Bittar is an artist, writer and community organizer who lives in North Park.
“I give you my condolences,” were Senate candidate Barbara Lee’s first words to a gathering of Palestinian Americans. Her empathy was appreciated and some of us teared up when she said those simple words. She held space for us as a community suffering from intergenerational trauma.
As I see it, most elected officials in San Diego County are having difficulty showing empathy. County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer’s cavalier attitude about regretting her vote for San Diego Imam Taha Hassane’s appointment to the Leon Williams Human Rights Commission is one example. On Dec. 5, without consultation, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors ed Agenda Item 31, page 50 co-authored by Joel Anderson and Nora Vargas naming Iranian and Palestinian Californians as possible abettors of terrorism. These casual remarks and actions make Arab and Muslim San Diegans feel unsafe and vulnerable. Why did they not talk to local Palestinian and Iranian Americans about how these concerns about terrorism may affect or endanger them?
Mayor Todd Gloria — whom I ed in every election — has yet to acknowledge San Diego’s grieving Arab Americans. His and acknowledgment of the local Jewish community has come, as it should, but he has refused to similarly acknowledge Arab and Muslim American suffering.
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs was refreshingly balanced with measured words to a ceasefire in Gaza. Congressman Mike Levin acknowledges our suffering, but has not endorsed a ceasefire. Congress Juan Vargas, Scott Peters and Darrell Issa have been predictable disappointments. Their silence designates Arab Americans as second-class citizens.
In other states however, other politicians are trying to make the anti-war and ceasefire vote transparent, Dearborn, Michigan’s well spoken and courageous Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud guided over 100,000 people to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary. They are trying to send a message that the Arab American community wants the genocide to end, wants to show solidarity and wield political leverage.
Recent days were packed with emotionally loaded events as Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old military cyber engineer, took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He first recorded his pledge to “no longer be complicit in genocide.” As he filmed his self-immolation he shouted “Free Palestine” until he collapsed. Bushnell’s death circled the world with seismic ripples. Arab and Muslim Americans honor Aaron Bushnell while we wish he had found other ways to protest.
We honor Bushnell by following his demands to continue to tell the story of the slaughter of Palestinians and the theft of their homes, destruction of agricultural lands, broken sanitation, desecration of holy sites, the bombing of orphanages and loss of world heritage sites. The over 30,000 verified deaths of Gazans should not be justified for any reason. If we do not act now to end the massacres, there may be 80,000 dead from starvation in a matter of weeks.
To underscore Bushnell’s death, early on Feb. 29, Palestinians in Northern Gaza suffered a slaughter while getting food sacks. They are calling it the “flour massacre.” Aid trucks with sacks of flour moved into northern Gaza, a place in the early stages of famine. Awaiting the trucks were hundreds of men. As people approached the trucks and began to collect their sacks of flour, the Israeli military fired on them, killing over a hundred men whose blood mixed with flour.
Back here at home, 1,000 Palestinians are mourned by their families in San Diego and Orange counties alone. I have three friends who collectively lost 200 family . My closest friend has lost 14 family on her mother’s side and awakens each morning in terror, imagining hearing bombs and seeing her dead relatives beside her in rubble. She took action and began to increase her exercises, limited her news intake to analysis and steered away from graphic images.
Aaron Bushnell tragically made the ultimate sacrifice to protest the active and live genocide. We have run out of time to rescue those on the brink of death because of starvation, but we can still save people from a full scale famine. The young Aaron Bushnell’s torment has become our own as we decide who we will in these primaries.
