I don’t know if Frankenstein star Christoph Waltz is normally a man of few words but he didn’t have much to say at a recent Venice film festival press conference. Waltz uttered only six words, with “CGI is for losers” constituting four of them. The remaining two were “I don’t”, in response to a question about how he stays hopeful in today’s “monstrous times”.
Waltz is certainly not alone in despairing of a world which seems to elevate liars, cheats, and adjudicated sexual predators. It’s hard to feel hope when a genocide has been livestreamed to our phones for almost two years and there is no justice in sight; just a systematic slaughter of the journalists who serve as messengers. No peace prospects on the horizon; just well-paid consultants putting together ethnic cleansing prospectuses so a “Gaza Riviera” can be built. (Oh, sorry, we’re supposed to say “voluntary relocation”, aren’t we?)
As a British Palestinian, I urge you to keep (or start!) speaking up for Gaza and Palestinians. The situation in Gaza and the West Bank gets worse daily. But please do not succumb to hopelessness or assume that you are powerless to change things. While it may seem like nothing will shame politicians into meaningfully upholding international human rights law, your voice does make a difference. Writing to your MP; protesting; donating; supporting the Freedom Flotilla Coalition; advocating online; boycotting companies such as Airbnb which profit from illegal settlements. These sorts of things do make a difference.
Plenty of people are keen to tell you otherwise. There is a certain form of hopelessness that has been repackaged as sensible centrist thinking. Don’t bother with your silly little acts of activism or your social media posts, these people will tell you, they won’t achieve anything.
Look, for example, at the contemptuous reaction in many quarters to Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s decision to boycott King Charles’s state banquet for Trump in protest over Gaza. Per a sneering piece in the Telegraph, this boycott “betrays a serious lack of seriousness”. Davey would be far more serious, apparently, if he just joined other politicians in doing nothing, except perhaps issuing an occasional statement expressing “serious concern” about Israel bombing another hospital or executing another aid worker.
Of course, Davey’s boycott won’t shame Trump into acting. But it might cause someone to think more deeply about the perverseness of holding an extravagant state banquet while a US-enabled Israel, which has a history of weaponising food and controlling the calorie intake of a captive Gaza population, has orchestrated a human-made famine. It may pressure other politicians into some sort of action.
And of course your tweet about Gaza, or the Palestine flag in your window, aren’t going to stop the genocide. But I’ll tell you what these things do achieve: they help stop despair from taking over. Perhaps, if you do not belong to a group that has been systematically dehumanised for decades, it might be hard to understand the impact of these acts of solidarity. But whenever I see a stranger wearing a keffiyeh, or a celebrity raising money for Gaza, or a Palestinian solidarity sign in a window, it gives me hope. It reminds me that not everyone has normalised a genocide. Not everyone has given up on Palestinians.
More importantly, small acts add up. Politicians rarely do the right thing for the hell of it; they have to be pressed into progress. Do you think women would have got the vote if suffragettes hadn’t made a nuisance of themselves? Do you think the US civil rights movement would have succeeded if African Americans sat compliantly at the back of the bus? Do you think same-sex marriage would have been legalised if the queer community and their allies had just quietly hoped for the best? Do you think apartheid in South Africa would have ended when it did without global boycotts?
Celebrities can play an outsized role in shaping politics. When Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997, first on the cover of Time magazine, then in character in her sitcom in front of an audience of 42 million people, it was a watershed moment for gay rights. People who had never met an openly queer person started to understand that they weren’t weird deviants but people just like them. That episode helped pave the way for gay marriage in the US. So don’t let anyone tell you that asking celebrities to speak up is a waste of time. If celebrity advocacy didn’t make a difference, there wouldn’t be such an aggressive campaign from pro-Israel voices to smear Ms Rachel, the children’s entertainer and educator who has done an enormous amount to humanise Palestinians, and said she is willing to risk her career to keep advocating for children in Gaza.
They may seem trivial but social media posts aren’t meaningless either. If online advocacy didn’t matter, US politicians – many of whom openly lamented there was too much pro-Palestinian content on the app – wouldn’t have made a bipartisan effort to ban TikTok. If angry tweets were irrelevant, Israel’s government wouldn’t be pumping an additional $150m (£115m) into shaping public opinion. Last year the Times of Israel reported that the foreign minister said the increased hasbara budget “would be used to influence sentiment in the foreign press and on social media”.
It is hard to stay hopeful in today’s “monstrous times”, but for the sake of the people bearing the brunt of modern monstrosities, it is imperative that we do. Ask yourself this: if you were in Gaza, watching your babies wither away from engineered starvation, would you want someone to speak up for you? If your kids were buried alive under rubble, left to die a protracted and painful death over several days, would you want people to demand accountability? Or would you simply say to yourself: as a sensible geopolitical realist, I know this is all far too complex for the average citizen to understand; too hopeless for them to solve. Far better if good people do nothing. The politicians will sort it out.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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