The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

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Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909

Building a Real Left: Not One That Condemns Resistance and is Without Palestinians

[Pictured: 500,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4 for a historic march that recognized the Palestinian right to resist]

By Ben Becker

Republished from Liberation News.

We are eight weeks into the war in Gaza and into a protest movement that has swept the country demanding justice for Palestinians. It is remarkable how much the political environment has transformed in the United States in general, and within the U.S. left in particular on account of the mass mobilizations organized by genuine anti-imperialist forces, both inside the United States and around the world. An honest reflection must admit, however, that eight weeks ago, many of the liberal leftists and “progressives” were paralyzed, bending to the pressures of bourgeois opinion, practically abandoning the Palestinian cause, and reserving their sharpest vitriol for anti-imperialists rather than apartheid Israel. 

From the very start, anti-imperialists rallied to the side of Palestine and so were called apologists for terrorism by mayors, governors, the White House and liberal leftist publications in one united chorus. While for a moment that meant the real, anti-imperialist left was demonized, caricatured and written off as a marginalized fringe by the liberal leftist organizations and some prominent liberal “influencers,” two months later there is now a mass anti-war movement taking the streets every night with anti-imperialist politics at the very center, and it is the liberals who are isolated.

The spineless “plague on both your houses” position held by liberal leftists and “progressives” collapsed within a week as Israel began its genocidal bombing, and as the broad spectrum of left forces and Palestinians united to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and a ceasefire. But the initial awful reaction from big sections of ostensibly “left” commentators should not be forgotten, and in fact should be learned from. It reflects a recurring line of division that will likely reappear as Israel’s siege enters a new murderous stage, especially if Palestinians begin to strike back outside of Gaza. This division is not about ideological minutiae but a fundamentally different approach to the colonial question. It speaks directly to the question of what type of movement we aim to build — either one that is tethered to a section of the liberal bourgeoisie, and so vacillates alongside it, or one that seeks to build anti-imperialist politics among the working class and is oriented towards unity with the Global South.  

To review: Four days into the genocidal bombing and siege of Gaza, with a massive ground invasion pending, the West’s most prominent left-liberal intellectuals stood up and spoke out against … the leftists on the streets for Palestine. Naomi Klein, Michelle Goldberg, and other self-proclaimed “left” writers immediately joined the ruling-class mob howling at those who had dared to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and their resistance, in the days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They declared there can be no “credible” or “decent” left that does not condemn the tactics of the Palestinian resistance — and that by “valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way.”

Goldberg proposed that the left should declare instead: “We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza.” The sentence is a marvel. The feelings of horror are reserved for the actions of Hamas — not Israel — while Israeli atrocities are presented passively, a potential thing of the future, which could be hopefully stopped by U.S. government “pressure.” Ignored are all the core questions: what about the longstanding Israeli atrocities and the fact that the United States has always facilitated and funded Israeli crimes? And what should the Palestinians do in the meantime? Apparently, anything but fight back.

For her part, Klein called for “An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Sift through the poetics of this paragraph and this is essentially a call for the left to put equal distance from all the sides of the battle, so that it can achieve pure and unadulterated morality. How decent! Perhaps the Palestinians should lay down their arms entirely so the international left can keep our hands and reputations clean. Under this liberal position (using left phrases), it is fine to retain the moral and political position that Palestinians are in the right against occupation, but to be “consistent” this must be combined with a condemnation of Palestinians when they actually rise up against that occupation. This is nonsense: the “left” as an abstraction rather than a social force that accompanies the living struggles of our time and the real people fighting injustice. The true betrayal of left principles is to lapse into pure pacifism and abstract humanism so as to create distance from the oppressed.

That distance from the oppressed was made literal in the following days, when the protests with that political line were attended by shockingly few Palestinians and scarcely a Palestinian flag in sight. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist forces who were so demonized and declared to not be “contending for power in a serious way” united a broad coalition rooted in the Palestinian and Arab community for the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history, which was estimated at 500,000 people. That unity was not built by equivocating on the central issues of Palestinian self-determination, or pandering to the mood of the liberal bourgeoisie. Doing so would have not made the march bigger but actually doomed it. Instead, it put out a clear, unmistakable message that tapped into the mass mood of struggle and defiance felt by people of conscience from all communities. 

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Whatever initial isolation was necessary for anti-imperialists, the last month of mobilization has shown that a different type of broad unity can be built — not with bourgeois liberals — but by going directly to the base, and orienting to the majority sentiments of the Global South. Viewed from a global scale, it is the liberals who are isolated, and increasingly struggling to stay relevant. Look at the supposedly “decent” “left” represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC: they have never been less relevant to the actual movement of history as now, when it counts the most. Sanders has stubbornly refused to even call for a ceasefire while AOC has scarcely been better – in two month’s time she has voiced support for the Iron Dome, then called for a ceasefire, and this week voted for a slanderous House resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Klein, Goldberg and company focused their arguments after October 7 on the killing of Israeli civilians and noncombatants as war crimes. But this was just a convenient way to mask what was really a condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance as a whole. It’s not as if they defended under the rules of war the Al Aqsa Flood operation’s killing of an estimated 280 Israeli military personnel, or its taking dozens more soldiers and even generals as prisoners of war. What they really want is for Palestinians to remain peaceful and committed to nonviolent forms of protest. A more sophisticated and explicit version of this argument was presented at length in a New York Times essay calling for Palestinians to commit to “ethical resistance.”

