Emory and I want to be parents. As we get closer and closer to that transition in our lives and weigh the decision against the very real risks we are facing as queer trans people in the United States, I am wondering how we navigate our small part in the multigenerational struggle toward liberation when there will always be setbacks, dropped threads, and people working just as hard as us to keep their feet on our necks. I am wondering what it looks like to be fully devoted to conflict, to struggle, without expectation of resolution in the form of solution or amends within our lifetimes.

I’ve been thinking about the lineages of resistance and resilience and the lineages of conformity and oppression I come from. As a child in conflict with my parents, they would often say, “you enjoy fighting, you get a kick out of this.” I remember thinking that was ridiculous. Of course I didn’t want to be fighting, certainly not the way we fought, always with raised voices and threats and rage. I wanted peace, security, and understanding. But those weren’t always options, so I fought. It was a reasonable response to unfair treatment. Now though, after several years of deconstructing and reconstructing my relationship to conflict, I’ve come to realize that healthy conflict is a blessing and that in some ways, I do enjoy fighting.

To be angry and fight for change is a vulnerable act of love, one that is mirrored in my ancestral lineages as well. In ’s March spotlight on Irish history through the lens of rebellion and resistance, I gained a wealth of knowledge about the complex history of Irish and Irish American resistance to and participation in oppressive systems. In ’s Attune series, we practice seasonal attunement to our bioregions as we learn about the seasonal traditions of Celtic peoples. It is impossible to really understand those traditions without examining how the relationships between humans and non-human kin in the Celtic Isles were inflected by imperialist conflict. These traditions have survived in part due to a tradition of fighting to keep them alive, fighting to keep ourselves alive. As the genocide in Gaza rages on and Israel doubles down on its campaign of death and destruction, I find myself often thinking of the parallels between my own ancestral lineages and those of Jewish-Americans and settlers in Palestine. Like many people not native to Turtle Island, my family tree includes colonial settlers, refugees fleeing famine and war, and immigrants looking for upward class mobility, but the picture gets fuzzier when I try to trace it back across the Atlantic. I have only been able to learn about who my ancestors were before we were American through a great deal of effort. It feels important to me though, to know what came before, because I feel that it might show me some path forward through the fight for liberation. What fighting traditions will we pass down to whoever comes after us, especially if they are not “Americans”? How did our ancestors fight and for what?

A historical site that’s been on my mind is a spot on the banks of the Niagara River, where the Fenian Invasion of 1866 took place. It was an attempt by Irish veterans of the American Civil War to leverage an invasion of British-occupied Canada to secure a free and independent Ireland. I’m thinking about this because the tension between attempts to liberate one people by taking over the indigenous land of another feels all too familiar. The parallels between the development of Irish-American identity (which is in many ways wholly separate from Irish identity) and the development of Israeli and Jewish-American identity are the result of being subject to different parts of the same oppressive system. Both are the result of experiencing oppression and genocidal acts and facing a choice: to align themselves with white supremacy, with colonization, with their oppressors, or choosing to continue the fight of their ancestors for liberation in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Following the Great Hunger—the forced mass starvation of the Irish people at the hands of the British—and the Holocaust, Irish and Jewish people respectively found themselves at a crossroads: replicate the violence and oppression they experienced in the hopes of escaping persecution through mimicry, or distinguish themselves from their oppressors by fighting for collective liberation.

The responses of both groups were not monolithic. Monumental figures like Irish politicians Daniel O’Connell and James Haughton vehemently opposed anti-abolitionist sentiment in Ireland and in the United States, going so far as to call for the rejection of the “blood-stained contributions of American slaveholders” to famine relief efforts at home, lest they legitimize the means by which that money was earned. This view, while loudly stated, was not popular. Many Irish and Irish American nationalists believed that solidarity with Black enslaved peoples in the States would distract and detract from the struggles of the Irish. Many wanted instead to pursue assimilation into whiteness as a means to escape oppression. Today, groups like Jewish Voice for Peace vocally oppose Zionism and support Palestinian freedom, earning them a place on the Zionist Anti-Defamation League’s website, where they are billed as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers.

