My slacktivism is pacifying resistance

A photo I capture in Istanbul, Türkiye.

Note: this isn’t an analysis. It’s a personal reflection of my own behaviors, habits, and coping mechanisms while witnessing genocide unfold through a screen. I’m not writing this to tell anyone what to do. I’m writing it because I needed to ask myself some hard questions, and maybe you’ve been asking them too.

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Lately, no feeling has lodged itself deeper in my chest than helplessness. Not the kind you can shrug off with a good cry or a long walk, but the kind that wraps around your throat, leaves you staring at a screen, unable to work, to eat, to carry on like nothing is happening. What’s hollowing me out is watching a genocide unfold in Gaza in real time, while the world just scrolls on by. And so do I.

Someone I follow on Instagram, supporting Palestinian families in a village in the West Bank, recently wrote:

“The only difference between the children I play with every day and the ones in Gaza is where their grandparents fled in 1948 or 1967.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that sentence. I’ve been carrying it around ever since, unable to swallow it down. Because that’s also the only difference between me and any woman in Gaza today. Had my grandparents made a different choice, I might be under siege, or deliberately starved, or killed. And in the best-case scenario, I’d be facing violence from Israeli settlers or watching my home demolished to make room for yet another settlement.

Even if I didn’t have Palestinian roots, I couldn’t be okay with any of this. But this isn’t about me. Not really. It’s about the dissonance between knowing what’s happening, knowing children are being deliberately starved, homes obliterated, entire bloodlines erased, and realizing that all the grief, paralysis, and heartbreak in the world won’t stop it.

For a long time, I believed awareness was so important. I held on to the idea that if we just told the world, if I perfected my English and maybe learned two or three more languages to translate our pain, if I studied harder or learned more about our history, if we cried loud enough, screamed, made a carousel, or reshared a post, they would listen. I thought visibility would lead to justice. I was wrong.

Like many in my generation, I poured myself into online activism. I posted. I shared every harrowing image, every donation link, and every urgent headline, hoping attention would lead to action. And to be clear, I still do. But as the genocide continues and world leaders, including Arab ones, offer nothing but statements of “deep concern” and “condemnation,” I was hit with something unbearable: the world is not looking away; it is watching, and choosing to do nothing. And maybe worse, it is scrolling past their suffering like it is just another piece of content.

I’m not writing this to call anyone out. I’m writing it because I need to admit something to myself: I, too, have mistaken visibility for resistance. I, too, have been comforted by the illusion that a well-worded post might somehow bend the arc of history. But here’s the truth I need to confront: slacktivism benefits Israel.

We live in a time when everything, political expression and grief alike, has been flattened into content. Grief becomes a graphic. Outrage becomes a reel. And then, seamlessly, the feed continues: selfies, brunch, pets, genocide. The algorithm rewards attention, not action. It trains us to feel like we’re doing something, while ensuring we don’t disrupt anything. And in fact, this cycle of posting and scrolling can quietly kill the urge to act at all.

Israel, and the Western governments that fund its killing machine, benefit from this dynamic. Slacktivism channels mass outrage into bite-sized, fleeting performances. It pacifies what could be resistance and/or dangerous to them. It gives us, myself included, a fleeting sense of moral clarity, a way to say “I’ve done my part,” while nothing actually changes.

I’m not saying digital activism is meaningless. It’s not. But it only matters if it leads to something more. Because governments aren’t afraid of our heartbreak. They’re afraid of disruption. They’re afraid of the kind of resistance that makes complicity too costly, changing their calculus. No liberation movement has ever succeeded through awareness alone. They succeeded by making themselves impossible to ignore. They organized. They shut things down. They refused to let the system function normally while people were being massacred.

Awareness is the entry point, not the goal. Everyone who needs to know already knows. Israel knows. The U.S. government knows. The EU knows. The media knows. Big Tech knows. And yet, they do nothing, or worse, actively aid genocide.

And so I ask myself, as someone with Palestinian roots, as someone alive in this moment, and as someone who once believed in the power of words: what will I do after I post? I don’t have a perfect answer. I’m scared. I’m tired. I’m still untangling my own conditioning, still learning what real solidarity and resistance look like. But I know I can’t go back to thinking that performance is enough.

I’m sitting with that. With the discomfort. With the responsibility. With the reality that I can’t unsee any of this, and that I don’t want to be someone who just scrolls past it anymore.