Living in the labyrinth

I can’t stop thinking about Palestine.

I can’t stop thinking about how it is projected as an abstract, as a headline or a “conflict” but also how people carry it as a heavy pain in their chests. It is a grief I can’t shake. I think about what it would be like if someone came into my home and claimed it wasn’t mine. If they told me my history didn’t exist. If they pointed to a map and said “That’s ours now”. I imagine soldiers storming into my kitchen, vandalising it, bombing my neighbour, filming a birthday celebration in my living room. And then posting it.

The cruelty of it haunts me. On how seemingly ordinary it's made to look. The way genocide is being broadcast with the casualness of a vlog. A whole people displaced, bombed, starved and how the IDF sometimes videotapes the aftermath like it’s a house tour. I don’t want to see more statistics. I don’t want to see another UN emergency meeting. What I want and what I feel is rage. An endless, fuming rage.

And underneath the rage I feel confusion. Despair. A disoriented grief. And questions of how did we get here? And how is this allowed?

When I think about Netanyahu, I see more than just a right-wing politician. I see a man who wants to redraw the map of the Middle East with his own image at the centre. A man who talks about security but builds a state on domination. A man backed by the most powerful empire in the world, the US, who sign off on bombs with the confidence that no one will ever truly hold it accountable.

And it’s not just him. It’s a system. It’s the media’s dehumanising language. The soft complicity of governments who offer “concern” while sending weapons. It’s the entire global order that decides who gets to be a victim and who gets to be erased.

Because this isn’t just about Palestine. It’s about the Sudanese, the Congolese, the dispossessed across the Global South. It’s about Indigenous communities stripped of their land, language, dreams, dignity. It’s about centuries of colonisation silently rebranded as strategy. It’s about who matters and who doesn’t.

At the centre of all this I guess is oppression. And I don’t mean this merely as a concept but as a living, breathing force. A force that’s been shaping borders, bodies, economies. The sort of force that teaches people to see domination as survival.

All of this and more constantly makes me think about Paulo Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he wrote that the greatest human task is not just to end oppression. But to recover our shared humanity in the process. He warns that without reflection, the oppressed may become the new oppressors and mimic the same structures that dehumanised them.

That idea is complicated. It’s not saying pain turns people bad and it’s not saying everyone becomes their enemy. It’s saying that oppression teaches us. It teaches us to wield power through fear. It teaches us that to be safe, someone else must be unsafe. And unless we break that cycle, we become fluent in the same language that once silenced us.

Erich Fromm calls it the “drama triangle” (oh hello, 2019 nostalgia). A pattern where people move between victim, persecutor and rescuer and the lack of reflection that ensures we never step out of these roles entirely. It’s a psychological trap. It’s how trauma plays out when it doesn’t get witnessed and held. And I can’t help but see it everywhere. In geopolitics, in relationships and even in myself.

And yes I think about the Holocaust. I think about the horror of it. And its scale. And the evil. And I understand why Israel was created - uh no, I don’t know if I want to phrase it that way - I guess I understand why some people wanted it. This is a place where they imagined Jews could be safe after centuries of persecution.

But the tragedy, the unbearable, gutting tragedy is that this search for safety has been built on the erasure of another people with entire villages gone, children raised under drones, refugees that aren’t allowed to return. And again I find myself holding a contradiction that can’t seem to sit silently. Grief that was never healed turned into justification for occupation. And the confusion behind whether all this thinking is somehow making me bitter.

I keep seeing footage of Israeli soldiers inside Palestinian homes. The reflection of joy in their faces that only makes sense when someone has been so dehumanised, they’re no longer real to you. And in the comment sections I see a lot of rage and threats and warning that Iran or Hezbollah or someone else will burn it all down in revenge.

And part of me understands that too. The instinct to fight back, to demand blood for blood. I understand how rage can feel like justice.

But I also wonder if we use the same tools that harmed us, are we actually healing anything? Or just passing on the pain? 

bell hooks’ words in all about love has helped me a little in cutting through all this noise. To her, love is an action. Love is justice. Love for her isn’t a weak response. It’s the strongest thing we can offer in a world built on domination. It doesn’t mean forgetting the injustice. It means refusing to become what tried to destroy us.

There’s a deficit of love in this world, as cliche or contradictory as it may sound. Not the romantic kind, not the empty kind. The kind that sees, listens, mourns, protects, repairs. And you can feel that lack everywhere. In the bombs. In the hate. In the broken communities. In the way we erase cultures, entire languages and histories.

And you feel it in the climate crisis too. The same logic that bombs Gaza is the logic that sets forests on fire for profit. It’s the same hunger for control and extraction and for more. It’s the same violence that treats lands, waters, people as things to be used. Palestine is not just a war zone. Bombs don’t just kill people. They destroy soil, poison water. The land remembers everything. The climate crisis is not just about carbon, it’s about conquest. About who gets to live. About who gets to rebuild after a disaster and who gets left behind. 

So yep, I’ve just been another person sitting with all this. All the rage, the helplessness, the horror, the teeny tiny flickers of hope and the people who ask me “Why do you take this all so seriously?”. 

And I guess a way out of all this, the grief, the madness, the cycle of suffering, is to maybe ask the question that Simon Bolivar muttered in his dying and confused breath:

“How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

And maybe the quietly loving answer, as John Green so eloquently put it in Looking for Alaska is: “You forgive”. And you refuse to keep passing the wound forward.