Sarah Schulman - Solidarity

APA: Schulman, S. (2025). The FANTASY and NECESSITY of SOLIDARITY. Thesis.

page 36: (from a commentary published October 16, 2023, in New York magazine)

... Palestine, like every society in the world, is a multidimensional society. Like Jews and Americans and Israelis, Palestinians contain multiple factions and religious perspectives -- Muslim, Christian, Druze -- and they hold a wide variety of political visions. The only thing they share is the desire to be free. They would never be able to act like a united bloc and all vote the same way, for example, in the same way that we cannot. Because ==they are human, as we know ourselves to be==. To fear unanimity is to imagine they are different from everyone else on earth.

The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence. Every person has to face their own complicities, and we start this by listening to whoever is suffering. Even if it is by our own hand. It is this transcendence that can lead us all to a better place.