[This is a long read, but an important one. Not all my blog posts will be like this, I swear. No matter where you stand on this matter, I hope you will read it in full with a sincere and open heart, just as I have written these words with a sincere and open heart and with nothing but positive regard for whomever may read them.]

In my previous post, I briefly touched on my feeling of making comics not mattering anymore.

That feeling was informed by many things, so many increasing injustices and blatant hypocrisies. Outright lies being told in public by the likes of news personalities, pundits, politicians, and billionaires. Ever-increasing poverty and inequality, bigotry and xenophobia. Literal fascists running for office and even being elected in some places. The creeping stranglehold of tech companies over public discourse and the creative professions. But not the least was the genocides being committed right out in the open.

My comics were at one time singularly dedicated to combating injustice and standing for what I believed in – which is the dignity and autonomy of all conscious beings. Sure, most of them ended up being about transphobia, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to touch on other issues affecting the world, and I think I always aspired to take on other issues more and more as time went on.

But, to my shame, I never commented on Gaza. For a long time I didn’t feel like it was my right to speak on it, nor was it worth the hornets nest it would likely invoke if I did.

But in order for me to feel like comics matter again, like I have any right to speak on other issues that sting closer to home for me, like I deserve to make my living doing what I love in the name of justice and my most cherished beliefs, I need to speak on the 21st Century Holocaust happening before us.

Not only happening before us as though we are mere onlookers, but being funded by our tax dollars, cheered on by our elected officials, and supported of the greatest military super power on Earth, all while western news media presents it as a war between equal foes – one side righteous, the other barbaric – rather than calling it what it is: ongoing settler-colonial imperialist aggression against a displaced people who barely possess the means to fight back in any serious manner.

There is no two ways about it: what is happening in Palestine is atrocious. It is unacceptable. It is a genocide.

The civilian death toll is massive – upwards of 100,000 at this point. The majority of the victims are women and children. The stories of death, mutilation, and general human misery are beyond harrowing. The cruel and inhuman tactics used by the IDF read like those of a science fiction villain – things such as snipers shooting children to lure first responders to cluster around them and thus fall easy prey to a bomb, or playing children’s cries and screams out of drones to lure out victims for the drone’s missiles and gunfire, or using an AI (called “Where’s Daddy”) to track individual’s daily (and often incidental) physical proximity to “suspected terrorists” in order to sign-off on bombing the apartment buildings they live in as they sleep next to their wives and children. Just about every single hospital and university in Gaza has been destroyed. Doctors, journalists, and international aid workers are being murdered, and Western physicians returning from Gaza report extensive evidence of routine direct, intentional murder of small children by Israeli snipers. Israel recently had it’s own “January 6th” style riot, that was enacted in defence of Israeli rape and torture prisons that hold untold numbers of Palestinians civilians. The primary defender of institutional rape of Palestinian prisoners is now a prominent media celebrity.

I firmly believe that what is happening in Gaza is the worst thing happening on Earth at this moment, but unfortunately, it most likely only sets the precedent for greater still atrocities lying ahead for us this century.

Throughout the years during this ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people by Israel’s settler-colonial project, we in the west have always seen Israel portrayed as a lone beacon of democracy and tolerance amidst the barbaric swathes of Muslim nations, who ruled by authoritarianism and persecuted women, non-Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

The comic above was inspired by a particular instance relatively near the beginning of the most recent Israeli military campaign of destruction in response to October 7th. An IDF soldier raised up a pride flag amidst the destroyed rubble of Palestinian homes, proclaiming to be raising it in the name of love after having “liberated” the land and making it “safe” for LGBTQ+ people.

Frequently, queer people who support the Palestinian cause are ridiculed for supporting those who would “throw you off a roof top”. As though we should be in support of a genocide because it’s happening to people who don’t like us?

In truth, Israel is no protector of LGBTQ+ Palestinians. If you are queer in Palestine, and the IDF finds out, they will blackmail you into becoming an informant for them under pain of revealing your identity to those in Palestine who are against such things. If you ask most queer Palestinians, or Lebanese queers for that matter, they will tell you that the primary threat they are concerned about is the IDF blowing them up rather than the religious bigots among the ranks of those fighting against their oppressor.

Never mind that Israel itself doesn’t allow gay marriages to be performed within its borders and has increasingly moved in a right wing theocratic direction that is against the existence of queer people in Israeli society (I know multiple Israeli trans women who want nothing to do with their home country in no small part due to how they were treated there). Or that Israel’s biggest backers are the Christian fundamentalists attacking queer people over here in North America, and who Israel props up in turn.