Irish assimilationists and Jewish Zionists have both made appeals to their peers to take on colonialism as a way to gain political power and better class standing. The leader of the Fenian Invasion, John O’Neill, was born in Ireland and immigrated to New Jersey at the height of the Great Hunger. He served in the Union army during the American Civil War as a fighting officer and briefly as a captain for the 17th United States Colored Infantry, sustaining combat injuries that forced his separation from the Union army in 1864. After a victory at the Battle of Ridgeway, the attempted invasion of 1866 failed and O’Neill dedicated the rest of his life to promoting Irish-American colonization of Nebraska by Irish settlers, proclaiming, “My heart is with the Irish people. My earnest desire is for the amelioration of my race. For this reason, I urge you to colonize and possess the land, and all other advantages will follow. As a powerful means to that end, I would inculcate temperance and economy so that you may save your money for this noble purpose.” This sentiment was repeated several decades later in 1902 when Theodor Herzl, the founder of organized Zionism, made a plea to Cecil Rhodes, the English mining magnate in modern-day South Africa, to legitimize Jewish settlements in Palestine: “It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”

I can understand the Fenian Brotherhood’s desperation to free their people back home, Jewish Europeans’ desire to flee antisemitic persecution in their home countries, and I understand that solidarity is a choice that comes with great cost. What I fail to comprehend is how someone like O’Neill with the bravery to take up arms with a force of only 800 men to secure independence for their people would be afraid to pay the price of solidarity so that others can also be free. I do not understand the impulse of someone like Herzl to grasp at a power that is set on destroying your own life, to aspire to to use that power to destroy the lives of others. O’Neill’s moral downfall was believing that the Irish needed to assimilate into the American land-owning class and take on the mantle of colonization, his belief that this would result in amelioration of his people in the eyes of their oppressors. Similarly, Herzl’s moral downfall was his belief that colonization would allow for Jewish assimilation into the Western European bourgeoisies, the most privileged class of people at the time, and that this could only be obtained through the subjugation of Palestinians. Both of these men recognized the power imbalances that were causing great pain to their people, and instead of questioning the authority of their oppressors, sought to possess it for themselves.

I do not understand how proximity to oppressors becomes the goal of oppressed peoples again and again and again. One of the few reasons I can come up with is that the short term benefits of aligning with oppressive powers often obscure the long term detriments, especially in life-or-death (or perceived life-or-death) situations. For example: “The historian Angela Murphy explains that Irish Americans rejected O’Connell’s antislavery pleas in order to demonstrate their bona fides as respectable American citizens who would not be beholden to foreign influences.” This sounds familiar, yes? The current targeted arrest and deportation of immigrants to the United States who profess their opposition to genocide and dedication to fighting for a free Palestine is intentional and designed to encourage participation in respectability politics that mirror what Irish-Americans engaged with in the 19th century when they were challenged by their countrymen from across the Atlantic to oppose chattel slavery. In a similar vein, Israel budgeted over $146 million (USD) this year to improve its public image, at least in part through disparagement campaigns against Jewish-Americans, especially university students who are speaking up against the occupation of Palestine, by painting them as “part of a Global Hamas Support Network.” The goal of these actions is to increase the personal cost of resistance—to prevent long term action toward solidarity, to push people toward supporting their own death and destruction.

How do we engage in principled conflict when faced with the pressure to confirm? Mahmoud Khalil said, “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear,” in a statement dictated from an ICE detention center in Louisiana. This is the difference between fighting for freedom from specific oppressions and fighting for all people’s liberation—the ability to see liberating your oppressor, including the oppressor in your own mind, from their hatred and fear as a necessary step toward freeing yourself. Submission to fear and hatred is submission to death.

When I look at the examples of resistance and solidarity within my ancestral lineage and the example of those engaged in liberation work today, I feel certain that the object of keeping up the good fight is not to win, but to provoke the distortion of worldviews that don’t lend themselves to liberation; to hold our peers through the grief of recognizing those distortions; and to welcome them into the fight when they have changed. Our fighting traditions in the United States are too often rooted in fear that freedom is a zero-sum game. Generations of people have taken on the mantle of preserving histories of resistance to self-centered pursuits of freedom, and it is because of them that we can see that resistance works.

I am grateful to the people who have rejected the notion that their comfort and short-term gains are more important than their commitment to liberating the oppressed and the oppressors from the structures that keep us separate. I am grateful for the examples of what anger can do when it is expressed without equivocation—just as the institution of chattel slavery perpetuated by the United States fell, so will the apartheid and genocide perpetuated by Israel as a result of armed resistance, public outrage, and efforts to make “business as usual” unprofitable. We engage in principled conflict by refusing to submit to fear and hatred and accept that the consequences of resisting domination include ostracization, imprisonment, and even death. We choose to be unrelentingly welcoming of all those who share our goal of liberation and unrelentingly critical of those who do not.

As we prepare to become parents, I feel a responsibility to learn the ways that this dedication is well-precedented in our cultural history so that I can share stories of the steadfast fighters that came before us with our child. Liberation work is full of grief, and I hope that these stories will provide hope and comfort when the outlook appears grim. There is joy in knowing that despite it never being easy, people have been passing the baton of the good fight for generations. There is satisfaction in knowing that as long as you can muster the strength to carry it, someone else will pick up where you leave off. This is the legacy I hope to pass on: a life of dedication to fighting not for any one nation or people, but for liberation for all of us.