Why I watched "Andor" with my toddler on Oct 7

“I’d rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want.” -Cassian Andor

Note: I’m about to talk about a show that airs on Disney+. If you are participating in a boycott of Disney because of their complicity in Israeli apartheid, I support you! Our family has chosen not to do so since (at the time of this writing) the company is not an explicit consumer boycott of the BDS movement, which guides the strategy of my national church and my family’s boycott targets, but if you want to boycott Disney — yes! Good on ya.

I want a free Palestine. Like, “from the river to the sea” free.

I’ve been working toward Palestine’s liberation since 2013, when I returned from two months in the land, having stitched together some seminary grants to spend the summer there on my own. I signed up for everything anyone suggested to me on that trip: I did tours that included birthright trip participants, had Israeli tour guides and went to “Israeli” national parks, I “walked in Jesus’ footsteps,” and visited churches looking for my faith. I had no idea about the history of the land I walked on before I got there, but I’m sure if someone had asked me before that trip who were “the heroes” and who were “the bad guys,” Edward Said has me thinking that the media I grew up on would have led me to answer that I was rooting for Israel. Possibly just because the only Israeli I knew of was Natalie Portman.

Media is an incredibly important tactic to gaining the public’s opinion. It’s why Israel has pivoted to use sex appeal to sell Zionism and props up “ambassadors” like Gal Gadot. As Maarva tells us in Andor, “The empire is never more alive than when we sleep.” When we sleep on the media we’re consuming, we can think we’re just watching a super hero movie when we’re actually taking in government war propaganda.

I didn’t know what to do this October 7th (2024). The local protests had occurred the weekend before, I had made sure to check in on my friends ahead of time, I didn’t want to spend the day watching people re-litigate a genocide on Instagram. So, on Monday, October 7th, I cancelled all my meetings and unscheduled my kid from daycare and made a plan to stay in with them to play and cast spells and hold vigil for the day. I couldn’t figure out what the appropriate way to mark a year of genocide was other than being grateful that my kid is alive and safe. So we stayed in and we went to the park and we colored and we made food…and we watched Andor:

“My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility … How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility … Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it … We will never have a better chance than this and "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." … There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, k*ll! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are more of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! One way out! One way out!”¹

White Americans (like me) love ourselves some resistance fighters—as long as we get to see ourselves as the resistance. It gets trickier to see ourselves in the role of empire, and this past year has highlighted how much American media refuses to allow Palestinians to be seen as the heroes in the story. This week I decided to rewatch this beloved show with that subaltern lens—reading recent resistance efforts of Palestinians as mirrored in the make-believe world of Star Wars’ Andor.

Andor shows us a model for good resistance at work

All Star Wars stories are ostensibly about the resistance and the rebellion, but the reason Andor stands out is it is an inherently abolitionist story. Andor is a story about movement strategy:

• Again² and again³ and again,⁴ it shows the resistance movement tactic to strike when the powerful are not ready.

• The show’s first arc contains a planned and intentional looting of the Aldhani military outpost, illustrating the way looting can be an important component to revolution.⁵

• The show’s second arc is a literal prison break.

• The show’s third arc is a politicized death ritual of a revolutionary, where one of the characters held hostage and tortured by the empire⁶ is healed by and rescued during the ceremony.

I think of Palestine always—when I wash the dishes and when I get in the car and when I put my kid to sleep at night, knowing they are safe in our home when so many kids in Palestine are being martyred during the genocide in Gaza. While re-watching Andor this time through, I thought of Palestine and the strategy we see in Palestinian resistance. Over the past year we saw what was the equivalent of a prison break: a strike when the powerful was not ready and the looting of military and militant settler resources. One of the main tactics Israel has used for decades in the oppression of Palestinians is to hoard the bodies of slain political prisoners so that Palestinian families cannot properly mourn their dead. Today in Gaza, the amount of death is so huge that proper death ritual is impossible. Andor’s season one story culminates in the fantasy and power of death ritual for political activation.

Andor reminds us that breaking out of the prison is not a kind sight

“Breaking out of the prison is not a kind sight. But still one of will and determination.”⁷ Last year, on October 7th, 2023, I was at home with my spouse when we heard the news; we called it a prison break.

In fact, we had plans to be in Palestine that next week, with flights (that were ultimately cancelled by United) leaving on October 13, 2023. We sat huddled in our little home in Washington and felt initially impressed by the resistance—but I had been in the movement long enough to know what happens to people who break out of prison. I soon began to worry that the people who had broken out of prison were going to be met with no real liberation on the other side.

As the day progressed, the prison break language continued to be an apt descriptor of the events. Like the prisoners in Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex, what were they breaking into but a vast stretch of water that would consume most of them, especially those who could not swim? The liberation was fleeting.

Cassian: “One way out! Whatever happens now, we made it! What's wrong?” Kino: “Can't swim.” [Image credit: Lucasfilm]

Like most heroic prison break sequences throughout film history, the prisoners in Andor’s prison break kill prison guards on their wait out the door. Our real life heroes killed people during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Unlike Andor, the people killed were not nameless extras in a show, but people with lives and families and legacies.⁸ Even as we learned that the narratives and numbers presented by the Israeli military were warped and overstated, killing Israelis was a part of October 7, 2023. I am working toward a world where violence doesn’t need to be a tactic toward liberation, but within this power structure, I will always blame the prison, not the prisoners, for the violence. Breaking out of prison is not a kind sight.

Andor reveals empire’s hypocrisy around violence

Despite showing my kid a show that Common Sense Media says is about 10 years too early (oop!), and despite the general tone of this post, I am, in fact, an ardent pacifist! I am adamantly anti-war. I do not own any weapons and I won’t purchase toy weapons for my kid. I have no close family members that have ever served in the military. I will be teaching my white-passing kid that we’re not about violence in our interpersonal lives. I believe we should defund the police entirely. We don’t watch PAW Patrol! To me, being a pacifist means I’m not into state-sanctioned violence: the military, the police, the prison industrial complex.

But there will always be a difference to me when comparing the empire’s military might to a resistance fighting militant.

On October 5, 2024 we took our little one to our local protest for Palestine and were gifted this pin of Palestinian militant and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Leila Khaled.

I might be a pacifist, but I’m also a white, Christian American who pays taxes to the U.S. government. I have no need to be militant because the empire is militant for me. I am the empire. (Or, on a good day I’m the privileged rich white lady who is on the side of the rebellion.) Because of the power that I have, I do not prescribe my pacifism onto other peoples who don’t have the same positionality that I do. When I hear people ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas, I remember Angela Davis’ response to an interviewer asking her about condemning violence — while she was held in California State Prison in 1972:

“When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

The positionality to violence matters when we tell resistance stories. I might be a pacifist today, but as a white American, violence has been my people’s M.O. for generations, and I don’t get to shirk the responsibility of that position. Positionality also matters when we use terms like “self defense.” As an occupied population, under international law Palestinians have the right to defend themselves, but as the occupying power, Israel doesn’t. It can’t be “self defense” when you are the active aggressor.

We may have a fruitful conversation about violence only after we address who began the violence in the first place—Davis points to white people in the U.S. in her example; and in Palestine, we must first look to the Israeli colonization of Palestine to see the seeds of violence planted that might bear today’s violent fruit. I will always blame the prison, not the prisoners, for the presence of violence.

Andor offers encouragement for the future of Palestinian resistance

Last night I found myself with another dying Gazan child in my Instagram feed, and I unknowingly grew quiet and somber for the rest of the night. My little one went to the box of tissues and said “nose” handing me a tissue for comfort. I smiled and thanked their little empathetic self and then, without prompting, my little one calmly said, “Free Palestine, mum.”

My 2 1/2 year old doesn’t understand a free Palestine or a jailed Palestine or what happened on “October 7, 2023” or what was already happening on “October 6, 2023.” What they understand is that when I say the words “Free Palestine,” I look comforted and happy. And in that moment, my little kid wanted to comfort me.

Cassian Andor’s life is revealed to us along many timelines, including the fact that we know he will one day participate in the destruction of the Death Star. In this show, he has the murmurs of past relationships, but the true love story in Andor is not between Cassian and a romantic partner, but is actually the revolutionary love of and for his revolutionary mother. Cassian’s love for his adopted mother Maarva is one of the driving forces of everything our titular character does—the show is clear that Cassian doesn’t choose to be a revolutionary, but Maarva does. We know Cassian will go on to become the revolutionary’s revolutionary. But here we see him in the learning stages, with Maarva as his teacher. I wonder how many Palestinian children have been nurtured into steadfast resistance because of their mothers. I think it might be just about every Palestinian I’ve ever met.

Maarva Andor: “Take all the money you've found and go and find some peace.” Cassian Andor: “I won't have peace. I'll be worried about you all the time.” Maarva: “That's just love. Nothing you can do about that. I've never loved anything the way I love you. And I've never fretted on anything more, but this time...you can't stay, and I can't go.” [Image credit: Lucasfilm]

I am rooting against the empire. That means I’m rooting for alternatives to white supremacy and an end to policing. I’m rooting for anti-war movements; I’m rooting for queerness in public; I’m rooting for the kids. I am a revolutionary mother who hopes my kid will join the revolution. Because a free Palestine makes for a freer world. Because thinking of a free Palestine calms and comforts my body, because a free Palestine means so much of the world would be freer.

There are a few kids and young people in Andor, and one important one is Karis Nemik, a young freedom fighter who participated in—and was killed during—the looting of Aldhani. On his deathbed, Nemik leaves Cassian Andor his manifesto, and just as it offers encouragement to Cassian, so too might it offer those of us in the movement for Palestinian freedom some insight:

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward … The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.⁹

This October 7th, after a year of live-streamed genocide, I chose to teach my kid to love the resistance, not the empire. The weekend before, I chose to teach them that they are safest when they are at a protest against a genocide, because the people around them are a part of the break, the leak, that will flood the banks of the empire’s authority.

My hope is that our little, insignificant, safe and contained Monday spent snuggling on the couch together and watching a show about a make-believe resistance trying to free itself from empire was still a commitment to a Free Palestine. Because even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

1. Andor, Season 1, Episode 10, “One Way Out.”

2. The looting of Aldhani, when the occupiers are distracted by the Eye.

3. The prison break from Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex.

4. The Ferrix funeral for Maarva begins early on Rix Road, before the ISB teams or Lumen’s crowd are ready.

5. If you’re cringing at the idea of looting, might I suggest you delve into Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting? Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class—not to mention the brazen messages these methods send to the police and the state—hello abolition!

6. Notably, the method of torture is the bottled up sound of dying children during a genocide. Perhaps we have all been enduring a slow form of torture these past 12 months.

7. Palestinian journalist, Mariam Barghouti, said this in an Instagram post on October 7, 2023.

8. One was even a peace activists who worked against the apartheid system in Israel. Breaking out of prison leaves no time to discover if the prison guards are actually peace activists. It is proximity to the prison that discerns their fate. Indeed, proximity to empire is actually very dangerous.

9. Andor, Season 1, Episode 12, “Rix Road.”