Activating Hope in Dark Times

Over my twenty years of activism resisting the Israeli occupation, the question of how one does not lose hope surfaced many times. In a way, it is to be expected in such a long struggle, when the mechanisms of oppression against which we fight only became more entrenched, sophisticated, and normalized. One answer is that we have a moral obligation to continue to resist as long as injustice exists. This is an argument based on faith that there is right and wrong—and that at some point things will be different. Faith that no occupation lasts forever, oppressed people eventually reach independence, and justice will prevail. Faith is hard to hold. Over years of activism, I have found that focusing on what we are able to achieve in our work has helped me hold on to hope.

In the past, in the popular struggles of villages like Bili’in, in the steadfastness of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, in the powerful protest movement in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, I saw firsthand how Palestinian communities resisting and activists joining them have agency. I saw how resistance makes a difference. For me, this was the material from which hope was made.

In 2023, Wadi a-Siq, a small shepherding community east of Ramallah, had 180 residents. Settlers from nearby outposts threatened the community regularly. They would scare their sheep so they scattered, attack residents, come at night to vandalize homes, and create roadblocks at the entrance of the village to scare the children who came from other towns to attend the Wadi a-Siq elementary school. The community resisted, they refused to leave, and invited Palestinian, international, and Israeli activists to stay in the village. While settler attacks continued, people in the community felt less threatened knowing they were not alone in this.

But then came October 7. As happened in so many other villages, settlers, some in military uniforms, came fully armed to the village of Wadi a-Siq and wreaked havoc. Residents were told they would be killed if they didn’t leave within twenty-four hours. The women and children left almost immediately. Younger men stayed a few more nights, packing everything that could be dismantled. On October 12, five days after the Hamas massacre, armed settlers came and forcibly took three Palestinian and five Israeli activists who were there to accompany the community as they left: they were beaten, tied up, and kept for hours. The Palestinian activists were tortured, stripped naked, and one of them was sexually assaulted (Ziv, 2023).

The limited yet significant feeling of success of an activist community that had created a protective presence in the village and had seen their community regain a feeling of safety in their homes was all gone in five days of violence.

This small form of hope we used to center on disappeared. Furthermore,while our activism doesn’t yield the small victories it used to in the West Bank, when it comes to Gaza, we activists are even more at a loss.

There was a time when we actually believed that if Israelis knew and recognized the crimes of occupation, they would cease. While we criticize and challenge this idea, at the same time, anyone interacting with Israeli society has to hold on to this hope in some way, even if not as a theory of change. In the aftermath of October 2023, this conviction has all but disappeared. When we speak about the crimes and atrocities in Gaza—the tens of thousands of children maimed and killed, starvation, unprecedented murder, and complete destruction—these facts are met not with denial but with justification and support. Seeing your own society shed all compassion and take pride in these crimes is enough to drive any heart to despair.

Against this bleak background, I search for tools not only for social change but for hope. Tools to resist despair. Reading on this topic, learning from other communities and places, I have seen these five methods used:

• • Drawing inspiration from the courage, struggle, and perseverance of those most affected by the systems of oppression we fight. For me, today, this is the conversation I have with a friend in Gaza, distributing food to displaced communities far from his own house that no longer exists, hearing him contemplate whether he should leave or not, and choosing time and time again to stay and continue the work.
  • Concentrating and celebrating the change we can see, and gaining faith in the process of change. Both through small victories and seeing personal and social change. For me, today, this is the conversation with a bystander at a protest who first yelled at us that we are lying about children being killed in Gaza, and left our long conversation heartbroken from the understanding that this is happening, and wondering what she is to do about it.
  • Acting in community, supporting each other, creating safe spaces, and practicing self- and mutual care within them. Sharing food after a violent protest, holding each other as our hearts break time and time again, and insisting on continuing to talk and think together.
  • Connecting to the past. Seeking inspiration from past struggles and past public attitudes, and using these to inform and inspire a path forward. This, today, reminds me that these crimes will end. Eventually.
  • Redefining meaning and value of action beyond its intended goal of dismantling the system of oppression. There is a fair amount of psychological research showing that sharing trauma, having witnesses to your trauma, helps victims in dealing with it. This is both a psychological need and a political one. The presence of activists means injustice is witnessed and recognized, and those facing it do not do so alone.

But resisting despair is not enough. Activism and resilience require hope.

Speaking to an activist friend about this, he referred me to Albert Camus’s The Plague, arguing that what the book clearly depicts is that doing the right thing, the decent human thing, is all we can do, including, and maybe especially, when there is no hope.

My great-grandmother was sixteen when the Jewish community in Hebron was attacked in 1929, sixty-seven of its members murdered. She and her family were taken by a neighbor into his home, and the neighbor and his son stood guard with word at the door not to allow any attackers in. That decency, that humanity that defied the religious-national divides that at the time were just being constructed, is the reason I exist.

I argue that stories like this don’t only move us to tears, they also plant hope—they do so because they prove that these divides are constructs. They prove that people can, and do at times, choose to defy them and, in that, expose their falsehood—the racism that these divides are. In that defiance we see hope for what could be.

I started writing this text from a genuine quest for practical tools for myself and my community to fight the despair that we often feel. I started writing it as a call for help, from the reader who is not here with us, who has the time, energy, and knowledge, to help us. That request still stands, but while writing I also realized how much of this learning, this creation of knowledge, must be collective community work: collective thinking, collective learning, collective reflecting, and collective action. Dare I add that it lies in holding hope collectively; holding it for one another when some of us are too tired to do so; allowing it to spread through us from one person to another, actively creating hope where we cannot find it.

Ziv, O. (2023). “Palestinians recount settler, army torture amid surge in West Bank expulsions.” In: +972 Magazine.