Of course, Palestinian groups will debate among themselves what tactics and strategies are correct to advance their national liberation struggle, as they have in each phase of struggle. But not a single Palestinian party or faction (aside from the widely hated Mahmoud Abbas) condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation — quite the contrary. Klein, Goldberg, et al should ask themselves why not. It is because the Palestinian people have attempted every type of march, protest and petition only to see the noose tighten around their necks. 

The Great March of Return consisted of weekly marches in 2018-19 at the Gaza border. Those mass marches, peaceful apart from mere rock-throwing, resulted in 223 Palestinian killed by Israeli sniper fire and thousands wounded. There was no international hue and cry; the settlements expanded and Israeli society shifted even further towards fascism. Now four years later, the Al Aqsa Flood fighters returned to those same border fences and bulldozed them. It is no wonder why three-quarters of all Palestinians explicitly support the October 7 attacks, and 89 percent support Hamas’s military wing. 

The Palestinian people as a whole, as a nation, understand that those who made nonviolent revolution impossible made the shift to full-fledged armed resistance inevitable. So in their insistence on an international left that condemns armed resistance, Klein and Goldberg are effectively asking for an international left without Palestinians. 

Without question, the experience of war is horrific, and no images shock the conscience quite like those of civilian casualties, especially women, children and the elderly. These images seem to require no context or explanation; they instinctively shape our emotions, stir our desire for justice, and compel us to show solidarity with the victims. But this is how and why imperialist war propaganda works time and again. Even though some people can in retrospect see the folly of many wars, in the moment of crisis they are selectively presented certain images, so that feelings of empathy and grief are easily instrumentalized as pretext for an invasion. The demand in a war fever is to feel anger and grief, to set aside analysis and critical thought. Hidden of course are the years of images of civilian death and mass destruction on the Palestinian side, the stories of trauma and terrorism they’ve endured, the names of their children. The whole world has never been instructed to join in their grief and to insist on their right to self-defense and retaliation against those responsible for that terrorism. 

War is always horrific and any student of military history knows the so-called “rules of war” are routinely violated – in fact they are not really considered at all by military strategists when they make their plans. Look at the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, which was just another way of saying “strike terror” into the hearts of all Iraqi society. Look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” operation to completely destroy the northern part of Vietnam, killing an estimated 182,000 civilians in three years. Look at even the “good wars”  like World War II, when the U.S. carpet bombed cities in Japan and Germany that had no military purpose, intentionally causing mass civilian deaths as a way of psychologically terrorizing the enemy into surrender. But no one questions the righteousness and necessity of the war against fascism. Those U.S. leaders who directed those mass civilian deaths never faced a day in court for war crimes, but instead had schools and airports named after them. 

The Vietnam Memorial in D.C. lists out the names of 58,000 U.S. service member casualties in the war, an emotional display that stretches around 500 feet. But if it had the names of the Vietnamese deaths, civilian and combatant alike, it would stretch two miles. The way the war has been presented and is understood emotionally in the United States is, again, totally selective. The fiction is thus maintained that one civilized side wages war within the “rules” and only the “barbaric” wage war with terror. In fact, all modern war contains elements of terror.

For its part, Hamas officially says it upholds the rules of war and Islamic prohibitions on the targeting of women and children, disputing the dominant narrative of October 7, and says that the breaking down of the border fences allowed undirected groups of Palestinians to enter nearby Israeli settlements. 

But regardless of what exactly transpired, and who ordered precisely what, that cannot be used to confuse the basics of the Palestinian question. It is a struggle for national liberation against colonialism. It is not a war between two conventional armies. One side has a massive, high-tech and sophisticated military with advanced weapons systems, while the other side is a collection of guerrilla forces. The Palestinians have no military bases they control, no advanced weapons systems they can buy, no control over their own borders or airspace, no internationally legally recognized force to strike back against enemy states and to defend their population. This is a totally asymmetrical war, and for years it has been rocks versus tanks with nearly all the bleeding on one side. 

To win their national liberation struggle, Palestinians have tried general strikes. They have tried to get other Arab armies in the region to intervene. They have conducted dramatic hijackings to get worldwide attention, often designed for maximum spectacle with minimal civilian losses. They have tried peace agreements and negotiations (Hamas itself only turned to armed resistance after about a decade of this). They have tried international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. They have gone to international courts and tribunals. The First Intifada was built on mass rallies and mobilization, largely led by the left, and it was only after the Israelis conducted a campaign of mass imprisonment and assassination of its leaders that the era of suicide bombings began. The failure of all the promised peace accords produced the Second Intifada, this time more violent. And now after years of losing more and more land, being asphyxiated by the millions, a new phase has opened. But it is one continuous national liberation struggle. 

