VALAR MORGHULIS

Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it's your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.

“I was going to go trick or treating,” she calls down to him, her attention mostly absorbed by the bowl of candy between knees and chest that she rummages through. “Stupid rental wouldn’t start. No one comes out this far either, so I guess I’ll still have candy.”

(Never mind that she could always have candy, that she was the one that bought the bag.)

   𝙷𝙴'𝚂 𝙽𝙾𝚃 𝚂𝚄𝚁𝙿𝚁𝙸𝚂𝙴𝙳 𝚃𝙾 𝙵𝙸𝙽𝙳 𝙷𝙴𝚁 𝙸𝙽 𝙲𝙾𝚂𝚃𝚄𝙼𝙴. He’s not surprised to find her with candy. Somehow, he isn’t surprised to find her on the roof. Will rolls down the window the rest of the way just before he kills the engine. Arya calls to him, and he offers the faint facsimile of a smile at her frustration. On the surface, everything is relatively ordinary. Before he gets out, Will leaves the keys in the Volvo in case she feels the need to leave once he’s asleep. He stands in the yard, looking up at her with his head tipped back, the brown grass soft and black-between with muddy earth. Dark, wet dirt. It always rains on Halloween. It always rains, and someone always ends up slaughtered. Busy day.

   Busy enough to ruin his plans with her. They were supposed to make dinner, go to the screenings of stupid old scary movies they have at the theatre in the next city over. When he’d called to say that Jack needed him, he’d heard the distant haze of resentment that colored her reasonable response. Purple on an ugly yellow, like the soft puddle of a faded bruise.

   She could have gone to Alana’s if the car had started. Alana’s house is in the city, in a nice neighborhood. People probably give out candy apples and king-sized chocolate bars. Decorate their houses; pumpkins and cobwebs, but the kind that come out of a bag. The streets are lit and the sidewalks are wide and people set up chairs on their stoops so all the children know they’re welcome.

   Not for the first time, though the first time in this circumstance, Will thinks of her as a child amongst other children. The halted exhilaration of the possibility of being a child again. The mask, the costume, their ability to render her backwards before the point where keeping track of her own age got away from her, to obscure the evidence of aging where it is visible on her in a way that she is deeply and plainly uncomfortable with. Dressed like a monster, an ordinary plastic-mask monster like everyone else, a monster in the way that everyone else is a monster, she could be a child again. They would treat her like a child, too. Laugh and indulgently pretend to be frightened by her mask, make guesses at her costume, drop candy in her bag just like all the other kids. What it would feel like for her, to be assumed to be one of them—for that assumption to create a selfsame reality in the isolation of a single evening.

   Will comes up the front steps and sits on the edge of the porch, just beneath where she is perched above him on the roof, and looks out into the dark. Arya rummages noisily through the bowl of candy. He’ll make her something of substance to eat when she comes down, once she’s inside, thawing—they'll worry about the car tomorrow.

   "It’s a lousy place for trick or treating. They close off the streets in town so all the kids can go house to house there instead."

   She couldn't have known that. Or she might've known. It's one thing to get dressed, to be prepared for them to come to you, but a whole other thing to go out looking. There are things he wants to tell her. It won't feel the way she thinks it will feel, being with other people. At first, there is a glow to it. A receding warmth. It's pleasing to preform well, to bask in the reflection of your perceived self in the eyes of other people. The reflected self is usually ordinary. When people don't find you threatening, they assign you to the categorical slot of ordinary. Like them. It's pleasing to do anything well, it's pleasing to seem like something that people can accept. Eventually, though, the pleasure wears off.

   People become predictable, grating, even the ones you genuinely like. Their ordinary fears and their ordinary desires—which are at first charming as evidence of some kind of human universality, like the same songs repeated on every radio, the same bumper stickers on every car—grow increasingly stupid and banal. Cheap and insincere. Your nerves grow over-sensitive. Resentment sets in like motion sickness and the performance shifts from spontaneous to scripted and then the game just isn’t fun anymore.

   It's something she needs to experience for herself to really understand it. It's also something she needs to experience so that she can understand how good it could feel to come home after that. To take off the costume, shed the skin. To be the animal of your naked self again.

   Like how she sometimes closes her eyes and lifts her nose and waits for the smell of the snow to come.

