As I write this, over 22,000 Palestinians have been killed at the hands of the Israeli government and Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers, with over 7,000 still under the rubble and 50,000 more injured. I find myself feeling more and more isolated as the days go on, as fewer people are talking about Palestine, even as the attacks by Israel have extended to the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. I cannot make sense of how the artists around me go to their studios every day and are seemingly able to block out the rest of the world. It often feels like I am living another reality when people ask me how my day was or about what I am making in the studio – I can only think of Gaza. As a Palestinian-American potter, my life has been unimaginable since October. Not because I had any illusions about how ruthless Israel could be, but because I didn’t realize how helpless and alone I would feel when Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza.
Thankfully, solidarity from the ceramics community lifted my spirits. On November 15th, 2023, my Instagram was flooded with posts from the “Potters for Palestine” campaign that urged potters to call for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The statement accompanying the post, written by ceramicists Melissa Weiss, Julie Moon, Leena Ismail, and Haakon Lenzi, urged readers to support Palestinians “in their struggle for liberation.” By this point, Gaza had experienced “1.4 million displaced civilians and 11,000 deaths – 73% of whom are women, children, and the elderly,” as stated by the Potters for Palestine infographic. When I asked Melissa Weiss why she felt compelled to be a part of the Potters for Palestine organizing, she said, “I’m sitting here looking at my phone of unimaginable horrors and atrocities being done to the Palestinian people by an occupying army and government.” She went on to say of being a potter who uses Instagram right now, “Then scroll to an image of a pot and someone talking about blah blah blah. It was so dystopian. How could I post about anything but to scream for an end to this nightmare? This cruelty is being committed using my tax dollars I pay when I sell pots using this app! With an illegal occupying government using my ethnicity to justify its human atrocities. They are killing everyone and everything and saying if they don’t, I won’t be safe. This is psychotic. It felt so wrong. It is so wrong.”
