Approaching Palestine during Thanksgiving
How to have the difficult conversation of Palestine while you break bread
The smell of turkey and stuffing wafts through American homes this November, but there's something else in the air – an urgency that can't be masked by cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. As families gather around dinner tables across the country, the conversation we need to have isn't about politics as usual. It's about over 50,000 lives lost in Gaza, about children buried under rubble, about hospitals without electricity, and about a humanitarian crisis that demands more from us than simply passing the gravy.
You might be tempted to keep the peace, to stick to safer topics like football scores or family updates. But while we deliberate over whether to speak up, Palestinians are facing their 75th winter of occupation, their tents flooded along with any semblance or normality. The luxury of avoiding "controversial" dinner table topics is itself a privilege that Palestinian cannot afford. As Palestinian action on college campuses is smeared and punished, one of the easiest ways to shift public discourse can start at your dinner table.
Here is a guide on how to answer some of common questions surrounding Palestine:
1) Hamas started this on October 7th, why should we support Palestine?
Palestine is not Hamas. Palestinians are indigenous peoples who trace their roots to historic Palestine dating back since the time of Jesus Christ. Today, Palestinians make up 15 million globally. Hamas is a political party founded in 1987 in Gaza, later associated with the Palestinian resistance. The distinction is important. However, it is also important to remember that Hamas did NOT start a random act of violence on October 7th, 2023. Hamas was founded 39 years after the Nakba – forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from our land. Their formation occurred after decades of land theft, colonization, and massacres.
Why you should support Palestine is greater than looking at the last year in a vacuum. Palestine is the contemporary benchmark of decolonial movements and a microcosm of how to see the impacts of destructive capitalism, institutional Apartheid and racial class systems, and lasting effect of European colonial rule. Palestinians have had their land and rights taken for over seven decades, their land annexed and seized, their movement restricted by checkpoints and illegal settlements, and their children indiscriminately killed.
2) “But they put babies in ovens”…
This is empirically not true, along with much of the propaganda Israeli officials peddled following October 7th. No babies were put in ovens or burned, there is few isolated accounts of sexual violence, but no factual claims of widespread rape by Hamas, and over 500 of the 1200 causalities on Oct. 7th were due to Israeli fire.
3) Isn’t supporting Palestine anti-semitic?
No. Full stop. Supporting Palestinians is supporting the indigenous right to self-determination of the Palestinian people – a right enshrined in International law, and a right seemingly reserved for white people of the world. Again, an important distinction exist between Judaism and Zionism. Judaism is a religion, one that has been shared peacefully among Palestinian Muslims and Christians and Jews before Israel’s violence in 1948. In fact, Samaritans are the only and last indigenous group which has never left historic Palestine. They, largely, identify as Palestinians. Whereas Zionism is a political ideology established by Europeans in the late 1800s as a way to remove the European Jewish population. They even considered other countries for colonization instead of Palestine.
Many anti-Zionist Jews profess that conflating Judaism and Zionism is in itself a danger precedent, one that makes it seem that Israel commits a slaughter in the name of their faith. However, Judaism does not call for colonization of Israel anywhere in the Torah. Judaism may come from the historic lands of Palestine, but a majority contemporary Jews do not. Indigeneity is more than about a genetic relatedness to people from a land that may have existed thousands of years ago, being indigenous is a cultural relationship with the land that is cultivated from surviving and relying on the land.
4) What about the hostages?
This is a common question used to deflect from the slaughter and massacre of Palestinians. Zionists will often say “return the hostages” in response to seeing Palestinians killed. However, NOTHING justifies the killing of 50,000 Palestinians, forced starvation, and legions of orphans. It is an important to remember that violence against Palestinians has been ongoing for decades, and Israel had arbitrarily held thousands of Palestinian hostages pre-October 7th, and now holds thousands more.
It’s also important to mention that Israel has denied several ceasefire deals, to which Hamas had agreed to, which have returned their hostages. Israel has also killed its own hostages in its indiscriminate bombing campaigns, even though they have the technology to target individuals with precision as evidenced by their extrajudicial killings in Lebanon.
5) What about Israelis? Where will they go if Palestine is “Free from the River to the Sea”?
This is inherently a flawed question and should be pointed out as such. If one’s first thought, after a year of watching Genocide unfold, is that would happen to their colonizers, then their mentality is aligned with the colonizers.
The future of Palestine will be decided by Palestinians alone. If that comes in a one-state solution for all, or a two-state solution, is not up to anyone but Palestinians. Thus, it is important to recognize that Palestinians have the right to self-determination, that peace is not justice, and justice comes with the liberation of Palestine, equal rights for all in Palestine, and the right to return for Palestinians.
Approach this conversation with intention. You may be surrounded by individuals who support occupation, so you cannot jump straight to decolonization. Instead, focus on facts, which by themselves provide a harrowing glimpse into Palestinian tragedy: tens of thousands murdered, 70% of those killed are women and children, over 300 journalists and 135 UN workers killed, 80% of infrastructure destroyed, 1.9 million displaced. If these facts are not enough to persuade an acknowledgement of the immediate need for a ceasefire, you can simply open your phone to this Genocide live-streamed.
The comfort of your dining room may feel worlds away from the devastation in Gaza, but the distance between silence and complicity is remarkably short. We cannot allow the normalization of genocide over turkey and stuffing, cannot let the deaths of tens of thousands become mere background noise to holiday small talk. The Palestinian people have endured 75 years of displacement, occupation, and loss. They cannot wait another generation for the world to find its voice.