May 28, 2024
Dear Kai,
Congratulations on your graduation and your admission into college! I know that if you keep your values close to your heart, you will be able to attain anything you set out to accomplish. I write to you as someone who understands that the learning you are about to undergo will define the person you will become. Everything you have known and been led to believe about your world will soon come to fall. Between one week and the next, you will rid yourself of the propagandized American lens through which you make sense of your surroundings. Your newfound understanding of the global imperial order will be exemplified and taught firsthand by the Palestinian people, their culture, and their survival amidst ongoing existential threats of genocide and erasure.
I know that you have continually witnessed that deceitful mirage waver throughout your life. You have witnessed pieces of a carefully crafted cloak crash and burn around you. I know that you will never forget when your classmate told you he only ate at school. You will never forget the nights you stayed at your friend’s home, where his entire family slept in the same room and his eldest sister, only two years older than you, had to take care of everyone. You will never forget when you gave a man your spare change and he gave you the warmest embrace you will ever experience. All your life you have witnessed the conditions in which others are forced to live under. You intuitively know that these conditions must be the purposeful outcomes of society, not unsolvable side effects, and you understand that a world with life-saving medicines, unimaginable technologies, and colossal accumulations of wealth could easily support all of its people with opportunities to not only live but to thrive. All your life you have witnessed how the system in place has decimated the lives of people around you. You have witnessed the merciless and cruel order of an inhumane world that could instead be built upon empathy.
Yet, when you turn to the people posited as your teachers, elders, and mentors, they seem unfazed and dismissive of the stories you tell them. You were raised upon principles of love and compassion. You were raised on stories of heroes — ancient and modern — who are now celebrated for daring to question the unjust worlds in which they lived. It confuses you that the same people who champion those historical warriors of love and freedom do not utter a word of disapproval as people today have to live through inhumane conditions. However, you have come to understand that inequality benefits people like you and me. You understand that the suffering of others is directly linked to the gluttonous privileges we come to accept as normal. You understand that our society, and the ones who pilot the status quo, are not helpless bystanders as intangible agents of evil devastate the lives of billions. You understand that those in power actively encourage and enforce these injustices.
The privileges you are provided have cast a curtain of ignorance over your understanding of the world. In fact, you are largely ignorant of perhaps the greatest failure of our contemporary world. You are blind to the history of the Palestinian people, blind to the Occupation, dispossession, and genocide they face. However, you are one of millions of people who will go on to learn from them and fight beside them. You will come to learn that the Occupation, the displacement, and the genocide of Palestinian existence epitomizes the world’s murderous, wealth-driven system in its most tangible form. However, you will also learn that through communal action and effort, this very system can be toppled and the ongoing injustices central to its very existence can be ended.
I hope that the emotions you experience when learning about the suffering of your brothers and sisters never diminish and never dwindle. You must understand that your feelings are normal and that those emotions of anger, sadness, and rage are the reactions that people should express when they witness their fellow humans experiencing violence and tragedy. You must not allow the daily stories, images, and videos of death and destruction to discourage you from your commitment to what you know is right. I also know that you will discover a new emotion, one that is shared with your peers: a combination of community and passion, motivated by a collective love for our fellow human beings. That feeling will remind you of the stories you heard as a child: of your parents, grandparents, and their ancestors finding ways to survive, flourish, and love, despite circumstances you could never imagine. The emotion will remind you of your Ama, who escaped her home during the imperial occupation. It will remind you of your Oma — who became a nurse after her town was desecrated by bombing during the war. The emotion will remind you that new stories, just like the ones now taught within your family — of terror, destruction, and sacrifice being overcome through perseverance and steadfastness — are being written among Palestinian families. Despite being a stranger to their culture, their history, and even the current conditions that they live under, you possess an innate understanding of the principles behind the Palestinian struggle and resistance.
You will also quickly recognize that those values that you appreciate so much are the products of the people around you – forged within the community itself. The peers who teach and inspire you are all students, professors, or staff members. All of them are powered by that same internal fire — of hope and love — that always glows brightly in your chest. Meanwhile, the university administration itself will often work against your community’s collective efforts, despite the progressive principles it professes to value and uphold. The collective voice of your new community will be ignored, misconstrued, and discredited by the very people paid to ‘serve’ you. Just like you have noticed before arriving here, a powerful institution will purposely disregard and discredit the very people it claims to protect. Instead of acting as a proactive extension of the community responsible for its existence, the establishment will serve the interests of wealth and power — much the same as our nation’s government. A better future, you will learn, does not rest in the hands of corporate boards, formal administrations, or stratified governments. Instead, you will learn that the people represent the hope and the possibility for a better future, prominently represented by Palestinian freedom from Occupation and apartheid.
For you, your feelings, understanding, and the measures that you and your peers need to take to support Palestinians in their liberation efforts will never be perfectly evident. However, those intangible feelings, ineffable sensations, and collective spirits you can recognize in yourself and others, will culminate in the realization of your place in time and in the larger movement. You must give yourself grace and patience in your journey, and you must remind yourself to always trust the process.
One night, sitting on your university’s grass, among a literal village of your peers, you will briefly exist in a microcosm of what a different world will look like. The moment is only one in a week’s worth, amongst a larger string of other demonstrations and mobilizations. Despite differences in culture, language, and geography, people will become peers, comrades, and siblings through their shared passion for a new and improved world. As just one of hundreds there, all seeking to utilize collective influence and power to force change upon an institution, you will realize that the movement is much greater than the sum of its parts. After months of demonstration and campaign efforts — spreading campus-wide awareness, collecting signatures, creating political art, fasting in solidarity, and directly protesting to the faces of your university’s administration — you will feel, if only for a moment, that you are truly acting in the best manner possible to achieve what you and your new community set out to accomplish.
In the weeks afterward, you will continue to be reminded of why you fight alongside Palestinians for their cause. You will be reminded of why you are willing to sacrifice other opportunities. You will be reminded that, because you are motivated by your love and compassion for others, you are joined by millions across the world. You are motivated by innate human empathy, bolstered by values that you know to be true. You are motivated by the knowledge that helping to achieve a free Palestine means the opportunity to achieve freedom from oppression, inequality, and injustice everywhere.
I cannot tell you how you will finally see your mission fulfilled. I cannot tell you when exactly Palestine and its people will be liberated from oppression. I cannot tell you how the Palestinians, and their allies across the world, will build off the success of their liberation and mobilize for other peoples in need. All I can tell you is that you will be there, powered by a fire made of love, empathy, and rage all combined into one. That fire you felt as a child, that you feel while reading, and that I feel while writing. That same boy who was shocked, saddened, and outraged when confronted with the evils of his society is now reading this letter. That same boy is writing this letter now and that same boy will be there in the future when the freedom of Palestine becomes the stepping stone for the global community of humans to actualize a better world powered by love and compassion.
With love,
Kai
