The way Palestinians in Gaza and in the diaspora are supporting each other on the ground, is Mutual aid. If ever you wanted to know the application of what it means for us to care for ourselves, and what care can be, this is it.
It means sharing your last piece of food, finding a toy for a child that is not yours, sharing solar panels to charge, feeding a shivering cat, and pooling together resources.
The Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Zapatistas had extensive mutual aid centering, and also we witnessed it through the beginning of the pandemic when neighborhoods banded together to help each other.
It has always been a practice within Indigenous and disability justice communities.
Chipping in for top surgery for a friend, being the community technical support (that’s often me), and having a community garden, all of those are examples of mutual aid.
Mutual aid acknowledges that systems like capitalist healthcare, ableist infrastructure, and war-mongering government aren’t doing what the people need. So it is the people providing for ourselves.
We have and are witnessing what mutual aid can look like with a dearth of resources, in the most dire conditions, amid Empire, and against all odds. Now imagine what we can do with the resources of all of us together.
And we don’t have to wait, we can apply and immerse ourselves in mutual aid principles right now and always. It is not the system that provides, it is the people that provide, it is the land that provides.
Mutual aid is so powerful that governments have often tried to criminalize it and disband it. When the people organize on their own to help each other, they will no longer need the system.
So mutual aid can be a liberatory tool. It can be practiced anywhere and by anyone. It means all of us have access. The more we practice mutual aid, the closer we get to what we imagine when we imagine liberation.
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