Leave Palestine Alone: Season 1, Episode 2 of My Life as an Ansari
Hafsah hits the ground running, and I meet my brother. The story of how I ended up an Ansari to Gazan Muhajireen, plus my struggles and experiences along the way
Here is Season 1, Episode 2 of this article series — the story of my personal experiences and struggles as I became an Ansari (Helper) of Gazan refugees (Muhajireen). List of all episodes can be found here.
“Leave — Palestine — alone.”
I continued to have mentorship sessions with the same mentor/coach; he coached me about excellence, purpose, psychology, mental health, and building wealth. He had already advised me against going into unhelpful spirals of doom-scrolling, damaging my health and productivity, and wasting my capacity and potential.
When I mentioned to him how my knee-jerk, messy Palestine activism was impacting me, this was his advice to me: “Leave — Palestine — alone.” Regarding my unhelpful, frantic activism, he meant. Obviously, I wasn’t about to stop my short-term efforts for Palestine — boycott, donate, raise awareness. But he meant, stop hurting yourself. Stop being frantically hooked onto Palestine news 24/7, and instead focus on building yourself. Play the long game. He himself definitely wants to help Palestine, too — but I needed to get my head straight, and stop sabotaging myself.
I knew he was right. While I kept trying to balance long-term gains with short-term activism, social media’s alluring algorithms and my own unhealthy habits kept ensnaring me into time-wasting, unhelpful doom-scrolling. I really needed to work on this P/PC balance (this is how Steven Covey describes effectiveness — definitely look it up if you’re not familiar with it).
After our Satanyahu project ended, I didn’t keep a close tab on Hafsah’s activism — I caught a few glimpses now and then as I was following her on Instagram. She was involved with public protests in the UK, and she also heavily pushed and fundraised for a long time to have her friend’s family evacuated from Gaza. I helped spread the word for this case, and Alhamdulillah, it was a wonderful win to celebrate when it finally succeeded, and her friend’s family was able to evacuate from Gaza into Egypt.
Around the end of March, Hafsah shared something publicly which pleasantly surprised me. She announced, on a pro-Palestinian group chat that we’re both a part of, that she had spent two weeks in Egypt, and firsthand observed the plight of the hundreds of Palestinian refugees arriving there. Without a support system, the refugees were in dire need of shelter, food, medical care, and so much more. So Hafsah, working along some friends, was announcing an initiative called “Egyptians For Palestinians” — a grassroots initiative to help provide these refugees with various forms of support: medical treatment, job assistance, emotional support, financial support, etc.
We cheered her on. And this was just the beginning. Please do check out this amazing, impactful initiative here.
Life got tougher for the Gazans as months stretched on. The engineered famine and rising prices made survival more and more difficult — not to mention the bombs, killings, repeated mass displacement, and the diseases from the collapse of sanitation. Like I explained in Part 1, more and more Gazans began reaching out online for contributing and sharing their fundraisers, desperately campaigning for their survival. I didn’t have that much reach on Instagram, so I received only a few such messages. I tried to never leave any person without a reply, and I tried to contribute where possible. I’d often point them in the direction of fundraiser aggregators like GazaDirect2FamilyAidSource, and share words of support.
An example of such a person that reached out to me is Moni, a 30-year-old mother who was displaced to Rafah with her two young children. She messaged me on social media with her story and her fundraiser link. I checked out the profile, which had the cues of being genuine, so I contributed to her fundraiser, offering words of support, and pointing her in the direction of a fundraiser aggregator, GazaDirect2FamilyAidSource (link).
I never heard back from her. I hope she and her family are okay. Much, much later on, I was saddened to see the message by her fundraiser organizer, that Moni has a pre-existing diagnosis of multiple sclerosis — a difficult disease that really impacts the patient's life, as the attacks occur in different ways. Symptoms include inflammation of the optic nerve, numbness in the lower extremities, inability to walk with balance, and more.
Moni is a person like us, with dreams and hopes like ours. Please, please consider contributing to help her and her family by clicking this link.
My tactics of awareness-sharing changed over time: I naturally drifted away from short-form content on Instagram, and moved towards these long-form articles on Substack. This seemed to be the opposite of what it takes to get viral fast, but I was following my true north. I am a long-form writer at heart. I began posting a Substack article once every week — a habit that I am mostly able to maintain up to today, Alhamdulillah.
Although I did continue to post one type of short-form content: quick screenshots on my WhatsApp Status. Whenever I would fall into doom-scrolling, I would often try to capitalize on that stumble at least by screen-shotting content that passed my filters of Islamically acceptable content (no swear words, no lack of Islamically appropriate clothing, no music), and then dump these screenshots onto my WhatsApp Status.
Best to beat my perfectionist tendencies with a quick-and-dirty share of awareness to my contacts, in a way that at least gets the job done. We can’t let this genocidal aggression become a shrug-of-the-shoulder, new normal. The Muslim’s heart bleeds for his oppressed brothers and sisters, and talking about this as a mission is one of the least things we can do.
Another brother from Gaza reached out to me on social media with a request for support, sometime in April. For some reason, I only replied to after weeks — perhaps I had missed seeing his message initially. After apologizing for the delayed response, I assured him that I’d contribute to his fundraiser once I could — as his profile had passed my review to be a very reliable and genuine-seeming one. In fact, more than just passable — his social media page actually impressed me. A few motivational and personal growth posts, with basically nothing that wouldn’t pass my filters of Islamically acceptable content to post. Plus, he had an ayah of the Quran as his profile description. My kind of brother, it seemed.
