Two Years of Genocide+: Crips Aren’t Done Sending eSims to Gaza

Two Years of Genocide+: Crips Aren’t Done Sending eSims to Gaza

 

Two years, what the fuck. It really has been two years to the day since Israel’s heightened and prolonged genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. According to UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, Israel has killed–directly and indirectly–more than 680,000 people in Gaza since October 7th, 2023.

Every life taken in this genocide is the destruction of an entire universe. As we mourn this catastrophe alongside the many other genocides around the world, and alongside the fascism growing and fomenting in our own countries, we refuse to live as if business can continue as normal. Instead, we live dreaming of a free Palestine where people can roam without being bombed, starved, humiliated, displaced, tortured, and forced to film the destruction of their homelands for an uncaring and unmoving world.

We live our disabled lives imagining a free Palestine where orange groves and olive trees and poppies grow; where children, families, villages, and sacred sites flourish from interdependent relationships with the land. And we act dreaming of disability justice futures in solidarity with oppressed people everywhere, from Coast Salish territories to Sudan, from Ohlone to Congo, from Lenapehoking to the West Bank, and so on.

Nearly two years ago, we began raising funds for eSIMs, calling on fellow disabled people around the world to throw sand into the gears of genocide. Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi’s words have resonated with us deeply because the act of throwing sand–small and multiple–into giant gears reminds us of what disabled people can do with our collective power. We do this understanding this genocide is also a mass disabling event and that disabled Gazans face incredible challenges surviving displacement and getting their needs met. As if this needs reminding, there is no disability justice without Palestinian liberation. And yet, here we are with people in our disability communities who support the military industrial complex and Zionism. The work continues, and we keep throwing sand into the machinery of imperialism’ until Palestine is free.

For nearly two years, together with all of you, we have used our collective power to send over 57,000 eSIMs and top ups, providing thousands of Palestinian families, journalists, students, professors, healthcare workers, and everyday peopleso on with the bare minimum they need to communicate with one another. Some of our eSims have been continuously used since last summer.

Despite the repeated attacks on telecommunication networks and the intermittent dips in public attention on the atrocities in Gaza–funded directly by our respective governments in the United States and Canada, Crips for eSims for Gaza has been holding steady. In the last few months, we have raised enough funds to regularly reimburse our volunteers, support Gaza Online, Watermelon Warriors, Najungi, and of course, Connecting Humanity.

In less than two years, we raised over $3M CAD ($2.18M USD) and spent roughly 99% of it. We watched as usage of our eSims dipped and increased. We continued to find hacks to reduce costs and save time. We worked on incredible community fundraising efforts mobilizing authors, game developers (raising over $100K USD from our Itch Bundle!), artists, and had a booth at the SF Zine Fest where Barabones debuted Jane Shi and Barabones’ zine, long live itsy bee: an adaptation of Mummy Joe’s “itsy bee and the royal flea” that imagines the titular dog aboard a Gaza freedom flotilla.

Our efforts are a small portion of the real needs on the ground, a need directly proportional to the violence Israel is inflicting on Palestinian people. This is especially true with reports of Israel’s plans to destroy Gaza City. The more we learn about the devastating situation on the ground, the more we realize our efforts have saved lives, and have helped people graduate university, work, and promote their own survival funds. We also learn, with immense pain, that there are countless more we can support, hoping that against all odds, people in Gaza can survive with the connections from our eSIMs, alongside many other crucial mutual aid efforts that fight against forced starvation, elimination, and genocide. If you are able, please support our efforts or share the link to our crowdfunding page.

What’s next? Will we be doing this forever? How long can we keep this going?

If nothing else, the last two years have given us an opportunity to learn from Palestinian persistence and to marry it with our own Crip persistence that sometimes slugs forward like a snail, slow but steady, and sometimes leaps in a wild disabled network of people plugging in and going fast to get eSIMs out every time the IOF causes a communications blackout again. We learned a lot and continue to be committed to the goal of a free Palestine.

Thank you so much for trusting in us and believing in us. This work is not over. Palestinians in Gaza have not given up, and neither will we.

 

In solidarity,

Jane Shi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong