Are You Doing Enough?
Maybe, maybe not. It's your decision to make.
During Jennifer Welch’s recent interview with Francesca Fiorentini on the I’ve Had It podcast, something Francesca said really resonated with me. She said she was sick of people demanding things from her, such as “have this person on your podcast” or “cover this issue” or “boycott this thing”, especially strangers on social media.
She wasn’t disparaging boycotts or getting suggestions about people and topics to showcase on her platform, but the aggressive and entitled way some people do it.
I have a platform just large enough that it comes off as false modesty to deny it, but small enough that it feels completely ridiculous to use the term to describe it. Even so I feel the pressure sometimes from people who aggressively push a particular event, news item, charity, or boycott target and frame it as a moral failing if I don’t adopt their priorities as my own. I boycott. I donate. I write. I write, share, and collaborate with others on several social media platforms. I work full-time for an advocacy organization. Pretty soon I’ll be allowing embarrassing videos of myself struggling to articulate my thoughts about what I’m reading and why into the world. In other words I am doing more than my part to make the world a better place.
The irony is that this kind of social pressure only really affects people who care in the first place. People who don’t care or who think it’s not their problem just dismiss the demands as yet another reason they don’t get involved. It’s the people who care, who already feel as if they’re not doing enough, who are demoralized by these demands.
This is what some people mean when they talk about “virtue signaling”. Not people who use “social justice warrior” as an insult, fuck those people. But people trying to illuminate the difference between real advocates/activists doing the grinding, thankless work on the ground day after day, and poseurs who prioritize appearing virtuous over being virtuous. Who pretend that anyone who isn’t doing everything possible for every possible cause at all times is an enemy of progress.
I know that sometimes people who do this are agents of chaos, deliberately demoralizing and dividing people to keep them scattered and ineffective. But I think most of the time it’s just naive and overzealous people, often young people, whose ideas about activism and advocacy are more impulsive than strategic.
Last night I read (and then listened to) the speech made by the outgoing UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini at the Geneva Graduate Institute. It’s an excellent encapsulation of the current state of affairs even if I would push back on some of the framing in the statement (e.g. Israel and Palestine are not “neighbors”, the former is illegally and immorally occupying the latter).
What really strikes me, though, is that UNRWA, along with many other organizations and people, have been in this struggle for over 75 years and in some ways things have only gotten worse. In my view this doesn’t reflect a lack of virtuous intent or action, but a flawed or nonexistent long-term strategy. This is strongly reinforced by the book I am currently reading, Mapping My Return, by Salman Abu Sitta1. A memoir of a man who was a boy during the Nakba in 1948 and not only saw, but lived the catastrophe.
People, especially here in the US, think the struggle in Palestine is some ancient animosity or religious conflict wherein “both sides” are equally to blame. They do not comprehend that this is a straightforward case of settler-colonialism2, even as literal “settlers”, described as such even in mainstream (and especially Israeli) media, are in the news every day for terrorizing, displacing, and killing indigenous Palestinians.
I realized shortly after I pulled my head out of the sand and decided to educate myself on this issue and start pursuing advocacy full-time that this would be a long and difficult fight. So for me the pressure of unreasonable expectations is relatively easy to brush off. The fact is I don’t have to do anything at all, so if what I am doing is perceived as ineffective or insufficient by some, oh well. The only thing that does keep me up at night (figuratively) is when I worry that something I am doing or some org I support is actually working against the movement or the people of Palestine. So that’s something I try to stay vigilant about and constantly reevaluate.
Recommended by the brilliant writer Miral Askar, who you should be following.
Speaking of which, my conversation with Omar Zahzah on the topic of his book Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle is now available online.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Tom. I wonder all the time whether I am doing enough or if what I am doing is impactful enough, or if I am spread too thin. And I sometimes feel bad not showing up to protests and vigils which, as a POC, I have put aside since the current administration unleashed the ICE dogs. I didn't go to No Kings today, for example. Instead, I am writing about my trip to Palestine as part of hopefully opening more people's minds.
As always, thanks for this Tom and for all of your incredible advocacy. What you are doing, is what it takes to finally bring justice to Palestine and continue allowing it to be an unmasking agent of colonial atrocities throughout the world. Many more are doing this work now and I imagine how far we can go when more actively join this fight.
I use to be most grateful when someone like you or someone like Rachel Corrie—someone who is not Palestinian by birth—joins the struggle. I still am, because I know that makes a huge difference in defeating the propaganda contrived to dehumanize everything Palestinian. But now I also see that taking up the mantle here is really the full embrace of our shared humanity, beyond the constructed divisions of concepts like nationality and religion. I’m very grateful for you and all that you are doing. Looking forward to the videos!