loneliness, crushes, and Palestine
If hopeless love leads me every time into social movements then it will have been worth it.
If hopeless love leads me every time into social movements then it will have been worth it.
It was a crush in high school who made me want to learn Arabic. I learned what Palestine was that year. I read and marched and started to understand that Palestine had struggled far beyond my lifetime. I remember standing, alone and afraid at a downtown Portland square in 2021, feeling the protest drums thrum something deep in me, something that hadn’t yet become me because it did not come from me. I remember these boys, joyful and routy standing on the back of a fire truck, singing Falastin into existence for all of us. “What does from the river to the sea mean?” I remember asking. Liberation, I learned. Never erasure.
I was done with that crush, but the next fall I took Arabic 1-2. After class I’d talk with my Palestinian teacher and she’d pester me on my pronunciation. Ain felt like rubble in my throat. I wanted her to like me, because I wanted to understand her. She had the eyes of someone whose judgement was meant to be heard. And she gave so much of herself so that the school’s Arabic program could stay alive.
I didn’t write her after graduation…one year passed, and another. Then, October 7th arrived. Six days later, I opened my email. “I wasn't sure if I should reach out…” I began. “My heart is with those in Gaza…may we find strength.” My Arabic teacher found energy to write back, amongst everything: I LOVE YOU MY AMAZING STUDENT! Spread awareness!
Her student? I felt unworthy as her student. My Arabic was gone. I had not been attentive to Palestine. And here she was tasking me to work beyond myself.
This is not a story about a student who has made her professor proud. This is a story about loneliness. Loneliness silenced me, and it might be the greatest pitfall for our chance at coalescing movements. Hopefully, this is also a story about giddy what-ifs: the only thing we have to combat that loneliness, and the thing that feeds everything from high school crushes to radical social progress.
From October 2023 through the end of the year, grief swept me. Graphic Instagram posts of Israeli bombs tortured me, awoke me. Meanwhile, my mind ate me from the inside. I had nothing to give to Palestine save a dull and lonely anguish. Talking about Palestine with Duke friends was eternally disappointing and isolating. “I care about all the…deaths…but I don’t know enough,” was one friend’s excuse. I had the feeling many were only willing to grasp a morality that was mainstream, and one only in terms of children dead and aid detained—never speaking of land theft, of exile, of intent.
Would they wait for the dissertations and memorials twenty years later?
“Goddamit Luna you can’t forget how hard that was,” I wrote in my Notes app. I wouldn’t let myself forget the hours under my dorm sheets hiding from sunlight and Zionists. There were other things going on, but Palestine permeated it all.
When I think back to this fall Sophomore semester, I think of my poetry class. In every other class, I was getting by. Better than I thought. Poetry class was where the edges of my will-to-make-do began to unravel. I let myself rant out interpretations to poems, and put my feet up on my chair. I still felt lonely, but strangely, I had a vehicle to do something with that. Luckily this manifested itself in a decent amount of okay poetry and a new friend.
I only realized the damage Duke did to me when spring came, and Columbia revolted.
Campuses across the country followed suite, and I bused to join the Triangle Solidarity Encampment at UNC. The first night, I lay under the open sky at 2 am listening to hushed conversations and one weirdly incessant bird…and felt grief all over again. This time, though, it was something new, and laced with anger. Duke had made me believe direct action and community wasn’t possible, I realized as I looked around at all the peacefully dissenting students.
It’s a layered paradox. Emotion had derailed me in the fall. But Duke had also derailed my emotions. Duke had done what it was supposed to do: redirect subjective emotions into practical career choices. Make me grow up. And yet here I was, feeling and doing. We were children at summer camp and activists on the frontline, all at once. I hadn’t felt this sense of communal mission and selfless importance for a while, since marking up text drops at the U.N. in March of 2023. Maybe that didn’t matter. But it was emotion-full. And I had missed it, without knowing quite what was absent.
An elite university does this thing where it quiets your urge to chase the things you really need, because it trains you to label emotion as esoteric and intangible. Some of this is good practicality and empiricism. But I worry some of it, too, is self-sabotage, and untangling the two might be one of the most difficult tasks of a college student.
It sucks. We won’t get paid to feel deeply or act justly—only for our hours and promised skills. And I won’t get to add “ability to indirectly anger university presidents” or “ability to procrastinate final exams study to prioritize fighting genocide” to my resume.
“What if we kissed under the encampment tent?” someone commented on social media. Another joked: “I want that on a t-shirt.” I say: let them love, because liberation is hot.
If you step inside a Palestine solidarity encampment, you’ll notice that you can find food freely, medicine quickly, and educational material profusely. Professors lead teach-ins. There is intellectual safety. Everyone is welcome, as long as you are willing to learn and share.
That was my experience, at least. A friend lent me pants. Another lent me socks. Strangers offered transport. When the night settled, phones were tucked away. People read with flashlights and played mancala. Others volunteered to take shifts to keep watch through the night, in case counter-protestors came to disrupt or cause harm. And in the morning, people gathered to hear updates from the organizers.
My friend remarked, “This might be the first sort-of socialist society I’ve experienced.” Were we world-building in front of our very eyes?
With my needs met, I realized my ability to tend to the needs of others had grown. It’s simple, isn’t it. As long as we feel alone and victimized, we won’t have enough in us to give. These are pieces not only of justice for Palestine, but of a better social contract.
We can battle over narrative—over whether all protest has lived up to the ideals we hope for. In Portland, an anarchic group co-opted a Palestinian protest and destroyed a library. Other schools noted cases of antisemitism.
I’d rather battle over tactic. What is the best we can do, given that movements inevitably have players who may undermine the movement? Where do we draw the line when universalizing demands and decreasing barriers to entry? What wakes people up from complacency? Does shouting “who are you protecting” at a police officer change their mind, or affirm their use of force?
The encampments broke my heart, because systemic inequity (police brutality, administrative apathy, presidential dysfunction) has not changed. The end of the Triangle Solidarity Encampment was brutal, and I personally was not present for it.
Despite the pain, I’m grateful for language and protest. They help us imagine beyond what we have lived, and rationalize and strategize to close the gap between what we are afforded in the present and what we need for shared prosperity. Without the Portland protests for Palestine, back when I thought things couldn’t get worse…without my Arabic teacher, who made me realize the fight was much, much more than myself…without this spring, where I woke up, and made a commitment…Without it all, I could have lived on misbelieving that Palestine did not form part of the architecture of liberation.