Dignity as a Way to End War
This is Bisan Owda from Palestine.
Bisan Owda (Arabic: بيسان عودة; born 1997 or 1998) is a palestinian journalist, activist, filmmaker and a dreamer, as she says. She is documenting her experiences during the “Israel–Hamas conflict” in the Gaza Strip through Social Media.
I didn`t know Bisan nine months ago. In fact I didn`t know much about anything happening in the Middle East before Bisan. Through reading, informing and transforming myself the past years about the capitalist colonial patriarchy and the ways of land theft, famine, murdering and killing children, mothers and fathers, our MOTHER, I grew up.
I am following Bisan and other palestinian people on Instagram. I want to connect and support wherever I can. I also speak to my Israeli friends who are living in Germany. And I don`t know enough because it is happening for so long now.
What I sense, feel and know about is that the “Israeli- Hamas conflict” is not a war. It is an ongoing ecocide influenced by US and Europe. She and so many people in Gaza are currently facing atrocities, not only losing their village, their roots and GAIAs treasures in the land called Palestine but also being undignified to their core, being dehumanized and soul shattered. This year, 2024, Bisan won a Peabody Award in the News category for her Al Jazeera Media Network show, “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive.”
Yes she is still alive! She is facing atrocities and she is more alive than many people I see in my surrounding. How can that be you might ask?
It is because she can feel and she has something to say!
Bisan grew up in Beit Hanoun. She has worked with the United Nations on gender equality as a member of UN Women’s Youth Gender Innovation Agora Forum. She has also worked with the European Union on climate change, and is an EU Goodwill Ambassador. Bisan has produced a show, Hakawatia, which is aired by Roya TV. She also presented educational Palestinian Arabic videos for the YouTube channel Easy Languages and works for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
“Her Being is pure love, power and presence.” — Tamara Montenegro
During a May 2021 escalation in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bisan shared videos on Instagram with the goal of drawing international attention to conditions in Gaza, which are fueled by the US and European Countries.
What the people of Gaza are showing us is resilience either because they have to, need to or want to. Groundedness is not seperate from your roots. The latter are important to become grounded in an ever changing world. The purpose of displacing people, robbing their cultural wisdom, shaming and undermining it, is fed by thousands of years of colonial capitalist patriarchy.
Living in Morocco for two years and traveling to Tunesia and Egypt, I had a grasp of what colonialism looked like in North Africa and the Middle East and what responsibilities Europeans have about that. Little did I know then.
My first response was to fall into shame and guilt about it. Everyone who has a heart goes there first. However, this only colludes to the colonial paradigm. It is the only respons(e)ability white people can comprehend because we didn´t learn how to feel, to stay connected to GAIA and live with the land!
It is not ok that the emotional body is untrained in that way, if you want to be connected to Mother Earth. You need all your feelings unmixed to be able to create something different. You need distinctions about all your bodies. You need to unlearn the colonial capitalist patriarchy! Before that every healing, transforming and therapy is contexted in patriarchy and will collude your growing up process.
So what to do next?
Start leaving patriarchy!
On these websites you find portals & doorways to decolonize. There are a bunch of people who even are crazy enough to live together and meet up in teams to do that.
And they practice, even as a lifelong practice. It is a practice containing distinctions indigenous people know about and we should have listened.
I didn`t know enough yet about the situation in Palestine. But I know now and I am writing this short article here to remind you about the colonial paradigm living in you and your responsibility, especially as a white person to get your voice, authority and inner wisdom back from the colonial capitalist patriarchy. It is outdated, like a zombie half-dead it still hangs around. Let it burn! Let it fall off of you. I did it too and I am alive!
Let Bisan show you too! The seeds of archiarchy in you, can not be killed!
After the Israel Defense Forces told Gaza residents to evacuate in October 2023, Bisan and her parents relocated from Beit Hanoun to Al-Shifa Hospital. Her family’s home and her office in Rimal were both bombed. All of her filming equipment was destroyed. From Al-Shifa Hospital, Bisan documented everyday life on social media. She witnessed the Al-Shifa ambulance airstrike on the 3rd of November. She was displaced from Al-Shifa Hospital after it was sieged in mid-november. By May 2024, Bisan had accumulated 4.1 million followers on Instagram.
Bisan is a guardian, an earth guardian.
If she wouldn`t speak up, using her rage, sadness, fear and joy, her range on Social Media, her community, who will.
No one can do it for you but also no one can stop you from it!
She is a brave young woman. She has to be in these conditions and she continues to report on the conditions of this conflict as she experiences them and let her dignity lead her to the gap of not knowing what to do but the clarity that wars must end.
Bisan shows us what it means to be a woman of earth. She is connected to the land, speaking up with arrogance, taking no bullshit form anyone. She knows her roots and worth and despite all the suffering doesn`t let her dignity to be touched.
Thank you Bisan Owda!