   Will exhales and feels the wet mist of his own breath on his wind-bit face. It's cold. Colder than usual for this time of the season. The crowds probably would have been small, smaller than she wanted. Smaller than she was rehearsing with in her mind. A complicating factor. The average person is less suspicious when they exist in a comfortably padded herd. Alone and individual, people grow vicious. Will looks up at her bare toes curled around the gutter, gone a colour not unlike a corpse. She can’t see him, but his expression is soft and easy,  "We’ll go next year, if you want to."

   There's only silence above him until he hears the thin rustle of a wrapper tearing. Will doesn't like the idea of her making herself sick on candy—but she's not a child. That's the problem, the pivot point of the oblong centrifugal cycle that keeps bringing her back here in uneven intervals. The thing she can't have back and the thing he can't manage to give her, no matter how hard they are trying to conduct a mutual, soft-edged staging of it from time to time—

On Revenge and Grief

On the 15th, Israel returned to bombing Gaza during the ceasefire. Two days after, they bombed Gaza again, leaving more than 100.000 people without homes.

Israel has been blackmailing Hamas and other Palestinian leaderships in Gaza, saying they will only let Palestine resume fishing, reopen its borders and let Qatar financially aid them in exchange for political prisoners.

Israel has imposed stricter import restrictions on Palestine, including the import of raw materials, what’s directly affecting Palestine’s industry and leaving hundreds on job insecurity. Note that Gaza’s borders are all tightly controlled by either Israel or Egypt in a blockade (hence why it’s called an open air prison)

Because of the 14 year old blockade, Israel doesn’t let construction goods in Gaza under the guise it can be used for military purposes. Over 100.000 displaced Palestinians have no material to reconstruct their homes and have to repurpose debris, while some of them are uncertain to rebuild at all under the political climate

A timeline of Nizar Banat’s murder and protests

June 24th: Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic of the Palestinian Authority, had his home raided by PA security forces at 3:30 AM, was taken to an unknown location and killed. The body was hidden from the family. Preliminary autopsies say the cause of death was unnatural and he took blows to the head

Still about Banat’s murder, his home is in an part of the West Bank occupied by Israel, meaning that the PA couldn’t coordinate the attack without help of the Israeli government

To understand better who Banat was and the relationship of Palestinians with the PA, here’s an article

Palestinians came together to protest and were met with heavy backlash, being teargassed, beaten with sticks and brutalized by plainclothes officers

Trigger warning for police brutality: here’s two videos showing the protestors being repressed by the police

June 25th: Dozens of Palestinians turn up to Banat’s funeral to protest and are heavily repressed.

The PA brings an unconscious Palestinian to the ER of the Palestinian Medical Complex and closes off the building for other injured

Three lawyers were arrested by the PA

June 26th: Hundreds of protesters gathered in Ramallah demanding that the PA’s president resign. Once again they were heavily repressed

Seven Palestinian journalists were brutally beaten by PA officers in plainclothes and uniform alike. Their names are: Shatha Hammad, Saja Al-Alami, Mohammed Ghafri, Najlaa Zeitoon, Fayhaa Khanfar

Here’s a graphic video of a PA officer in plainclothes brutalizing Najlaa Zeitoon

Here’s a graphic video of the PA dragging an injured protestor down a street

June 27th: PA cuts off internet access in Ramallah.

PA police attacked a group of twenty women trying to keep each other safe. Right now, Palestinian youth are protesting, without knowing if a plainclothes officer or Fatah loyalist will brutalize them with no way of communicating

About Beita

Israel is building a new settlement in Beita, on the West Bank (I want it to be very clear it’s not Israeli land either by 1948 or 1967 accords, it’s an invasion even to the most liberal person)

Beita has been raided by settlers for weeks now, with deaths, including children, and injured. IOF has been shooting and stopping ambulances coming to aid.

Beita heavily depends on its olive groves, and over 100 olive saplings were burned and older trees chopped down

Residents have come together in something they call night confusion units, where they honk horns, burn tyres and use laser lights to bother settlers. This is what’s being compared to the Charlottesville nazis by zionists.

About Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah residents are still being beaten and brutalized for months now. Settlers have thrown stones at palestinians and pepper sprayed four children, leaving 20 hurt, all with cover of the IOF.

