Memory Is Political

I hate Memorial Day. It’s a day for war porn and selective memory cementing the illusion of American Freedom(™) in public culture. We are told to grieve the fallen — who have died in foreign lands, for wars that benefit Empire but not their own families — we are told to remember the soldiers. But memory, like everything else, is political. What we are forced to remember versus what we are forced to forget, who is acceptable for a public mourning, and what stories get carved into stone are all part of a broader machinery of Empire.

Last year Slow Factory along with the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library held a public funeral at City Hall in New York City to honor the memory of, then, 45,000 souls killed by Israel in Gaza. We held a powerful ceremony, covered the stairs of city hall in thousands of tulips and read the names of each person murdered by the State of Israel and their soldiers enacting crimes against humanity. We mourned publicly. Lamented and cried under the rain, surrounded by hundreds who came to show respect.

As a displaced Arab woman living in the U.S., I’ve learned that memorials are not neutral. They are instruments of power. Memorial Day is weaponized to reinforce nationalism, to sanctify war, and to silence critique. But what of the memories that don’t make it into the ceremony? What of the unmarked graves or the ones Israel has been desecrating? What about the bombed schools in Gaza and Sudan, the farmers in Lebanon burnt with white phosphorus?

Today, as the genocide in Palestine continues—under the watchful eye of the same governments who drape themselves in the language of freedom—we must name this moment for what it is: Palestine is not a battlefield. It is a memory being erased in real time. It is a land being stripped of its people, its olive trees, its breath.

To remember is to resist. To commemorate is to reclaim the right to tell our own stories. As you eat your hot dogs manufactured in slaughterhouses, remember the slaughterhouse that the city of Gaza has become, the Israeli-made famine, the children dying of malnutrition. A sense of despair might take over your body, this is precisely the moment where memory as a political act kicks in: rise and break from apathy. Do not engage in celebrating an American holiday glorifying the murder of our people.

Colonialism is not history—it’s policy. It’s the settler state bulldozing homes and planting non-native trees to erase Palestinian villages. It’s the fossil-fueled militaries polluting skies and seas in the name of security. It’s the burning of forests in the Amazon, the theft of water in the West Bank, the extraction of life in the Global South to sustain luxury in the Global North.

Climate change, too, is colonial violence, accelerated. It’s not a distant crisis—it’s a war being waged daily against the most vulnerable. The same systems that bomb hospitals in Gaza also flood the streets of South Beirut and dry out ancestral lands across Africa and South America. The frontlines are connected.

So this Memorial Day, I choose a different kind of remembering. I honor those fighting not with weapons, but with seeds, stories, and truth. I remember the resistance in every village, every march, every rewilded patch of earth. I memorialize those whose names the empire has tried to disappear—and I commit to making their memory impossible to forget.

Because our liberation is entangled. Because another world is not only possible—it is being remembered and reimagined.