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Thinking you can "help" by donating to NGOs as the end all be all is particularly insulting because:

1) my family, and many Palestinian diaspora families, have been donating to Palestinian charities for years and look at where we are at now (ie, the systematic violence has not been addressed AND we already have been consistently donating to make a difference, contrary to what people on here claim we aren't doing)

2) reframing this as a humanitarian issue rather than a systematic violence where a people are occupied by a colonial force

By all means, donate to charities I'm not going to say they're not necessary. They absolutely are. I donate to Palestinian Children's Relief Fund myself. It's a cause near and dear to my heart. However, monetary support and a hands off approach only goes so far and does not address systematic issues that communities face. If all we do is donate, we succumb to an endless spiral of reactive responses to violence rather than preventative.

NGOs are great but to say "just donate" and then ignore the issue completely is incredibly harmful. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are PLEADING for you to take action, get involved, spread information. So find your niche and please help! Make art! Attend protests! Hell, even reblogging posts with the intent to educate is useful.

Remember, our goal is short term AND long term liberation! So keep Palestine on your mind! Keep Tigray on your mind! Congo! Kashmir! We need to remember that the world we live in is not ok but it could be BETTER!!!

Interview with Khalil Abu Yahia, in From the River to the Sea - Essays for a Free Palestine (2023)

Apparently if a warrant is issued, it will be for crimes against humanity

I hope you guys enjoy all this high quality yep

Thank you @jeebusmeebus for getting me into golden kamuy

I had a sketch I wanted to render and I guess something was going right for me because I ended up with this??? Enjoy all ye who come upon this

While talking with @jeebusmeebus he mentioned that Beetle might have taken after Leon's appearance for Ryker's comfort.

I like this concept, very sad but very cool!

answering a couple questions i got on this post since i realized ppl genuinely wanna know:

tl;dr:

israel lets very, very little aid get into gaza. even the UN can't get in as much as they want to. funding individual families, gazan led initiatives, and mutual aid collectives operating out of gaza ensures gazans can provide for themselves and pay for the extremely expensive aid that is available.

with all the civil infrastructure destroyed by israel, the situation on the ground has devolved into unrestricted capitalism, driving up the price of aid (that should be free!). this makes it more urgent for people to have funding for daily survival.

the post linked above has examples of how donating to individual families can help a lot. if you want to help more than one family at a time, there are many gazan-led initiatives focusing on rebuilding their infrastructure and distributing aid fairly that are worth donating to instead of large charities that already get the majority of donations.

as i mentioned in the last post: @/careforgaza on twitter is a nonprofit started by gazans, it's been endorsed by multiple palestinian journalists.

the sameer project is a collective organized by diaspora palestinians offering emergency shelter to gazans.

ele elna elak is a project aiming to bring water, food, shelter, etc. to gazans and has been promoted by bisan owda.

and the municipality of gaza itself is fundraising to rebuild water infrastructure.

all of these organizations are active inside gaza right now and are being run by gazans. if anyone knows of other gazan-led mutual aid projects, nonprofits or charities feel free to link them in the notes! hope this helped!

long answers under the cut!

if you wanna donate to a charity that's absolutely fine, but the thing is most charities (and even the UN!) are unable to make it into gaza in the first place, leaving aid rotting at the egyptian side of the border or subject to israeli settler attacks

not to mention, charities and nonprofits also maintain a paternalistic colonial relationship with the indigenous people they are trying to help, determining what aid they need for them instead of returning power to them and letting them make their own choices

i'm not here to say that one option is better than the other, just that they achieve different things and are equally legitimate. there's an attitude among people who question the legitimacy of these gofundme campaigns that somehow the people promoting them are telling them not to donate to charities. nobody is stopping you from donating to charities. we are just asking that you do not dehumanize the very real gazans in your inbox just because their method of asking for aid is more direct and risky.

unfortunately that's exactly what has happened. because israel destroyed all of gaza's more formalized infrastructure, it seems that organized crime and rampant inflation has taken its place. aid is supposed to be free, but in order to save for evacuation or the cost of living, people have started selling them at an inflated price. and aid that is truly free attracts intense, large crowds that are dangerous to navigate.

this was posted on abc a few days ago

it's pure, unrestrained capitalism. i've had multiple palestinians describe this situation to me confidence. that's why everything's so expensive now. why people have to rent out tiny plots of land for their tents to sit on, why my friend @siraj2024 still has to buy tarps to cover the broken windows of the overpriced bombed out apartment he rented, and why a bag of flour can cost a thousand bucks in the north.

even before israel closed and then bombed the rafah crossing, the egyptian hala travel agency was only allowing people to cross the border if they paid a hefty $5000 USD per adult / $2500 USD per child bribe. it denies doing this, but the hundreds of stories from palestinians say otherwise.

with regard to the economy, here in america we saw something similar happen in the wake of hurricane helene and milton. the podcaster margaret killjoy describes how she saw dual economies rise after asheville was fully cut off from the rest of the country - some people offered each other supplies for free in a sort of mutual aid honor system, and some people required payment when they lent supplies because they themselves needed to buy stuff for their families. these dual economies exist in gaza too. and this means they all still need money to survive.

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If you're having trouble keeping up with what's going on in Palestine because of US news coverage of university protests, here are some articles you can read and a video you can watch:

While CNN & all the other mainstream media try to paint the university protests as "pro terrorism" (which they're not, they're literally anti-war protests.) Palestinians are being slaughtered by the minute.

Please don't stop speaking about Palestine.