The Companion 015: Friendship as solidarity

On my 30th birthday party and Palestine.

Still from Fadia’s Tree (2022)

On the day of my 30th birthday party this past weekend, I felt jittery and jetlagged.

I was cursing myself for organising a party at all; not enough people would turn up, and I would feel a cascade of shame as the people who did would be expecting something more than I could provide. And then, of course, the messages started trickling in. People couldn’t make the party any longer because they were exhausted, burnt out, ill. All very reasonable and plausible — I have sent those messages myself — but still a punch to a sensitive gut.

A friend of mine on a WhatsApp broadcast group (the only way to organise birthdays), actually recently requested people not to tell her if they could no longer make her party. As she rightly pointed out, it’s a bit of a bummer to get those messages and at such a late stage, one simply has to accept the night as it unfolds. Maybe next year I’ll do the same.

But I digress. Earlier on the day of my party, I had attended the National March for Palestine in central London, reportedly the biggest march for Palestine in UK history with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. We shouted for a ceasefire, for a free Palestine, for an end to the genocide. Some of us participated in direct action organised by Sisters Uncut. I marched alongside members of my football team, who, in the past few weeks, have converted our friendships on the pitch into attempts at solidarity: we’ve cancelled competitions and released a statement.

It quickly became clear to me that the reason why so many of my friends felt exhausted or overwhelmed on the day of the party was because of the nature of their work, and their implicit or explicit closeness to the violence occurring in Gaza. Their attempts at solidarity had left them simply not in the mood to party. The weight of the world has felt particularly great the past few weeks. Their energy was needed elsewhere. Often, perhaps most importantly, with their Palestinian friends and colleagues.

Solidarity is a word we hear often. Upon research (Notes Towards a Theory of Solidarity is a great place to start), I’m most drawn to a definition of solidarity encompassing the idea of action. It’s not equivalent to charity, the voluntary giving of help from the privileged to the underprivileged, it’s about the recognition that in a global sense, all of our struggles toward a fairer world are interconnected. That means that solidarity is more of a mutual relationship than a charitable one. We’re moved to treat solidarity as a verb, not out of selfishness, but out of a grander idea of shared interests.

Around the international fight to free Palestine, you’ll also see the word friendship used a lot. There are groups such as Friends of Al-Aqsa, a UK-based Palestinian campaign group and the Britain Palestine Friendship and Twinning Network, a network aiming to “increase mutual understanding, solidarity and cooperation through links with the people of Palestine”, according to their website. My current understanding is that friendship isn’t necessary for solidarity to exist but it can absolutely help strengthen it.

“The Palestinian struggle is everyone's struggle, or at least the struggle of everyone who is concerned with the possibility of a fairer world, and a world that would be materially better for all of us,” says the academic and author Jeremy Gilbert, who is currently working on a book about solidarity. “When people are talking about supporting Palestine in terms of friendship, they are trying to evoke an idea of solidarity as mutually empowering.”

There can be, Jeremy acknowledged, a risk of trivialising the plight of people who are actually suffering by casualising our distant relationships or creating inaccurate equivalences. I personally do not have any Palestinian friends, and I’m more inclined to think that people who have direct relationships with Palestine, who have visited or worked there and created sincere connections, should lean into the idea of friendship as solidarity. For me, there does need to be a sense of intimacy (or at the very least, self-education) involved for a term like friendship to become potent and meaningful.

Thankfully, many of the people involved in the fight for Palestinian justice do have that intimacy. They have been on the ground in Gaza, in the West Bank and beyond. They have, like Sarah Beddington, the British artist and filmmaker behind the beautiful Palestine-based documentary Fadia’s Tree, created long-lasting relationships that have spanned decades. The documentary lightly tells the story of Sarah’s good friend Fadia Loubani, a Palestinian writer, teacher and refugee living in a camp in Lebanon, who sends Sarah on a mission to Palestine to find a symbolic mulberry tree. The tree, according to legend, grew near her family’s former home before they were forced to flee Palestine in the 1940s during the Nakba.

“You know when something happens that changes everything in your life?” Fadia says over a video call with Sarah. “I was living in Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp. It’s one kilometre [square]. There are 50,000 people living there, and there is no sun, no light. I felt there was a border between me and the others outside, and that people were forgetting us. But Sarah let me see how beautiful the world is, how people have beautiful hearts, and even though the politics are very bad, people care and love. They want to help and share. For 20 years, I’ve shared love, death and happiness with Sarah. Now, I’m afraid when I see all this killing every day. I’m afraid that I’ve lost something in my heart, the will to live, to breathe. But Sarah comforts me all the time.”

The pair have spoken a lot since the present crisis started. “We have been thinking that if something good could come out of this horror, it would be the importance of friendship and solidarity with each other across borders, across countries that can build a civil movement that can change the world,” says Sarah. “My hope is that the movement becomes so large that even the worst of worst governments have to pay attention. Every second somebody is dying in Gaza. There's a genocide that is happening there and in plain sight. I don’t feel at all optimistic, but I feel it's a time when the worst and the best of humanity come out.”

Fadia and Sarah met in 2005, almost two decades ago, when Sarah was visiting Beirut for work. “The first thing she said was, are you happy? And I said, ‘That's a very big question to ask someone when you've never met them before. Why do you ask?”’ Sarah reminisces. “She told me, ‘All the freedom I would like to have in this world is denied me as a Palestinian refugee living in a camp where I have no citizenship, I am denied most jobs, I can’t try for anything other than manual labour jobs. I’m having a tough time at the moment.’ We spent an afternoon together walking beside the sea, and that was the beginning.”

Fadia describes a “spirit” between the two women, a friendship that deepened when Sarah set off in search of her tutti (translation: my mulberry tree). “Sarah is so sensitive. She’s clever. She can express what I want to say,” Fadia adds. “She can read my ideas. I don’t feel there are differences between us. She’s like my sister, in thinking, my sister, in my heart. Sometimes when I’m feeling sad she calls me. She feels it. And we share a sense of humour in common.”

And Sarah agrees. “It was as if we'd always known each other. We were so comfortable with each other. I've lived an incredibly privileged life compared to the privations that Fadia has grown up with, with war and losing everything over and over; bombs destroying her house several times during her childhood. But there's a very deep connection, almost like we've met in another life.”

Fadia, Sarah explains, has led her down a path of courage. “I became an activist. Rather than letting life slide by and not being actively involved, I’ve been standing up for the truth, and standing up and saying no, this is not right — not just for the Palestinian struggle, but for every struggle. I have no fear. I’ve learned courage from Fadia, the most fearless, strong leader of a woman.”

Fadia’s relationship with friendship and solidarity comes through so viscerally in her final words during our conversation. “Nothing is impossible in life when people support each other, dream with each other, and feel each other,” she says. She recognises that her and Sarah’s life circumstances are different and that she has fewer rights than Sarah does. But, she says, it’s important to seek out humanity where it can be found, and break down the borders between us.

If you’re feeling at a loss as to how to express your solidarity with Palestine, here are some links from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that might help.