By SEPI ALAVI
I am an American woman of Middle-Eastern descent who grew up Quaker. Not as strange as it may sound at first blush, if you consider that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. While my family isn’t actually Quaker, my parents always taught at Quaker colleges and high schools, and as I grow older (no, I won’t tell you how much older), I find that the tenets of my education seeped in when I wasn’t looking. Quakers believe that there is “that of God” in everyone—that goodness and dignity are inherent in all human beings. Quakers are pacifists and seek nonviolent solutions to conflict. For indeed, if there is that of God in everyone, then to kill another person is to kill God.
I grew up in Washington, DC and am no stranger to protests. My parents took me to Iraq war protests in the 90s, and when I moved home after college, I found myself regularly going to anti-war protests with my friends—since 1776, the United States has only had 17 years of combined “peace” times. My family is Iranian and I have traveled far to participate in the Women, Life, Freedom protests that occurred after Jina Amani was murdered by the Iranian “morality police” last year for refusing to cover her head with a hijab. I have recently been participating in the protests here in Vermont to support Palestine.
My parents would leave my brother and me for a month every summer as they traveled to the Occupied West Bank to work at the Ramallah Friends (Quaker) School. The very same school that the three young men who were shot here in Burlington graduated from. These three young men, who were shot at point blank for speaking Arabic and wearing traditional Palestinian scarves, spent their lives being taught nonviolence.
We were taught to use our voice, our silence, and our money to lift up those who are oppressed. That is why I have been going to every protest I can, that is why I am hopeful that the Anti-Apartheid ballot measure in Burlington will pass the City Council vote.
Amidst all this horror that I see flashing on my phone screen, I am hopeful. I am hopeful because for the first time in my life, I am not a minority. For the first time in my life, I see, hear, and witness people on a mass scale struggling to define their own relationship to what is right.
In the last two months the world has been watching the destruction of Gaza and the death of the Palestinian people who live there being live-streamed online while traditional media has largely glossed over the terror being rained upon the Holy Land. We have watched children—approaching 10,000 as of the printing of this paper—murdered in their homes and on their streets. We have seen the heart wrenching tenderness that Palestinian men have been bestowing upon the children of Gaza, the women of Gaza, and the other men of Gaza. We have seen doctors defy evacuation orders from an army intent on indiscriminate attack. We have seen journalists risking their lives to share this horror with the world. As of the 3rd of December, there have been 73 Palestinian journalists murdered in this invasion. The highest number ever in a “modern” conflict, and in the span of only 58 days.
And to the civilians of Gaza, it seems as though the world has abandoned them. How can the whole world be offered proof like this, of four babies left to starve and suffocate to death while their doctors were forced out of al-Nasar Children’s Hospital at gunpoint by the Israeli army, friends digging with their bare hands to pull each other out of the rubble, grandfathers cutting locks of hair from their children’s babies?
Well, it turns out, it is the governments who will not intercede, it’s not the people who are ignoring this. With only 16% of American voters op- posed to a ceasefire in Palestine, what is stopping Biden, arguably the only leader in the world who has the power to stop this massacre with a phone call, from doing this? I suspect it is the decades-long fear of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. I suspect it’s the economics of lending Israel 3.3 billion dollars—which comes to 10.7 million dollars a day—which then contractually requires Israel to then put 99.7% of that money back into purchases from U.S. arms manufactures. I suspect it’s the oil that has been discovered under Gaza’s sea.
I am also seeing millions of people in the Western world taking to the streets and saying “Not in my name. Not with my money.” I am in a coalition of Vermonters—Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, University of Vermont Students for Justice in Palestine— who are dedicated to raising our voices to uplift the struggles of people across the world who are fighting for their freedom. I have seen how the realization that the struggle in Iran is the same struggle in Palestine is the same struggle in Ukraine is the same struggle in the Sudan is the same struggle in…Vermont for fair wages. And that, that brings me hope amid the horrors.
Sepi is the graphic designer for The Reporter, and she recommends Amnesty International, Jewish Voices for Peace, and If Americans Knew as places for further investigation of this subject.
