By Drew Webb

graphics: The content of Queering the Map is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Queer Kentucky did not alter these images.

“I’ve always imagined you and me sitting out in the sun, hand and hand, free at last. We spoke of all the places we would go if we could. Yet you are gone now. If I had known that bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”

This is an entry left in Gaza with Queering the Map, self-described as “a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.” Since October 7th, 2023, Israeli Occupation Forces have martyred no less than 61,000 people as of February 3, according to Al Jazeera reporting, and critically injured 100,000 more Palestinians.

At least 1,500 of those deaths were after the January 15th ceasefire agreement. As of March 18, Israeli forces have abandoned the agreement in total with a full return to the bombardment and massacring more than 400 people in the evening following. Adding insult to all this injury, it was with the full knowledge and backing of the newest Trump administration. They are playing age-old games, seeking to overwhelm and confound with each new headline. Currently, here a man has declared himself king in all but name. Netanyahu, his cabinet, and Israeli settler-colonialism don’t sit on their hands while fascist power swells here. Representative bodies in all three branches of government almost fall over themselves to align with dictatorial agendas, similarly ceaseless. But really, all those words boil down to a reality where billions of people—domestically and abroad—are deprived of care, basic humanity, decency, and self-determination.

Here, in this penal colony, we are thousands of miles away from so much of this struggle, so much of the worst anguish wrought, destruction of every magnitude imaginable. Reader, you and I might never see the West Bank with our own eyes, but borders and oceans pale in the wake of how far-reaching this violence spreads.

In Kentucky, members of our more intimate and local community don’t have the privilege of any such distance. Afnan, a Palestinian willing to speak on the record, lent me some context into her perspective and positions: “You know, I’ve been there twice, but I haven’t been back in [around] 18 years. It’s been a long time. I have a very specific kind of understanding of Palestine.” At the opening of our discussion, I asked her how it felt to have a relationship–built on ancestry and culture–to a place and people at the center of so much international conversation.

“I didn’t have the words for the occupation. I just knew how it felt. Neither one of my parents would ever really sit down and have a conversation,” she recalled. “A lot of adults talking and not knowing where to start. I was five and I turned six there. I don’t think I even had an understanding of police in America. But [in Palestine] you see soldiers every time you try to go into the city. We were outside of Ramallah. It was almost 10 minutes away, but it would take us 20, 30 minutes to get through checkpoints. You have men with guns come up to you. I just remember being scared when my grandma and grandpa would go somewhere by themselves. It felt like a life or death situation. Even though I couldn’t make sense of it or I didn’t understand this security and surveillance.”

Zionists and their sympathizers are forever uttering about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The personal account above felt necessary when recalling that the same Al Jazeera reporting–in correspondence with the Gaza Government Information Office and the Palestinian Ministry of Health–included 17,492 children murdered, the majority 6-12 years old. By Israel’s own accounts, they have a right to defend themselves from children who don’t understand topics like occupation or open-air prisons. By their own logic and actions, some of the greatest threats to the Israeli agenda are little girls worried after their grandparents.

On January 2nd, Israel increased their $7.5 million propaganda budget to a staggering $150 million, as reported by Middle East Monitor. Knowing this, we have an obligation to return to accounts like Afnan’s. So much money and so many bodies move in the hopes that we won’t see ourselves in “someone else’s pain.” If this is your neighbor’s story, how far is the hope and revolutionary struggle for a liberated Palestine from you, really? Relating to my own queerness never began or ended at a nationality; I imagine a world where our geo-pin poet and the person they adored could sit, hand-in-hand, in the sun.

“Coming back to America, I saw a connection between American and Israeli soldiers. Like, it was anybody in a uniform to me; I know that these people don’t like me,” Afnan continued. “During this time, the Iraq War was going on, I remember having a pretty solid idea of being anti-military around 2012: millions of Iraqis were killed in the Iraq War…The numbers [of casualties reported] are always smaller. It’s so hard to reckon with the idea that there’s so many stories.” If someone looking down the barrel of a genocide’s gun can contextualize their disenfranchisement, their loss, and its larger questions through the lens of someone else’s, reader, what’s stopping us? This kind of intersectional critical position guided a lot of my second conversation for this work. Farah Mokhtareizadeh is no stranger to these topics, from working on Louisville Metro Council with Jecorey Arthur, to spending over two decades deeply committed to community work in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

“I first went to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement in 2002 as a volunteer first responder. It was my first introduction to what Palestinian people experience in their everyday lives. I think I’d just turned 18…The day after I’d arrived in Hebron, there was a siege on the city,” she remembered. Mokhtareizadeh went on to describe the experience as sobering and “the scariest thing [she’d] ever experienced in [her] life.”

