My Tax Dollars Were Used To Kill My Family
On October 17, 2023, Israeli airstrikes struck my cousin Wisam’s building, killing her and twenty-one members of her family. The youngest, Anas, was a year old. Two weeks later another airstrike hit the building of another family and killed my 17-year-old cousin, Abdelrahman. His 24-year-old sister, Alaa and 22-year-old sister Malak, succumbed to their injuries on January 1 and April 19. To date, a total of twenty-four members of my extended family in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. The survivors are now starving and desperately clinging to life through the unimaginable and inhumane wrath of the Israeli occupation force aggressions.
As a citizen of the United States, my tax dollars were used to kill my family.
My maternal grandparents are from Al Ramlah, Palestine. They were among the 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their town in 1948. The Nakba, or the Catastrophe, was to make room for the settler-colonial state of Israel. My grandparents were highly educated yet humble people. They were made to pay the price for the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust. Many family members made their way to Lebanon, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza. The grief and terror of forced displacement caused some of my family members to die on the way to Gaza. This history remains with us, as the Nakba continues today.
Your tax dollars, OUR tax dollars, were used to kill my family and over 34,000 Palestinians in the past six months, more than 15,000 of whom were children.
We are ALL complicit.
This live-streamed genocide is the most destructive of the past century. But for decades, our taxpayer dollars have funded the settler-colonial state of Israel to the tune of $3.8 billion annually. Since Israel’s founding 76 years ago, the U.S. has provided approximately $130 billion in aid total, comprising about 15% of our country’s defense budget in recent years, and with most of that assistance coming in the form of weapons grants. Between the years 1950 and 2020, 80% of Israel’s weapons imports came from the United States alone. (Source: axios.com)
Jon Schwarz did a thought experiment and came up with $150 per US taxpayer funding the genocide in Gaza. According to Schwarz, there are two ways to look at this number: “One is that this is a relatively small amount of money. Another is that the U.S. is so astonishingly rich and powerful that we as a country can mete out overwhelming brutality to others and barely notice as individuals. This is, in part, what makes the dollar amount of my contribution especially horrifying.”
Activists talk about collective action all the time–each person making small efforts that add up to tidal waves of change. The same thing is true for causing harm. It only takes a little bit of indifference in the form of seemingly negligible amounts of tax dollars, not taking the time to vote, not calling or writing your representatives AT LEAST ONE TIME, from every American to add up to a tidal wave of harm.
The taxes demonstrate this idea really well. Taking Schwarz’s experiment a step further, I can estimate that I’ve paid about $4800 to Israel over the course of my adult lifetime. Small numbers add up quickly!
To compound my complicity in dollars, I have taken on the emotional labor to educate and inform all my life. I get questions like, “What’s going on over there?” Or worse, statements like, “Those people have been fighting for thousands of years, there will never be peace in the Middle East!” Declarations of which are simultaneously dismissive, demeaning, and just patently wrong.
Since October, the generational trauma and current trauma have been overwhelming. I am drowning in helplessness and grief watching the genocide of my family and my people unfold in real time on my phone while I stand in line at the grocery store or while watching my daughter at soccer practice. It is a surreal juxtaposition that leaves me constantly unbalanced.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been systemic, strategic, and perpetuated for decades. Abroad we are being occupied, abused, starved, and killed simply for being Palestinian. At home, we are being dismissed at best and more often gaslit for speaking out against the total annihilation of our people. It’s a particularly cruel twist of fate that we are forced to literally fund the genocide of our own people.
When I share with people what happened to my family, the responses vary from, “I am sorry,” to “I can’t imagine,” to “we pray for peace.” The worst response is silence, which I’ve received much of lately.
But words matter, actions matter, and silence kills. There are an estimated 255.5 MILLION voting-aged people in the United States. (Source: usafacts.org) We have the power to make a collective difference. Speak up for a permanent ceasefire, an end to occupation, and a free Palestine.
RIGHT NOW:
My family created a GoFundMe. Funds are being used to evacuate to Egypt. Please help, if you can.
Please Support My Family After Loss and War
Text RESIST to 50409
This will allow you to contact all your officials at once in only minutes by automatically generating emails that go to Congress and your other elected officials.
Text CEASEFIRE to 51905
This will take you to a page created by Jewish Voice for Peace where you can: tell President Biden to call a ceasefire now, tell Congress to support a ceasefire, and demand better coverage on Gaza from the New York Times.
Please support and share these news, commentary and literary sources…
@aljazeeraenglish
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@IMEU
@jenanmatari
@sbeih.jpg
@wizard_bisan1
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The Hundred Years War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi
We Could Have Been Friends, Raja Shahadeh
Against the Loveless World, Susan Abulhawa
We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders, Linda Sarsour
Justice for Some, Noura Erakat
Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear, Mosab Abu-Toha
Gaza Writes Back, Refaat Alareer (الله يرحمه)
Behind You Is The Sea, Susan Muaddi Darraj
The Beauty of Your Face, Sahar Mustafah
Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine, Hannah Moushabeck
These Olive Trees, Aya Ghanameh
Safa Suleiman is a Palestinian American educator with more than twenty years of experience in undergraduate and elementary school pedagogy. She now focuses on writing and teaching through storytelling centering the Palestinian and the American Muslim communities. Her debut picture book Hilwa’s Gifts will be released by Candlewick Press in Spring 2025. She lives with her family in Colorado on the homeland of the Ute Nation. Find her online at safasuleiman.com, @safawritesbooks
This blog post is part of the #30DaysArabVoices Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature Arab voices as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Nedda Lewers and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog series.
