For most of October, I was in Utah for work as a climbing guide and to spend time in one of my favorite places, Indian Creek. While I took groups climbing at crags overlooking the winding Colorado River around Moab, friends in Oakland and Los Angeles were in the streets protesting Israel’s military response to the Hamas October 7 attack.
I traveled onto highway 211 into the Creek and out of cell phone range. I looked at the cliffs around me and thought about what was happening in another arid landscape, what was happening in Gaza, what was happening for Palestinians around the world, and for Jewish people around the world, finding their religious and cultural identities conflated with the actions of a state.
My friend Endria wrote on October 16 about states, violence, and safety. I’ve revisited it several times. Her thinking helps me think.
“Anything I feel or think about Palestine and Israel begins with my own body. I am a queer black and asian woman living in the United States. I live in and benefit from a state that uses violence in order to protect a bounded life for some of its citizens. I live on stolen land. I am a vulnerable body with a traumatized nervous system and my fear and my vulnerability is living inside of a state that enacts enormous violence on people I do not know, not specifically so that I can feel safe, but the result is that, yes, I feel, more or less, safe.”
If I begin my thinking and feeling about Palestine and Israel with my own queer, Khmer woman body, I think about the displacement and genocide my own family has experienced. I think about how powerful governments determine whose lives are expendable, whose deaths are acceptable as collateral damage for assuring others’ supposed safety. I think about the ways that the United States along with other European governments have exercised power over the shapes of borders all over the world, extract resources from those lands, extract further profits from conflicts within them.
When I think about Palestine and Israel and my body which loves climbing and gardening and marveling at this earth, I see that war is an environmental catastrophe. Land and water are poisoned. Immense resources are expended and extracted to bomb, to raze, to someday rebuild. And as our capacity for destruction becomes greater, the cost of war becomes dearer.
It was strange to be in the bubble of climbing in the desert in those weeks in October. And strange to still prioritize climbing now that I am back. I told a friend how weird it is to be so committed to an activity that, ultimately, is extremely low stakes— it doesn’t really matter whether I do it or not, and yet it is such an important part of my life.
Then I watched Resistance Climbing, which came out earlier this year as part of the Reel Rock Film Tour. The film highlights the lives of Palestinian climbers in the West Bank and doesn’t shy away from showing the extreme conditions of living under occupation. And it shows how climbing can become a refuge— a passion— even in such conditions.
In the film, a climber named Faris says, “I can’t always be fighting. I want to live as well. I just want to climb and dance.”
Maybe having something— whether it’s climbing, or dance, or some other activity— that brings that kind of embodied joy, in community, is even more important.
As the credits rolled for the film, the final scene shows Urwah climbing his first 8A (5.13b), a benchmark “hard” grade for strong climbers.
After his success, he kisses the rock. I loved that exuberant expression of appreciation for the rock, rather than the more typical roar of conquering.
There is loving land, and there is controlling land.
My particular existence on these occupied lands, on which genocide was committed long before my arrival, can be traced back to another genocide which the United States helped precipitate and for years did nothing to stop.
Is it only in hindsight and with scholars’ eyes that genocide can be identified and named? What of the experience? What of the rubble? What of the bodies?
Asia, another climber featured in Resistance Climbing, recently wrote about what it’s like to be a climber during a war. Her thoughts are hauntingly familiar.
More from Endria’s October 16 piece:
What I learn daily, within my own body and through study, is that the reality of the United States, if I emerge from the illusion of safety that violence affords, is one of precarity, vulnerability, loss, and death. I am not safe here, and neither are you. The long history of all states ends in their collapse. There is no true safety and there is no true refuge in violence, there is only violence and its consequences.
The United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a humanitarian truce in Gaza on October 26. Since then, many more thousands of people have been killed, huge swathes of land destroyed, and so many displaced. Meanwhile the United States government continues to stand by. As it has, until it is either convenient to act or too inconvenient not to.
narinda heng 