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Author’s note: The title of this piece is a direct reference to Karim Kattan’s piece, entitled “At the Threshold of Humanity”, wherein he says “Gaza is not an abstraction.”
A few months ago, I was flyering for the TAHRIR Coalition’s Divest, Don’t Arrest campaign in the Chemistry Building. After a few hours of flyering I’d pretty much memorized my script and gotten used to the awkward avoidance of eye contact and fast walks of passersby as they tried to avoid my, “Do you have a minute to talk about the Divest, Don’t Arrest campaign?”
Near the end of my shift someone stopped by, and I started with my usual line: “Have you heard of the DDA campaign?” Upon an affirmation of interest, I described the campaign to him, and the University’s history of arresting pro-Palestinian protestors. I showed him a zine put together by the TAHRIR Coalition, which highlights the University’s direct investment in Israel — including but not limited to the investment in research and development of spyware, drones and weapons technology. I explained all the different ways he could get involved, but ultimately he told me that he wasn’t really interested and how he didn’t want to get involved in something that had nothing to do with him and that that was unfortunate for “those people” but he had his own problems to deal with. More than just his actual words, what struck me was his apathy. I forgot my script; all I wanted to say to him was, “Why?” Not just why, but “How?” Why don’t you care? How can you not care?
At the same time, it felt less like a simple question but more like a “How can I convince you to care?” What could I say that I haven’t already said? Convincing this stranger in the middle of the Chemistry Building to care about an active, ongoing genocide — one of the most documented in history — by Israel against the Palestinian people became tantamount to convincing the whole world. I thought that if I could just figure out what to say and change his mind, then I’d have unlocked the key to overturning the apathy I saw in everyone else.
As Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) set up their encampment on the Diag in the beginning of May, my last few weeks as a junior at the University of Michigan were distinctly characterized by the apathy people around me had towards the Palestinian cause. Seeing people taking graduation photos on the steps of Hatcher Library, their cameras angled in such a way to conveniently crop out the encampment a mere few feet behind them, left me feeling upset for reasons I couldn’t articulate. While I wanted to join them in their earned celebration of graduation and accomplishment, it unsettled me to see how people could be so close and yet just skirt by and gingerly avoid acknowledging both the encampment and what it stood for; for them, it seemed, the encampment was simply an inconvenient issue of pictorial composition. All I could think about was how most universities in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Force in the past year, with the United Nations quoting billions in damage to the education system. Of how Nada Almadhoun, a medical school senior at Al-Azhar Medical School in Gaza, wrote : “Graduation year turned out to feel like an amputation of our aspirations.”
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Despite what I desperately want to believe, it often seems to me that apathy prevails as the guiding political world view for the average University of Michigan student. Year after year, beyond just DDA flyering in March or the encampment in May, engagement in student activism for Palestine on campus in all its forms — whether it be a protest or petition — is consistently limited by the fact that some people just don’t seem to care.
While I want to pathologize and rationalize reasons why (discomfort, ignorance, the list goes on), my naivete has limits: It’s clear to me why some people don’t care. Like Karim Kattan describes in his essay, “On the Threshold of Humanity,” “Gaza is an abstraction, a space designed for the violent death of an abstract people inhabiting it.” Gaza, and Palestine, and subsequently the Palestinian people, lack a materiality or tangibility in the minds of these passersby. What remains is an abstraction, one that they, consciously or otherwise, do not deem worthy of their labor, emotional or literal. For them, Palestine is a place far away, inhabited not by people like them but by statistics that don’t have anything to do with them. For them, the genocide is not quite a genocide, but rather, like Kattan describes once being told, a vague and amorphous “current situation.”
This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth: The liberation of Palestine from oppression, apartheid and colonialism concerns all of humanity, regardless of who you are. Care, or lack thereof, for Palestinians and their liberation is a mirror of our own humanity, or lack thereof. Our daily lives are intertwined with those of Palestinians in tangible ways that surpass the metaphorical or abstract. From our tax dollars to our tuition to the University’s endowment fund all actively being invested into the genocide, we are already involved with and benefitting from the destruction of Palestine, whether we choose to be or not. As such, doing nothing and remaining steadfast in apathy isn’t neutrality; it’s a stance in and of itself. There is no neutrality in the face of genocide and apartheid. All neutrality serves to do is normalize the inherently abnormal — the injustice and violence by Israel against the Palestinian people — as normal.
The point isn’t guilt or hopelessness. It’s understanding that actively disrupting and dismantling these normalized structures, and ultimately working toward joining the movement for the liberation of Palestine, is thus a responsibility that concerns all of us.
Get involved in supporting the Palestinian people in the fight for liberation:
SAFE’s guide to fight police intimidation and repression at the U-M
Boycott Zionist companies and support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement
Learn about the history of Palestine
Read the work of Palestinian authors
MiC Managing Editor Aya Sharabi can be reached at asharabi@umich.edu.
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