Who Cares? – What It Means to (Continue to) Love and Hope during a Genocide

At least 40,000 Palestinian lives have been killed in Gaza, as October 7, 2024, marked the first anniversary of the genocidal campaign unleashed by the Israeli government since October 2023. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed described it as the loss of its “moral compass” among international communities’ inaction to stop the genocide. The haunting images and news continue to roll out from the ground in Gaza. On the one hand, digital media and technologies brought “truths” and emotions right in front of distant spectators in the West, forcing the gazes to be met. The genocide in Gaza has undoubtedly transformed the ways in which local and global social movements and people across nation-state borders “connect.” On the other hand, while lives are undeniably devastating in Gaza and the West Bank, which are undergoing ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing, Palestinians living in the diaspora have been continually and systemically gaslit by the colonial regimes and experiencing extreme guilt and pain from reliving the intergenerational trauma of the ongoing dispossession and displacement since the 1948 Nakbah.

However, an unprecedented sense of strength, love, unity, care and community belonging has sprung out and grown from the effects of this genocide at the same time. This has become increasingly evident through my fieldwork interviewing over 30 Palestinian women who have been advocating for the rights and liberation of Palestine in Canada. I also obersrve their activism works in various forms online and offline. By scrutinizing the diverse conditions of production, circulation, and reception of digital media that shape the visual and discursive construction of humanity and contemporary warfare on transnational, national and local scales, this proposed research examines critically how transnational solidarity and community/self-care are facilitated and made possible in the context of the interconnected world we are currently living in.