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Please consider spending time to learn more about Afro-Palestinian experiences and living under occupation while Black and Palestinian, along with Afro-Palestinian resistance efforts throughout the years. Here are some valuable articles and resources:

Articles:

In the heart of the Old City, generations of Afro-Palestinians persevere in the face of occupation by Mousa Qous

Putting the pieces together: Fragments of oral history in exile by Samah Fadil

‘Afro-Palestinians’ forge a unique identity in Israel by Isma'il Kushkush

The Africans of Jerusalem by Mousa Qous

The History Of Afro-Palestinians, Past And Present by Fayida Jailler

African-Palestinian community’s deep roots in liberation struggle by Electronic Intifada

Remembering Fatima Bernawi: Historic Palestinian fighter and liberated prisoner (1939-2022) on Samidoun

Fatima Barnawi, founder of Palestinian Women's Police and veteran prisoner, dies at 83 by Middle East Eye

On Fatima Bernawi, Women's Struggle, and Black-Palestinian Solidarity by Elom Tettey-Tamaklo

Afro Palestine: the African Diaspora in Palestine (not an article but a quick video summary of Afro-Palestinian history)

Note: highly recommend checking out Mousa Qous, the founder of the African Community Society, for his writings above all!

African Community Society of Jerusalem:

Their website— organization centered around the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem.

General info about the group

ACS's instagram to learn more about Afro-Palestinian history.

Here is a write-up about the African Community Society, their impact within Palestinian society, and Afro-Palestinian history in Jerusalem specifically. Highly recommend taking the time to read this if you can.

Please take the time to watch this Documentary by Stephen Graham about former Israeli prisoner Ali Jiddah where he takes the viewer on a tour throughout Jerusalem and describes the unique struggles the Afro-Palestinian community face. He is quite a friendly guy and very funny:

i've said this before but i suppose it bears repeating and clarification. it is arabs and palestinians who have suffered the most under islamist rule. we (middle easterners, revolutionaries, religious minorities, gender and sexual minorities) as people, understand what hamas represents better than israelis do, better than anyone does. we understand what the entire spectrum from political islam to outright jihadist extremism does. we understand dictatorship. we understand theocracy. we understand fascism.

the repression israel has created is so absolute, has destroyed civil, diplomatic, intellectual and peaceful avenues so absolutely, that it leaves no avenues for anyone to condemn hamas anymore. even the representative of hamas's ideological and political opponents, the PLO (which oversees the West Bank), is openly frustrated at the request to condemn hamas. and it's not because he sympathizes with them. he has absolutely no political, personal, ideological or economic reason to.

israel has bombed gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each and every time with the declared intention of targeting hamas and instead murdering civilians en masse. everyone familiar with israel understands that 'hamas' is meaningless, that israel has no real interest in defeating them (and that defeating militant resistance to an occupation with military force is not possible), that they went so far as to fund them as their choice of preferred enemy. when palestinians hear 'hamas' they correctly understand that israel intends to kill everyone. it is, to use the lingua franca of this period, a dogwhistle. on october 7th, israelis were horrified to see this dogwhistle suddenly become an actual whistle, but nothing else changed except for the intensity and savagery of their attacks on gaza. instead, the more they say hamas, the more they murder civilians en masse, just as they always have. everyone in gaza has said "this is not new, just worse." they have always understood that they are the target. no amount of condemning hamas, being a good palestinian, a good civilian, or even a newborn will change that.

this includes all of hamas's ideological opponents and so-called victims as well. peace activists, intellectuals, palestinian christians, and queer palestinians alike are not condemning hamas right now. they can't because they are busy fighting for their lives and homes against the israeli occupation. if you understood the personal toll this takes on them, if you understood how deeply their trauma runs, you would understand just how evil the israeli narrative on hamas is for all palestinians.

if you want a plurality of palestinian opinion, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want tolerance, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want israelis to be safe in their homes from the threat of hamas militants, get rid of the israeli apartheid state.

the truth is, there is a base and deeply evil racism at the core of asking to condemn hamas, especially by those who would never condemn israel or the violence it requires to maintain itself. it presumes that they have the right to ask for a condemnation of child murder, without ever giving an apology for child murder or the promise to stop murdering children. ghassan kanafani once called this "a conversation between the sword and the neck."

it is absurdity in full display, a macabre delight in impunity disguised as moral superiority. more than treating every palestinian as a terrorist in interrogation, more than its dehumanization and islamophobia, it is at its core asking "do you agree our children are more important than yours?"

and lest you forget, Israel's current minister of national security has already said it directly. as he famously once told arab-israeli reporter mohammad magadli, “Sorry Mohammad, my right to life precedes yours, that is the reality.”

in many ways, that's far more honest than asking "do you condemn hamas?"

