On Palestine and Zines

Photo by Gebiya Putri on Unsplash

Some of you may have heard this story before. For those who have not, I shall provide some context.

In addition to being a speculative fiction author and a book coach in training, I consider myself to be an entrepreneur that dabbles in many industries. One of them, which happens to combine my love of gaming and storytelling, is being a Professional Game Master, where I mostly run sessions of fifth-edition Dungeons and Dragons games to paying players. Unironically, in a world that’s rife with injustice and terror, having a safe, welcoming, fun place to go is important, and I consider it very important work of mine to tell stories and let others do the same even if it’s only for two hours every other Saturday.

On December 15, 2023, one of the players in my paid games messaged me on Discord. They mentioned that they had been “doing a lot of work in the Free Palestine movement” and that they had been “checking in with people in [their] life on where they stand…on the genocide happening in Palestine”.

I responded by admitting that I was still educating myself about what was happening. However, as a Secular Buddhist, “I don't condone genocide or oppression of any kind. I also stand against any antisemitism or anti-Palestinian rhetoric and hope that a humanitarian ceasefire can be reached.”

I hit Enter and sent the message. An acceptable answer to their question, I hoped. In truth, I felt nervous about responding to them. I felt my chest constrict and grow heavy. I felt heavy and numb. At the time, I had been worried that I would say something wrong out of ignorance or that I would be admonished for not educating myself sooner on an issue that did not necessarily affect me and my life as directly as others had.

There was also a small part of me that didn’t want to admit that I didn’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time educating myself about Palestine and its history because I believed that my own issues took precedence. I thought I needed to focus on getting my MFA (which I now have). I thought I needed to get the work done for Tessera Editorial’s mentorship so that they might hire me (which they did). I thought I needed to make sure the next game I scheduled with this player and the others went off without a hitch (which it did).

And so on and so forth until everything was fine as it tended to be.

The player responded to me twenty-two minutes after I sent the message with a red heart emoji with a sparkle. They seemed pleased by my response.

However, the next day, the player was tapped for an emergency protest, and they decided to leave the D&D campaign and wrote the following:

Let me know what you decide as far as being in favor of Palestinian freedom or Israel's genocide. I can't in good conscience associate with someone who doesn't definitively support an indigenous peoples [sic] right to live freely in their homeland.

I was gutted. Not because they had to leave my game and that I’d lose a wonderful player, but that it seemed my initial answer had not been good enough for them. What’s worse, the wording of their message appeared to push me into an ideological binary where I had to choose between Palestinian freedom or the genocide of Israel, the latter of which I absolutely do not condone. Or perhaps they meant to say “Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people,” which I do not condone either.

Even so, what they appeared to want was something definitive, exact, concrete, polarized, immediate, and sure—all the things that most people tend to want in this age of cancel culture, likes, hot takes, and viral videos. Things like nuance, patience, education, and uncertainty about the unknown make us so uncomfortable that we are unable to tolerate it within others.

I was never nor have been neutral about what’s happening in Palestine because I am against the oppression of all human beings. In response to their message, I wrote back to the former player, trying to be as clear as I could about where I stood:

I believe that any [I]ndigenous population has a right to live freely without the threat of violence or oppression. My Indigenous heritage informs me on this matter regarding the United States and spreading awareness of the missing or murdered Indigenous women, two-spirit, and trans femmes in my country. I also do not support the genocide of any group of people--Israeli, Palestinian, or otherwise. My hope is that an amicable, peaceful solution can be reached between these two groups of people without one harming or entirely killing the other.

I have not heard from them in months, and I do not think I will ever hear from them again. I also explained to the other players in the game why this player left and reiterated my stance. To this day, we still enjoy our company and are looking forward to the next adventure. Moreover, I think that it was best for us to go our separate ways and set out on our own paths, and I still hope that they are safe.

Since then, I have seen university and college students exercise their right to protest on national television. I have heard newscasters and reporters announce the rising death tolls. I have seen videos on timeline after timeline urging for Free Palestine, and to all of it, I have been numbed just as I have become numb to mass shootings in the United States.

Yet what good is it to stand for something if I am numb to the pain of so much else? What good is it to stand for something I don’t fully under-stand and don’t know if I should fully understand or not? This is not my war. This is not my religion. This is not my history. This is not my story.

Oh, but it is. I just hadn’t realized it yet because sometimes, you need to learn a lesson a certain way in order for it to stick.

Which happened this past June at my final graduate residency. A student had offered me a zine they had made. Trimmed and stapled the pages themselves. The cover printed with motifs of the Palestine sunbird.

And the pages themselves containing some of the most beautiful poetry translated into English that I had ever read in my life.

All of them written by Palestinian poets killed in Israeli airstrikes.

WITNESS. A zine dedicated to the memory of Palestinian poets and scholars.

I did not know the meaning of the word gutted until I read this zine. To know that each of the poets and scholars whose work was in these pages had been taken from this world for simply being who they were breaks my heart and turns it to pieces. To see the power of the written word in what it has done to memorialize them is to witness my own potential for honoring them.

And so I write their names here:

Saleem Al-Naffar. Mohammad Saleh. Refaat Alareer. Nou Al-Din Hajjaj. Hiba Abu Nada.

I have never met you, but through your work, I have felt your souls. And I must apologize to you and everyone else for not realizing the extent of the genocide sooner.

Even then, I do not regret that it took this long for me to realize it, nor do I regret that it took a single zine rather than my protesting peers to reach where I am emotionally and spiritually on this matter. As a human being, I am not beholden to anyone’s timeline when it comes to educating myself about any matter, political or otherwise. I am allowed to recognize when I am being oppressed and forced to take a stand on an issue before I am ready. I am allowed to find my own enlightenment in my own way, and I am allowed to be numb and ignorant simply because I am human.

I would prefer to know anything and everything on a given subject. I would prefer to be right and just and knowledgeable so that I would not have to face uncertainty myself. Yet to refuse to face uncertainty—to face the unknown—is to demand perfection at all times, which is oppressive in its own right.

And so I write, uncertain of whether or not these words will reach anyone but in the hopes that they might one day hold someone in their proverbial grief or fear, because that is what a writer is very good at doing. They make the unbearable bearable, the complex simple, the villain heroic, the vast expanse of the universe just a little bit smaller.

Breaking chains and changing minds, one word at a time.