I also shared words of encouragement and solidarity. He responded warmly. I shared with him the link to GazaDirect2FamilyAidSource, for him to try to have his case posted there, and upon his asking, guided him on how to reach out to the admins. It was a short but genuinely nice exchange. We seemed to click, right from the beginning.
Starvation, bombing, displacement, murder, imprisonment, torture, rape — the oppressors’ genocidal tactics became so rampant over the weeks, that sickening became the new norm. At the start of May, something big happened — Israel seized control of the Rafah border. The trickle of evacuees (paying 5,000 USD per adult) from Gaza into Egypt stopped. All of the evacuation fundraisers that had been gathering momentum — evacuation would now have to wait, for God knows how long.
I remember feeling a pang of guilt when I learned about this prison door (the Rafah border) being sealed shut. I could have done more, faster. I should have donated more to the various fundraisers that I was contributing bits of money to. Maybe someone else could have gotten out in time. But I talked myself out of this guilt trip. This feeling of guilt wasn’t right, nor helpful. I didn’t know this Rafah-sealing was going to happen. What Allah had allowed to happen, happened, in His infinite Wisdom. We had to keep doing our best. That’s what Allah wants us to do.
At of the time of writing this, and to the best of my knowledge, Rafah is still sealed shut — but please be clear that this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t contribute to the evacuation fundraisers anymore. Firstly, a lot of the fundraisers are for immediate aid that families require on the ground, not for evacuation. Secondly, even the evacuation fundraisers are still going on, and Alhamdulillah people are continuing to donate to them. Gathering such large amounts of money through crowd-funding needs a lot of time, and In Sha Allah once Rafah opens, there is expected to be an outflux of families who can afford, by then, to evacuate.
Around the end of May, another surprise came from Hafsah’s side — and this one was a big one. I was texting her regarding something about Egyptians For Palestinians, and she mentioned something jaw-dropping: she had actually quit her job in the UK and moved to Egypt, to help the Gazan refugees.
She. Quit. Her. Job. And moved to another country, to Egypt. To help the Gazan refugees. To lead Egyptians For Palestinians.
I was stunned. This was incredibly brave.
I texted Hafsah that may Allah reward her and bless her efforts. I told her it couldn’t have been easy to take the plunge and quit her job — I’ve been wanting to quit my day job and to focus on my passion projects for God: to help people with my writing, and money. But unfortunately it's been years and I haven't been able to do it (due to ... financial charges / not monetizing my passions seriously enough?)
She said things were very hectic at that time since she had just moved, and that soon she might be able to get in touch to update / align better.
My family, in the meanwhile, had a high-level idea of what I was up to. What they knew was that I was working online to promote awareness about Palestine, and donating to legally registered charities. They knew about my attempt at the Satanyahu project. They had some vague idea about my awareness articles, that I would be sitting there working on some Palestine activism, busy writing articles and making Instagram posts. I also mentioned to them about Hafsah — they knew of her existence from the Satanyahu episode — and how she had bravely done what she had just done.
My family themselves are, like Muslims around the world, very concerned about Palestine, keeping up with its high-level news, and boycotting brands to not support the evil oppressors. But beyond this point … the way things moved, and how deeply I got involved, how emotionally attached I became to certain people … for various reasons that I explore in this article series, beyond this point, I mostly did not share specific details with them about what has been going on. I wanted to protect them. At least, that’s what it started with. And there were other reasons, too.
I took a major step.
Around the end of May, weeks after the occupation sealed the Rafah border, social media posts were showing an increasing desperation of the Gazans. The trickle of aid being allowed in was practically close to zero. The engineered famine in North Gaza was claiming lives. Even in the south, supplies were so scarce and the demand so urgent, that prices were skyrocketing. People were starving. Desperate. Crying out. Pleas for help burst across social media.
After consuming some posts on the desperation of the situation, I asked one pro-Palestinian group chat about whether anyone knew of ways to get money into the hands of the starving population on the ground. Things were getting tougher for them.
I was told that it would likely be difficult, and that regular charity aid trucks were probably my best option. But the amount of aid being allowed in through aid trucks was deliberately meager [see this related article I wrote]. That wasn’t enough.
This dead end did nothing to assuage my sense of desperation, my urge to help. People, families, my brothers and sisters, my parents and children, millions of Muslims — starving desperately. I had to do something.
That brother. The one I’d had a warm interaction with a few days back. I had seen his posts / status messages from time to time, and he had continued to impress me with his decent content. His fundraiser showed that had a large family, several siblings. They must be in need.
I took the leap. I sent him a message in the morning, asking him what was the best way to get money into his hands. I didn’t just send the money into his evacuation fundraiser, as often/always these evacuation fundraisers are organized by friends and families outside of Gaza, and might not always be accessible to the people on ground — as this brother confirmed.
I also didn’t want to use bank transfer, either, as that is too … loud. I needed to be careful. Especially given certain regional conditions, some local circumstances. And if I was going to take this risk, I was not planning to tell my family any time soon and get them worried.
Instead, I preferred to use an online wallet or something similar. Even though almost all of the banking system in Gaza had collapsed, bits and pieces were still functional.
I coordinated with the brother. He was grateful. We discussed the details of sending him a small amount; it turned out that we could make it work through a contact of a friend of his.
By that night, it was sent. By the next day, received.
From that point onward, the brother would slowly let me into his life, and I would slowly let him into mine. I had no idea about the amount of joy — and heartbreak — I was about to get into.
Continued in Season 1, Episode 3: Stress Manifests.