Israelis have started fires in Sheikh Jarrah

Here’s a graphic video of the IOF choking a resident and beating another (26/06)

The IOF has been abducting people in Sheikh Jarrah by the dozens. Today, they arrested two members of the Abdulatif family, including a 16 year old and two women of the El Qasem family, after making sexual comments to humiliate them

They’ve also detained Bashar Yaish, a resident from Sheikh Jarrah, for no reason, being released hours later. It can’t be more clear theyre doing this to break palestinians’ spirits.

Mohammed El Kurd was almost arrested again, while other residents have been arrested for recording the streets of Sheikh Jarrah, under charges of “Tiktok”

About Silwan

Today’s the last day before the demolition of Silwan. Over 1500 palestinians have been threatened by the Israeli government to either destroy their own homes or pay the government to destroy it for them

The Bustan neighborhood will be demolished to make space for a biblical park. This thread by Mohammed El Kurd of how this is a systemic excuse to displace palestinians

They’ve renamed Silwan with a hebrew name in anticipation, attempting to erase them

Not only are the people of Beita, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza and so on being made homeless, they’re made homeless in a place where they can’t build homes elsewhere and are being systemically repressed, starved and driven out. Be angry and amplify Palestinian voices. Follow Palestinians like Mohammed El Kurd, Linah Al Saafin, Mariam Barghouti and Al Shabaka and share their voices. To quote @/princessmlokhia on twitter, they will demolish these homes if they believe they can do so quietly.

national museum of african american history & culture  pb resources good twitter thread

“You’ve explained how it’s supposed to work, and I’ve explained that I don’t care.”

“Either we both get new names, or neither of us do.”

“You said I had a name before as well, but you won’t tell me what it was.”

“Purely as a hypothetical exercise, what would you name me?”

“You are… a light in the darkness.”

“You look like the underside of a Dreg’s boot.”

“I won’t have someone in my care without a proper name.” 

“I appreciate your handiwork! You just saved me a lot of trouble.”

“You don’t have to talk when you can shoot like that.”

“Since you kept this cargo out of the hands of the enemy, I’d say you’re entitled to a cut.”

“How has our friend been performing in the field?”

“And there haven’t been any indiscretions?”

“Do you have something to tell me?”

“Then he’s lying. Even to you.”

“I gave you rules for a reason.”

“Following rules is counter to my nature.”

“Someday you’ll realize who you were doesn’t matter. What’s important is who you are.”

“You have faced more than your share of cruelty. You’ve learned what it is to truly suffer.”

“I’m not afraid of being hurt anymore.”

“If you want me to stay, you’ll have to offer me more than threats.” 

“I will call for you again if I need you.”

“Maybe there’s some wisdom in your defiance.”

“I have an idea to protect you.”

“I—I think I’ll be fine.”

“I put you in this position. I let this happen.”

“You had no choice. We can’t change the past. We can only look to the future.”

“My future is with you. You’re all I have. The only person who… the only person who cares about me.”

“You won’t ever know who cares about you until you meet them.”

“I won’t abandon you. You would never do that to me.”

This is a non-exhaustive list of brands to boycott if you would like to participate in the Palestinian call for global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation. I've excluded security, construction, etc. firms that cannot be boycotted in an individual capacity. However, pressuring governments & other organisations to refuse contracts to those firms is an integral part of the BDS movement. Will also try to make seperate posts on how to add your voice to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

On another note, Coca-Cola and Nestle belong on every boycott list. Not just because they are complicit in the Israeli occupation but also because they have committed some of the worst human rights violations the world over. Coca-Cola has gone as far as having Union leaders murdered. Both Coca-Cola and Nestle steal water supplies and create water insecurity in already marginalised regions among many, many other crimes. I did not include them in the list because I am aware of how overwhelmed people become when they see those two companies and all their endless subsidiaries and I wanted to keep the list targeted on companies that have been the specific focus of the Palestinian BDS movement.

I have also excluded some brands that are often on older BDS lists, like McDonald's, because over the years they have stopped engaging in the activity that resulted in their boycott or have simply fallen to a lower priority because their relatively lower level of involvement compared to the brands that are our focus.