Your Manual to How to Function During Genocide
Chapter One.
Istanbul & Gaza share the same pulse
8:12 AM
Escaped the choking maze of Istanbul’s tourist traps, where selfie sticks outnumber soul-searchers, and headed east, deep into the suburbs of Turkey, where no one's shouting in French about evil eyes or lining up for overpriced knockoff brands.
Two hours away. Maybe three. Finally, no influencers filming another man flipping one single scoop of ice cream like it’s an ancient ritual, while that same man whoes probably deep in depression, performs it 200 times a day for clout he’ll never taste. That one scoop cone costs three times what it’s worth and tastes like frozen diabetes.
No shade to Istanbul. Just to the tourists, obnoxious doesn’t even begin to cover it.
9:27 AM
We’re on the bus now, headed to the bazar, not for souvoniers, for grociers. My daughter picked the back seat, so naturally, I follow. Free will? Never heard of her.
We sit by a defective door that only closes after two tries. The driver isn’t phased. He’s made peace with his imperfect machine.
Meanwhile, my sciatica flares up into my skull like a siren I ignored for a decade. My body is staging a rebellion over all the years I’ve gaslit it through war, loss, and deadlines. But no, don’t blame me. Blame the occupation. Even when I forget to buy salt, I look at the sky and mutter, “This is probably Israel’s fault.”
10:51 AM
A navy blue car crashes into the bus. I used to think Turks were blessed lunatics behind the wheel who never crash. Turns out they do.
Police arrive. Everyone’s calm. Respectful. No threats. No military-grade rifles. Just humans sorting a human error. Imagine that. Zionists wouldn’t understand this. Civility is an alien concept to them.
Their regime lives in my head rent-free. Not as a haunting, but as a blueprint to dismantle. Slowly but surely, it is coming down. If your heart aches from the genocide, let this soothe you: it’s not a fantasy, it’s a timeline.
Borrow my lullaby if you want.
It starts like this:
“Death, death to the IDF.”
Yes. Say it. Out loud. Say it again.
Or chant:
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Or maybe:
In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.
And for the brave ones who really know pain:
كسم إسرائيل
(If you know, you know.)
11:30 AM
Settled into a taxi, as usual, where the seatbelt has either been cut or shoved so deep under the seat that it might as well be with the spare tire in the trunk. Turkish taxi drivers drive like they’re in a video game, no seatbelt, no fear, just pedal slammed into the apocalypse. If they die, they die legends.
12:10 PM
At the bazar now. I buy strawberries and peaches. Their sweetness wrestles my tongue like a memory of home. For a second or two, I'm there, before the screams and the sirens. The vendors yell "Çilek!" with their whole chest.
I learned some Turkish not for the love of language, but to survive and to understand the sellers shouting over my silence. It’s çok zor, very hard.
My mother learned French, Hebrew, Turkish, English and Arabic, of course.
I followed, stumbling through Turkish and Spanish, resenting Hebrew, and assuming I could lean forever on my English and Arabic.
Because that’s what we do, we try to understand people, not because we like them, but because it’s the only way we survive them. We’re introverts dressed up as extroverts. My family? We treat social gatherings like a virus we’re trying to dodge. Now imagine how they feel, trapped between rubble and tents, crammed among 2.4 million people -minus 4% that Israel has slaughtered- crushed beneath starvation, genocide, and the unbearable weight of the world’s shame.
12:50 PM
Somewhere in the buzz of strawberries and okra, it hits me again: I stay awake at night trying to solve the occupation like it’s a puzzle. If I put the right pieces together, like some brokenhearted scientist at a blood soaked chalkboard, I can fix genocide.
Spoiler: I can’t. But I know who caused it. Do you?
Britain.
The mother of all terrorist regimes.
They tortured their neighbors, unleashed the Black and Tans on the good Irish, then took that exact colonial blueprint and stamped it on us.
Palestine was just next on the list.
So no, the Irish aren’t “lending” us solidarity. They remember. They feel the same قهر, the same betrayal, the same cold paralyzing morning after your family has been slaughtered.
They are healing because they resisted.
So go ahead:
Up the RA. A million times.
Up the resistance until the British Empire collapses.
Then the American Empire.
Then the Zionist regime. Or all together, I wont mind.
It’s all connected.
The blood on my chalkboard knows it.
You might call me mad. I call it clarity.
2:00 PM
This was supposed to be a manual. A guide. A “how-to.”
Like:
Take deep breaths while watching toddlers pulled from rubble
Mute your phone when your friend sends you another mass grave
Sip your coffee while listening to world leaders speak of “both sides”
But it’s not a manual. It’s a mirror.
Because functioning during genocide doesn’t make you a traitor, inaction does.
It makes you a participant in every ugly image I just described.
Unless you fight.
So let me rewrite the last step:
If you believe in freedom,
If you have even one drop of free will left in you
Don’t raise awareness.
Raise hell.
Don’t just hate the empire.
Dismantle it.
How to dismantle an empire? For educational purposes.
If you want a street named after you, pay money to build it.
But don’t forget: Even the streets don’t remember.
I don’t wish to be remembered.
I wish for people to live.
Fully. With dignity. With rights.
With freedom.
Not just my people, ALL people.
Let that be the legacy.
Let that be the chant that never ends.
Let that be Chapter One in our manual.
It saddens me that a manual is needed. But you write from a place that is raw and real. I salute you.
I hope better days are ahead.