Choose Solidarity, Not Guilt
Notes on displacement, grief, and guilt in the US and Palestine
By Tess GC
When I think about land and place these days, Palestine immediately comes into my mind. I’ve written about it before, but the action of displacing other people to make one’s home in a place, no matter the circumstances, leaves a spiritual rift in people’s experience of the world. That applies to Israel’s theft of Palestine, our settler society here in the United States, and even the displacement of gentrification as those with more push out and erase the life that was there before.
I’ve wanted to write about Palestine again recently, but found myself, like most other people, with very little to say that hasn’t been said over and over already. The situation is bleak, we’ve protested and pressured our representatives for months. Some have tried blocking roads and arms shipments. There’s some hope that Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s VP pick could allow her campaign to potentially be better on Israel/Palestine than the Biden administration has been. We’ll see where that goes. But we still find ourselves with the fundamental problem that by and large, we don’t have the organizational infrastructure in this country right now to force people in power to listen to us in substantial ways.
A lot of feelings come with this current inability to have much say in the world we live in: despair, hopelessness, guilt, grief. Many of us are quite vulnerable to guilt and coercion in particular, because we know we are part of processes of erasure, destruction, and theft of people and land here at home that are similar to those happening in a place like Palestine.
When I was asked recently to write a short article for “A Matter of Spirit,” a quarterly journal released by the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center (IPJC), I thought about all of these interwoven problems: The things we are born into and forced to participate in; the choices we make to survive and try to have the best lives we can; the ways of thinking that helped get us into these messes, and that many people still think will get us out of them again; responsibility, complicity, history, present, future.
Writing on the theme, “right relations,” I answered the questions they put to me as a white descendant of settlers in the United States: “Is it okay to feel grounded to a specific landscape? How do we, as the descendants of white settlers, honor our connection to the land while also acknowledging that we took it from the people to whom it rightfully belongs?”
In responding to those questions, I thought about all that we are dealing with now, all that we have been dealing with in this country for our whole lifetimes, and the release that there is in deciding not to let guilt have its way with us, and instead having some empathy for ourselves and those around us.
The Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center is an organization that “is sponsored by twenty-four religious communities and collaborates with Catholic, ecumenical, interfaith and other organizations in carrying out this mission.” You can subscribe to their quarterly publication here, and sign up for their newsletter here.
we too, descendants of the displaced living in the diaspora away from harm, often have to motivate ourselves to choose gratitude and solidarity over survivors' guilt. if we create and nurture communities of solidarity based on shared values, we can dismantle narratives of othering and strive for more equitable societies
Thank you for putting this into words! Only deep connections to places and other people will save us. Guilt drives us to isolate and punish ourselves- turning inward when we should be oriented outward. We as white people living on stolen land have so much to learn about community and de-centering ourselves, which cannot be done from a place of guilt.