In Defense of Righteous Anger: A Speech for Gaza

Miramichi, Flag Raising Ceremony for the Children of Gaza

I don’t intend to speak today as a political activist.

Why? Basically, so much of what constitutes political activism today is predicated upon an unrestrained and self-righteous anger.

This doesn’t mean that I discount the importance of anger: it is a productive and worthwhile emotion. However, in its common form, anger does not serve the people who have been suffering in the occupied territories of Palestine for the last 75 years.

I also feel anger at times. I am aware of its political utility, it mobilizes crowds. We have seen the benefits and pitfalls of mobilized anger among the newest social movements in Canada over the last fifteen years. At the very least, we can say that it is, for those who feel it, an optimistic emotion: it exists among those who haven’t yet lost hope. To be angry is to believe that things could have been otherwise. It is for those who haven’t given up: it strives, perseveres, toward new possible futures. This is the productive face of anger.

More frequently, though, I feel grief. We are here at this flag raising ceremony to mourn the loss of life, particularly the loss of children’s lives in Gaza. Yet, are we not plunged into a period of perpetual mourning? In the midst of perpetual mourning every few months some join us to share in the tears — they participate in the mourning process. Gaza is the world’s ‘dark night of the soul.’ Each death of a child in Palestine is also the death of possibility.

But wait — isn’t it even worse?

A doctor from Gaza told me a few years ago that there is an acronym commonly used in the hospitals: WCNSF. It stands for “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.” The child’s family has been killed and the child, without his family, now survives, but as ‘injured.’

How do we mourn for these children who are still living? Is there no hope for the widow’s son?

In losing their parents, have they not also lost the source of their history, their very biography? If we are in a period of perpetual mourning for the children of Gaza then it is not only for those lost lives but also for those whose lives have always already been lost. They have already lost the place from which they came, their history, their possibility. If we are in a period of perpetual mourning for the children of Gaza then it is not only for those lost lives -but also for those whose lives have always already been lost. This is the deepest part of the mourning process.

It seems to me that this is the real tragedy: those killed in Gaza were in some sense already living without life, within a limitless space of hopelessness, without possibility or future. We cannot say that they were enjoying life on the day of their death. The loss of those enjoying life is worth mourning as well — and we certainly mourn their lives. But, precisely, we can mourn their lives — something has been lost there, something that was there to lose.

But in this darkest night of the soul for the Palestinian people, nothing is lost — it is already lost.

We mourn for those who are still living in the occupied territories. For these people life was already lost and the future was never possible. We remain, once again, in perpetual mourning: the loss of the very space of loss.

In such dark and hopeless spaces, some righteous and refined anger would seem to constitute progress, … perhaps even something of a miracle. There are nonetheless, in the midst of the perpetual mourning process, those in Palestine who regularly reveal to us the miracle of humanity: from hopelessness to anger, from perpetual mourning toward a desire for another world — there is the boldness of the Palestinian people to pursue the possibility of possibility in spite of it all.

We witness on social media today those younger people who are inspired by their righteous anger.

Why?

Some years ago I was told that a child in Gaza said: “the rockets might be above us, but those who shot them do not believe as I do that God is above those rockets.” An unshakable conviction, that is, a belief, even in the most hopeless of spaces, shows to us the essence of what it means to be human.

I appeal to those of you who feel as though we are living the end times: the masses who feel hopeless, depressed, and alone. There are reasons to despair: global warming, unthinkable new wars against the backdrop of new emerging geopolitical troubles, plagues, and the obvious erosion of cultural meanings and values. This is why the Palestinian struggle is also your struggle: you who suffer from hopelessness, you who are, without knowing it, in perpetual grief; you who have survived atrocities committed during what was for your people a hopeless period of Canadian history, you who sat in bomb shelters in Ukraine, and you who rose up and in Ireland refusing to be tamed; but also you who face constant threats of violence because of your body; each of you, who remain, in spite of it all, resolute.

Inhabitants of this hopeless space, in perpetual mourning; you share in the global mourning process, and Gaza personifies it. Look to their righteous and refined anger; the anger that does not rise up against brothers and sisters in segregation, but the anger that, like Jonah who was consumed in the belly of a large whale, learns the lesson of Abel and Cain, of Yusuf in the well: “I am my brother’s keeper.” The work of righteous anger is a new lesson in solidarity among the hopeless, of those who care for the widow’s son, of those who become protectors of those without a name, of the WCNSFs.

You are right to be angry. Your anger is not political. It is righteous.