Your 20s are for lusting after furniture you can’t afford actually

Y'all I know that when so-called AI generates ridiculous results it's hilarious and I find it as funny as the next guy but I NEED y'all to remember that every single time an AI answer is generated it uses 5x as much energy as a conventional websearch and burns through 10 ml of water. FOR EVERY ANSWER. Each big llm is equal to 300,000 kiligrams of carbon dioxide emissions.

LLMs are killing the environment, and when we generate answers for the lolz we're still contributing to it.

Stop using it. Stop using it for a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. We need to kill it.

Sources:

The Conversation

AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions

Artificial intelligence promises revolutionary solutions to global challenges, but the water costs to produce and power AI hardware and infr

Nature

The carbon impact of artificial intelligence - Nature Machine Intelligence

The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the

nature.com

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

First-of-its-kind US bill would address the environmental costs of the technology, but there’s a long way to go.

Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!

Habibi (2011) dir. Susan Youssef

Habibi, a story of forbidden love, is a fiction feature set in Gaza. Two students in the West Bank are forced to return home to Gaza, where their love defies tradition. To reach his lover, Qays grafittis poetry across town. Habibi is a modern re-telling of the famous ancient Sufi parable Majnun Layla. The full Arabic title is ‘Habibi Rasak Kharban,’ which translates as “Darling, something’s wrong with your head.” — from the Palestine Film Institute

There's one charity that I haven't seen shared here personally, and that's Care for Gaza.

They're shared a lot on twitter as a reputable on-the-ground relief source. You can donate to their gofundme to help their efforts here.

Hey you know how I said I was going to make a workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies? I actually did that.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH LOTS OF SWEARING AT THE USELESS, SHITTY SITUATION YOU’RE IN.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH A FAIR AMOUNT OF BLACK HUMOR BUT NO CURSEWORDS.

Featuring Helpful Sections such as:

Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and how to get them

Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone

What the Everloving Fuck is Probate

Some Simple Dos and Don’ts

Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and Memorials

How to plan a non-religious death party

So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some shit

This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.

It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.

I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.

Good luck!

(in memory of my weirdo mother and her weirdo siblings who all died too fucking young and left me holding this flaming bag of dogshit)

Have you heard that the IDF used to be a terrorist group that was recognized by the US and the UN? And apparently the same terrorist group that carried out the Nakba? Basically meaning THE terrorists?...Because BOY, it sure would have helped learning that little detail earlier!

Oh yeah, the Irgun? Haganah? Lehi? All of these literal terrorist gangs made up what we know today as the IDF. Before that, they carried out terrorist attacks against the British as well as commit massacres against Palestinians such as the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948.

All of their terrorist acts are well documented and can verrrry easily be found if you look them up. For instance, the Lehi's focus was literally assassinations of British officials and the Irgun was in fact regularly described as a terrorist organisation in US media outlets, and they were all also described as "terrorist organisations" in official British and UN documents that detail their terrorist activities.

To add, the leaders of these terrorist groups later became Israel's prime ministers (David Ben-Gurion, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir).

If you're interested in learning more about this, The Institute for Palestine Studies has recently published The Roots of Zionist Terrorism, a paper that includes more info and a rundown of these gangs' most infamous terrorist acts committed against Palestinians starting the years leading up to the Nakba.

i know the nyt regularly edits and rewrites headlines post-publication but it's kind of wild that the basically one (1) good op-ed i've seen them publish in ages that was getting really widely shared was renamed from "Why Must Palestinians Audition For Your Empathy?" to much more vague and defanged "The Palestine Double Standard." like. come on.

anyways.

nytimes.com

Opinion | The Palestine Double Standard

The task of the Palestinian is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it.

(link to the archived page with the original headline)

The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.

If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts”? When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?

It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.

…

Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ].Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.

This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember?That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.

…

Here’s another thing I know as a writer and psychologist: It matters where you start a narrative. In addiction work, you call this playing the tape. Diasporically or not, being Palestinian is the quintessential disrupter: It messes with a curated, modified tape. We exist, and our existence presents an existential affront. As long as we exist, we challenge several falsehoods, not the least of which is that, for some, we never existed at all. That decades ago, a country was born in the delicious, glittering expanse of nothingness — a birthright, something due. Our very existence challenges a formidable, militarized narrative.

But the days of the Palestine exception are numbered. Palestine is increasingly becoming the litmus test for true liberatory practice.

In the meantime, Palestinians continue to be cast paradoxically — both terror and invisible, both people who never existed and people who cannot return.

Imagine being such a pest, such an obstacle. Or: Imagine being so powerful.