But even if Israel were a queer paradise, no matter how many pride parades happen in Tel Aviv, I will never be OK with a genocide, with a colonial occupation, with an apartheid state being defended by invoking the name of my people. We will not be your human shields for committing war crimes. You will not brutalize and immiserate the Palestinian people in our name.

I have many Jewish and Israeli friends and readers. I know how deeply the feelings on this matter run. I know the fear many Jews around the world have about ever-increasing antisemitism. I know how the rhetoric around us spins this issue into being a matter of either supporting Israel or antisemitism. Of any support for the Palestinian cause or criticisms of Israel as tantamount to being a nazi. Of speaking against one holocaust being an endorsement for another.

To any of my friends or readers concerned or hurt or offended by the comic above or to the stance I’ve taken here, if you are afraid that my distaste for the destruction of an entire people means I have joined the ranks of the anti-semites, I will quote an Israeli friend of mine whom I greatly respect and admire, “I love everyone from everywhere.”

I don’t want anybody to die. I want Israelis to live in peace, just as I want the Palestinians to live in peace.

No serious person I’ve known who supports the Palestinian cause does so out of a hatred for Jews or a desire to see Jews harmed or ethnically cleansed from the land of Israel. I hope I don’t have to point out the many brave Jews – many of whom are also queer – at the forefront of pro-Palestinian activism, protests, and scholarship. I also hope I don’t have to point out that every First Nations leader I’ve seen publicly speak on the matter did so in unequivocal support of the Palestinian cause – people who know a thing or two about colonization, oppression, and genocide. Global opinion is not on the side of Zionism. All over the world, essentially everywhere besides Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe, people are appalled by what Israel is doing, and even within those nations is a broad disgust with what is happening – with 100’s of thousands of people showing up at some protests. But since Israel serves as an outpost of the West in a strategically important location, and also because to condemn the Israeli settler project is to lay bare the genocidal basis of our own societies, our government and news media continues to frame Israel as justified and any objection to that as stemming from antisemitism.

To any who are still unconvinced of my motives in my criticism of the Israeli state, or who are incensed by my comparison of Gaza to the Holocaust, I want to remind you that my people were there, too.

It has been proven in German court of law that trans women were in Auschwitz. Those infamous photos of nazis burning books? They were books on trans and queer people from the Berlin Institute on Sexuality, and in the wake of that burning, they hunted down and killed all the trans people in the institute’s patient records. Their hatred of us is entwined with their hatred of Jews, for they claimed then just as they claim now that the Jews are somehow behind the existence of queers, in some scheme to undermine Christian civilization. We were put in the camps even before the Jewish people were, but the difference was, once the camps were liberated and their surviving inmates freed, those with the pink triangle on their uniform were not. They were put into “regular” prisons for the “crime” of “homosexuality”.

So make no mistake, we are in this together, Jews and Queers. There is no world where the nazis only come for one of us. When they come for us, like they are coming for us right now, they will come for you, too. Of course, these days I can’t help but notice that many of the nazis we have today like to insist they like “Real Jews” – meaning the religiously conservative ones who support Israel. With the “Fake Jews” being the Marxist ones who care about social justice and who made the queers happen. But how long before they turn those sights of theirs upon the so-called “Real” ones?

There is so much more I could say, but I will finish with where I started: with my loss of hope.

It is so easy, in the daunting face of all the horrific calamities and challenges laying before us, to feel utterly helpless. Like nothing we do can possibly matter, so why do anything at all? But even as I myself so frequently fall into this trap, one thing I am continually struck by is how, amidst the destruction, horror, and tragedy surrounding them, the Palestinian people continue to pray.

These people who have had everything taken from them: their land, their homes, their families, their culture, their dignity. They’ve been scattered to the four winds time and time again, only to be bombed and terrorized at every new “safe zone” they reach. They’ve lived their entire lives inside an open air concentration camp, being tormented daily by sneering zealots who are so utterly self-assured in their own righteousness that they post their war crimes to Tik Tok, and who are funded and cheered on by the most powerful nations in the world. These people who by all accounts should spit in God’s face for the hell they are living within the so-called “Holy Land”, they continue to sing praises to Allah. Of how good he is, how he is just and fair.

I am neither a Muslim nor a believer in any deity that interferes in our physical world, but if these people can still have faith, then perhaps I can, too. Faith doesn’t have to be in any specific thing. It can simply be faith in faith. You don’t have to know exactly what it is, or how to get it, you just have to keep faith that somewhere out there, there is goodness somewhere in the world. Faith that all your struggles will be worthwhile, and that justice prevails in the end.

Free Palestine.

– Bria