We spoke to the specific violence exacted on Palestinians and its contexts, with her adding: “Apartheid in Palestine is symbolic of the colonialism of the whole Middle East. If you’re able to solve this conflict, it’s a boon to working class people across [the region]. People who have always been looking for a right to exist in any space with some form of autonomy or rights to live without intervention from the colonial powers of the world. Because of the deteriorating situation over the last 20 years due the U.S ground invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, and the influence that has on the rest of the world–especially in international foreign policy–I say it won’t be the governments of the Middle East to start something, rather the people starving to death.”

Farah’s point illustrates so clearly how a larger scope of consideration and historical reference is essential to the formation of a functional politic. Especially one seeking to address class-conscious nuance and finding where you fit in advocacy. She asserted, “There’s no real great democracy [from Western intervention] in The Middle East. There’s no self-determination for Afghans or Iraqis or, you know, any of these people. So what are we doing there? What are we supporting? I think this other colonial model of the United States is exactly why we’re supporting Israel.”

The last question I asked Farah: what do you think is the bridge between all these different struggles? As a larger international community, what do you think our throughline is to relating and understanding each other’s oppression? Her response: “There are so many things. I say again as Iranian-American these people are in our community. Palestinians live in Louisville. They live in Kentucky. They live in the United States. And the Easterners, Muslims, we all live here. So this is something that’s affecting your neighbors’ family members, your neighbors, people you know. Your friends and their comrades. So it’s not something so far away, it’s people who do live here with you. So it’s not hard to envisage because it’s really here. We’re surrounded by people, not just Palestinian, but from the Philippines, people from Portugal, from Syria, people from Cuba. There’s a lot of similarities in terms of an anti-colonial liberation struggle in all of those [communities.] Israel’s got a hand in quite a few of them.”

If I could convince anyone of anything, it’s to live our lives in the wisdom of that statement. Every movement in the world, no matter how far it seems from you or how little you understand it, is connected: 61,000 martyrs and they were all our kin. Some of the oldest sites in the region’s history are gone now: the port of Blakhiyeh–the first known seaport in Gaza, dating back to 800 BCE. And the Great Omari Mosque Library–established in 1277 CE at the site of an ancient Philistine temple believed to have been built circa 2000 BCE.

As of this January, nearly 200 historical sites have been bombarded or razed to brick, each with their own relevance, story, and particular tragedy in being destroyed now. In these losses the Israeli Occupation is robbing the entire world, but no one feels these thefts as distinctly as all 5.6 million members of the Palestinian diaspora. While you have lips that move and air to pass over them, reader, there is endless work to do–and not just for our neighbors in Palestine. Billions of people around the world lie down at night and still dream of a different world for the next time they rise to greet the dawn.

What do any of our comforts matter if they merely pacify us comfortably as we sit silent or move complacent? There are many ways to lend yourself and your gifts and skills to the global cause of liberation. But you must do something and that commitment cannot waver because in the face of tireless fascists and megalomaniacs with nuclear launch codes, these politics must be lifelong. Free Palestine until it’s backwards. Free Mahmoud Khalil and everyone currently being used as scapegoats to push authoritarian agendas about what it means to belong in this country. Solidarity with all my cousins abroad, dreaming of liberated futures: one day, we will sit in the sun together, free at last.

Drew Webb is a poet and essayist based in Louisville, Kentucky. Their work—in all forms—is grounded in speaking to the personal as the political and maintaining a fundamental musicality and rhythm to their prose.

Webb has released collections of poetry, with work appearing in various publications, ranging from Carmichaels on Frankfort to The Washington Post’s The Lily. Currently, they are working on their first novel-length project.

Instagram: @drewwh0