Rev Left Radio - Rev Left Intervention: Help Get Food to Palestinians in Gaza!

Episode Date: August 2, 2025

Make a direct intervention in the lives of Palestinians enduring genocide: Donate directly to the Rayyan family in Gaza: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-rebuilt-rayyan-family-their-future-again Donate to Community Kitchens in Gaza: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/47-0667089/gaza-hunger-strike  

One of the worst things about watching the ongoing genocide in Palestine is this gap between how deeply you feel this injustice, how profoundly you want to do something, anything to stop it, and your seeming complete impotence as an individual to do anything at all. We can and we have and we should continue to educate ourselves and others. to organize, to put pressure on corporations, on political systems, on politicians, to do everything that we possibly can to stop this genocide. And I believe that all tactics are permissible in the fight to end this horrific mass murder campaign that U.S. and Israel are imposing on the people of Palestine, from direct action like Palestine action to, the armed resistance of the Palestinian themselves to any and everything that people around the world can possibly do to help others. But sometimes it can feel like there's nothing you can do. And what I wanted to do in this episode very quickly is offer you a couple ways to meaningfully do something, to take that anger and that hurt, to open your heart up and to do something.

nothing is ever enough right nothing short of stopping this atrocity will ever feel like enough but one of the worst things i think we can do is to watch the horrors unfolding in palestine and pretty much do nothing we all have a responsibility to do something and so today i'm going to play a very short clip a voice message that my good friend sent in where she is talking about her friend and her friend's family who lives in Gaza and are in continual need of help. Food prices obviously when and where you can find it have gone through the absolute roof

as Israel with the full backing of the United States imposes a purposeful, conscious starvation campaign on the people of Palestine. Men, women, and children, the elderly, the disabled, infants, nobody is safe from this horrific genocidal death machine that is the United States and Israel. So I have a quick little voice message I'm going to play that is incredibly moving and shows the closeness of my friend B to this set of families in Gaza right now asking for some help and I will link to this GoFundMe in the show notes. So if you have any disposable income,

anything at all to donate to these families in a concrete direct way that goes directly into their pockets and that goes directly into being turned into food to go into the stomachs of this family and their children. That is a concrete action you can take here and now. I don't have access to every family in Gaza. I do, through circumstance, happen to have direct access to this family and so I can help this family. And while I wish I could help every family, I wish to God, I could give every single family in Gaza

a warm meal, a safe home, space to breathe and to live and to be human without the constant threat of a miseration, but I can only help who I can help and here's a family that we can help. So I'm using the Rev.F platform to put out a call to play this voice message briefly and to provide a donation link where you can go and donate. Now that donation link is a GoFundMe that's been active for a very long time. It's been active since the beginning of this genocide and it supports multiple families.

So it'll say that it has $40,000 in it. But again, that's spread over almost two years. three different families. So any money is still needed. This is an ongoing genocide as we all know and the needs of the people in Gaza are ongoing. So don't let that number dissuade you from helping whatsoever. And I also have a very close friend locally. Her name is Ashland. I don't want to give her full name. But she works with an organization called Grace Lutheran Church. And they've recently went on a hunger strike to raise money for community kitchens in Gaza. They've reached their goal of $10,000, but she assured me that every single dollar over that goal will continue to go to these community kitchens in Gaza, including the Gaza Soup Kitchen, the Samir Project, watermelon relief, and watermelon sisters.

These are local community-driven operations. Your gift helps keep pots boiling and kitchens open. With food prices rising over 1,000% and widespread store closures, community kitchens are the only reliable source of hot. meal. So those are going to be the two donation links I'm going to put in the show notes. They go to directly, concretely, and immediately help put food in the stomachs of our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Hi, my name is B, sometimes known as Speranza, and I need to talk to you today about the Ryan family. I'm good friends with Afnan Ryan. I poet still and a professor before she and her family were trapped in the open-air prison of Gaza. She's exactly like so many women. we all know and love no children because she loves her quiet, loves drinking coffee in the early morning when the sun is just rising. And we used to talk about how soon this would all be over

and we could get coffee together, complain about boring things. She'd teach me Arabic so I could read her Arabic poetry finally. I'd email her when I found a perfume with her name and she'd laugh about the one with mine because she wants to eat honey, not smell like it. But that is all different now. We don't talk about normal things anymore. We talk about the cost of flour. About if it's enough to feed everyone for a week, we talk about where they're running after they're evacuated again. We don't talk about the worst things, and I think that maybe we never will. Avnan is there with her sister Noor, who was an English teacher before the war, and Noor is a mom like me. And like me, she's married to the love of her life, but she hasn't seen him since October of 2023.

And she still believes that they're going to be together again someday. She is incredibly kind, and she deeply loves her two children. The littlest is only six, and she lost her first tooth in this war. She has never been to school. And now they've been joined by their little sister Tasneem, also a mother. Her son's name is Yazan, and he's only a baby. He taught me an Arabic phrase that I hate having had to learn this way. Bidiakal, I want food.

He cries out this phrase all day long. My biggest fear, though, is for Kinan, Afnan's little brother. He's just a teenager, but he is trying so hard to become a good man, but he is skipping rare meals to feed the little ones. In the latest photos, I felt sick seeing him because there is almost nothing left. There's strength in his eyes, but I don't know how much longer his heart can sustain him. And when I asked Beth not about it, she said, she's tried to get him to keep his share. But he loves the little nine-year-old boy, Mustafa, so much.

And Mustafa is sick and needs more. So he won't, he won't eat his own. He gives it all to Mustafa. I panic pretty often, thinking that I'm just one person and I can't do enough to keep them alive. And I know, I know so many of you feel this too. this strange anxiety, a helplessness, this sense that surely this has to be like a video game. So there's got to be a code to get through this level. But nearly two years in, and my brain is finally accepting that there is no cheat code.

It's just me. It's just all of us. And I can't do what we all want to do. I can't reach in and pull them out. I can't sell my house to bribe some occupier to let them go. I can't send them water. I can't send medicine. but I can send money for food, and I can ask you all to do the same because the aid lines are death traps. And without those, it's $1,000 a week just to eat flour. A thousand a week, that's

10 people giving $100. That's 100 people giving $10. And I know we can do that. We can keep them alive for a little while or longer, and we have to because it's the only way any of us can help at this point. And because it's the only way I will ever see my friend alive again. If you can give anything, please do that. Thank you.