on the significance and insignificance of feeling
A common refrain that’s been circulated and chanted this last year is that Palestine has changed us. When the news broke of Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation in February, I cried. When this news was followed by footage of U.S. military veterans burning their uniforms in solidarity with Palestine, I continued to feel moved. At the time, I questioned my own emotional reaction, wondering if I was centering whiteness or the west — or whether I was perhaps moved because it spoke to how our liberation is intertwined; because it spoke to how rejecting imperial and military violence is liberating for everyone, even those who have been complicit and participated in this violence; because it spoke to how the struggle for Palestinian liberation might have the power to compel us all to be more morally and ethically courageous.
Now, months later, with no end in sight to the bloodshed, the phrase Palestine has changed us no longer sits easy with me. Another people’s oppression is not a vehicle for our own transformation. To focus on our own feelings, on our own internal sense of transformation in the west, in the safety of our homes, feels irrelevant — absurd — in the face of relentless genocidal violence. To say we have been changed when life, for many of us, carries on as normal, feels empty.
It’s October 2023. I tell my parents I need to cut our FaceTime call short; I am going to a nighttime protest outside the Israeli consulate downtown. I tell them — in broken Cantonese — that Israel just bombed a hospital in Gaza the day before and that we all need to do something about it. They nod and tell me to be safe. Before hanging up, they ask me why we are protesting at night, when the consulate is closed. A genuine question. I roll my eyes and grumble at them, as if their question is stupid, and tell them I need to go.
It’s November 2023. It’s one month (and seventy-five years) into Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. I take a day off work and wake up early one morning to carpool with friends to a weapons manufacturing company with a location in North York.1 We arrive to see about 200 people on-site, who, like us, were coming to protest the manufacturing of military weapons used by Israel to slaughter Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a good turnout. The action has been well and discreetly planned; no doubt, a lot of work and coordination by the organizers. The other people there are mostly familiar faces; not all people I know personally, but the same handful of Toronto leftists that you see at every direct action, protest, and rally. I admit that in that moment, I feel excited; hopeful.
We split into groups that picket around the parking lot and exterior of the building, purportedly to prevent workers from coming in to work their shifts. We chant and march in circles with our hand painted signs, with our banners. About two or three hours into the action, a capital O organizer announces on the megaphone that we’ve shut the facility down. Confused, I turn to someone beside me and ask what that means. I genuinely wonder if someone has pulled the power to the building, or something along those lines. We are then told to pose for a final group photo and then instructed to go home. On my way out, I look into the window of the facility and see people at work—employees who arrived for their shift before we got there. I wonder if anyone had tried to speak to them about the action.
When I get home, I immediately burrow myself in my bed beneath the covers, scrolling through Twitter on my phone. I see photos of the action circulated on Twitter, including one shared by a prominent American leftist account. I see myself in some of the photos. One of the posts — widely retweeted — states that the workers employed at the facility have walked out and have shut down the operations; calls the people in the photos “heroes”. I feel something like embarrassment swell inside of myself.
Is a lawyer who takes a vacation day off work to march in circles around the parking lot of a weapons manufacturing facility a hero? Is a bunch of protestors preventing workers from coming into their shifts the same thing as those very same workers refusing to work their shifts? Are there any shortcuts around the difficult work, the trust and relationship building, that’s required for working people to organize themselves to withhold their labour? How do we even begin to build the appetite and political will for a solidarity strike for Palestinian liberation, if most people are too reluctant to strike for even themselves, or to form a union? What do we really mean when we say, if we don’t get it, shut it down? Do the words, phrases, and rhetoric that we use matter? Do narratives of victory stifle our imagination? Do these narratives prevent us from effectively strategizing, from thinking through all the steps that would be needed for an actual victory? Do they prevent us from truly organizing? Is an Instagram slideshow organizing? Is calling our MPs organizing? Is going to a protest organizing? Is putting together a bake sale organizing? Is watching a documentary together organizing? Is camping on university property without escalation organizing? Is escalation without coordinated, material pressure organizing? Or perhaps, re-stated: is it effective organizing?
Can our movements, our organizing communities, make space for genuine self-reflexiveness, for self-criticism, for good faith questions — without defensiveness?
Is asking questions counterproductive?
Are questions bad for morale?
Whose morale?
Does morale matter?
Do our feelings matter, in this moment, in this context?
(Of course they matter!!!) But then: are they, on their own, enough?
Is there moral value to simply feeling; to being moved, angered, horrified by injustice?
Am I a good person because I feel sad?
Does feeling — or perhaps what people call empathy – on its own, challenge power?
Does the feeling of having done something mean we have actually done something?
L3Harris is a major supplier of parts and components for Lockheed Martin F-35 military aircrafts that are used by Israel in its deadly airstrikes on Gaza.