The feeling you are not doing enough

I have been to protests, meetings and lectures, and I have been boycotting since November. I have been donating and reposting TikToks of content creators who send money to Gaza daily. I have done everything I am allowed to do in my privileged position as a student who lives in a safe place, who has access to food and water, who can buy pads when she is on her period, who can walk outside in the street without hearing the sounds of bombs destroying her country. I don’t get told I am invading somebody else’s land every day and my skin colour does not indicate how much people will care if my family suddenly perishes. 

Still, I cannot shake away the feeling that I am not doing enough to help. I spend my nights lying awake, imagining the suffering of all those children who feel scared to death, of all those pregnant women who will have to give birth in such a situation and such an environment. “Never again” is happening right now in front of our eyes and we cannot stop it. It feels horrible that important people who actually could change the situation are not speaking up, that some universities are still deciding whether or not what’s happening is to be considered genocide or a conflict and whether they should cut ties with Israel or not. 

Israeli soldiers should not be allowed to film and post TikToks of their victims, of themselves disrespecting Palestinian houses and possessions, or grabbing random pictures of Palestinian women to make sexual comments about them on the Internet, “asserting their dominance”. Israel should have not participated in Eurovision, exactly like Russia was not allowed to do it in the last two years. The difference lies in the fact that Ukraine is white, while Palestine is Black and Muslim. Nobody will convince me otherwise. Black people have always been on the wrong side of history according to white supremacists, who still cannot shake away their internalised racism even in situations like this one. 

Those children had their entire life in front of themselves and just... Poof. It is all gone. I cannot wrap my head around how an entire life could end in a second, how those people will never get to see the end of the war. In the meantime, all I can do is write this blog entry to convince more people to speak up.