a quiet voice “this is what Palestinians are fighting for. The right to live off their land. To harvest their trees.”

And we feel the fracture.

We’ve seen the bombing through the eyes of the people for a year now. It is irrelevant whether or not those eyes are the eyes of your relatives, or the eyes of complete strangers. We are all Reem Nabhan’s grandfather, we are all Hind Rajab’s mother, we are all Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan, the man who left his home to pick up the birth certificates of his newborn twins only to return to find his three-day old children and his wife killed by an airstrike. The people suffering in Gaza and now Lebanon are all of our family, and people have been screaming for it to stop for 369 days and 76 years.

AND it is our world hegemony that aids this killing.

And life is dissonant.

But as I vacillate, untethered, as I know others are, from the spiritual crisis of bearing witness, to the needs of the prosaic day, to the appreciation of the generosity of life, and back again, I bring myself to ground through the decades of precedence, that offer decades of story tellers and decades of critically informed movements for justice. And I breathe my breath into them.

I don’t have the words. But others do.

You might not have the words, or you might not be able to yet disentangle what you have heard, over and over, from what you see. That is ok. Others can, and it is from them that we learn.

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And this is where I offer my invitation.

Justice for Palestine have been working for 10 years in Wellington towards justice, peace and freedom for the Palestinian people, from our place in the world.

They have just launched a targeted divestment campaign, grounded in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that, for 20 years, has been enacting non-violent, economic pressure on the Israeli occupation. The BDS movement, itself, was based off learning directly from those who lead the global movement for economic pressure that finally toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa.

These aren’t just vibes and headlines. This is deep, collective action to stop our money going to companies that fund apartheid and genocide. This is taking our power back.

just4pal

A post shared by @just4pal

This campaign puts ASB on notice: divest from Motorola Solutions by 29 November, or your customers will switch Kiwisaver providers.

Why ASB? Divestment movements only work if they are targeted, and so you focus in. Though many of our banks have investments in companies that support the apartheid regime (think chemical weapons companies or Israeli surveillance companies) ASB Kiwisaver has the most, at $14 million dollars, in Motorola Solutions. And so many of us have Kiwisaver, and so we have a voice.

According to research by Mindful Money, KiwiSaver funds' investments in companies financing and constructing illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine and arming Israel were up 20% in the first 5 months after October 2023. They went UP. And this was not just index, passive funds, but also active investment funds, where decisions are made to invest in these companies.

But why Motorola Solutions? Motorola Solutions a company identified by the United Nations as maintaining and enabling illegal Israeli settlements. They are a long time partner of the Israeli regime, and provide the regime with often purpose-built telecommunications, surveillance and military technology that enables the maintenance and expansion of the illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories (1), including the tech for their separation wall and hundreds of checkpoints.

This campaign is meticulously detailed and evidenced in the petition page on ActionStation.

Nadia Abu-Shanab is a co-founder of Justice for Palestine, and she tells this story with more depth than I can, mending the relationship between words and their meaning, and explaining this campaign, its history, and its purpose.

[[If you want to lean into learning, Nadia weaves words with an incisive intellect in ways that always make me stop to reflect, to read again and actively stretch my mind and heart to reach hers. She has just started writing a new Substack you can subscribe to. She is not a new writer, (this piece for Pantograph Punch on 17 November 2023 is a lighthouse); this is just a new platform. And she is one of many Palestinian thinkers, activists and writers who are guiding us all.]]

If you are an ASB Kiwisaver customer, you have huge power. Please read this petition, and read Nadia’s words to really understand what this is and why. Enough to be equipped, even, to talk to a friend or family member about it. Please sign — but do not switch yet! The purpose is to pressure ASB to divest, not to punish ASB. Your pressure exists while you remain a customer.

If you are not an ASB customer — please, read, learn, sign (this is still super important) and share with your loved ones, who presumably also don’t want to fund apartheid, or the genocide of a trapped people. This campaign is the power, it is the voice that has been screamed hoarse this last year, and all the years before, and it is speaking the language that is heard: the language of money. It will mend the fracture between the message and the outcome — stop funding this genocide.

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As I am writing this in the living room, Ümmu hands me a dried cennet elması, a dried “apple of heaven”. As I bite into it and feel the warmth of its flesh, I realise, this is from the balcony! This is this year’s harvest, not last years, still soft on the inside, warm from the sun, peeled with our hands.

By the time this year’s harvest is being eaten from the fridge, it’s cold body reminiscent of last year’s summer, I hope we have stepped methodically, investment by investment, away from funding a genocide.

Steadfast, and with love,

Kate

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I am not writing a referenced essay of this conflict, there are scholars abound who have done that, but the recent ICJ ruling is big, and we should know about it.

(1) United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights statement on the landmark International Court of Justice ruling in July 2024 of the illegality of the Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories.

*Sammy is not his real name.