The only real analogy left is that of the Native Americans or the Algerians, whose guerrilla struggles were not to win over the settler population — seeing that as impossible — but to strike back so that they might leave stolen lands and to show their own people through force that the enemy state was not invincible. Those battles too often involved the bloody deaths of non-combatants, and the anti-colonial fighters were called “savages” in the mass media of their day. But after years of broken promises and treaties, continuous encroachment on land, misery and humiliation, such armed resistance and violent eruptions became inevitable. And looking back, is there really any confusion about what was the side of justice?

As Israel begins a new round of murderous bombardment of Gaza, all responsibility for renewed bloodshed must be placed on the occupying power. The world sees clearly the genocidal and terrorist character of the Israeli armed forces. The task in the United States is to channel this into a mass social force that makes it untenable for the U.S. government to continue financing and arming the occupation. Out of the horrors of the present, many within the Palestinian community also believe they are entering a new phase of liberation struggle; this powerful movement must be prepared to stand with them.

Palestinian Resistance and the Crisis of Liberal Humanism

By Yanis Iqbal

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

The Battle Of Algiers Shows How Decolonization Is A Bloody And Messy Affair

By Eamon Tracy

On October 7th a group of around 2,000 Hamas militants breached a security barrier on the Gaza border astonishing the world and forever changing Israel’s sense of security. In response to that brazen attack, Israel has ruthlessly targeted 2.3 million people in Gaza who faced a siege for weeks facing an endless barrage of bombardments - which have so far amassed more than 25 times the tonnage of ordnance dropped on Hiroshima - and are currently experiencing a ground invasion by the IDF. Now more than ever, The Battle of Algiers is worth remembering. Not only is it a searing testament to collective resistance against foreign occupation, but it is also a reminder that rebellions or decolonization are a bloody procedure unfortunately full of atrocities.

It has been 75 years since the Nakba incident permanently displaced 720,000 Palestinians carried out by Israelis which occurred upon the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. Professor Rashid Khalidi writes in his superb book The 100 Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017,

WHAT HAPPENED IS, of course, now well known. By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population. This seismic upheaval—the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, as Palestinians call it—grounded in the defeat of the Great Revolt in 1939 and willed by the Zionist state-in-waiting, was also caused by factors that were on vivid display in the story my father told me: foreign interference and fierce inter-Arab rivalries. These problems were compounded by intractable Palestinian internal differences that endured after the defeat of the revolt, and by the absence of modern Palestinian state institutions. The Nakba was only finally made possible, however, by massive global shifts during World War II.

Today, 2.3 million people have survived living in what some refer to as a concentration camp, or at the very least an open-air prison. 70 percent of the people residing in Gaza, which is 25 miles long and 5 miles wide, are refugees from the Nakba tragedy. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Most of the limited but necessary resources like electricity, gas, and water are controlled by the Israeli government. Around 70% of the well water is undrinkable. In Lowenstein’s excellent book The Palestine Laboratory published by Verso, he thoroughly details Israel’s local and global techno-fascistic rule. In the beginning, he bluntly states, Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admits it. “The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state but instead has become an apartheid state, plain and simple,” Amos Schocken wrote in 2021. And as Israel’s government moves further to the Right, while increasing Zionist settlements, Palestinians have been forced into a desperate corner.

Israel’s Zionist government was formed off the political project fostered by the activist Theodor Herzl. His project was founded on the principle of a Jewish supremacist state. At a fundamental level, this extends the colonial crisis beyond a territorial conflict into a larger issue that is both religious and ethnic. Over the decades of Israeli occupation a growing number of Ashkenazi Jews, from Europe or America immigrated to Palestine ultimately kicking more indigenous Palestinians off their lands. Some of these moments have been documented in viral videos, where settlers are seen callously taking grieving families’ homes.

After Algeria was suffering under French occupation for over one hundred and thirty years, The National Liberation Front, or FLN formed in 1954 as a paramilitary force to fight back. During colonial rule, a majority of the Arabs were treated as subjects with second-class status, and only a small minority able to transcend their lower status if they renounced their faith and culture. The FLN wanted a right to self-determination and self-governance following Islamic beliefs. Although religious, the ideology encompassed an inclusive Pan-Arab society. One which would not be prejudiced against any race or ethnicity. It even included the emancipation of Women and other values drawn from modernity. If you have a look at the daily lives and constraints of a citizen within Gaza, this second-rate status is all too familiar. 

An avowed Marxist, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo wanted to capture the incredible true story of an occupied Algeria removing the yoke of colonial rule. Pontecorvo’s yearning for truth led him to film in a verite style with such stark realism, that it could fool a modern-day audience into thinking it is an old newsreel or documentary. Sharing screenwriting credit with writer Franco Solinas, the two Italians cared about international struggles and noticed their inherent underlying solidarity. In Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary, written by Solinas, his story centered on a Polish capitalist who has a road to Damascus moment where he teams up with a couple of proletarians and helps a revolt against the Mexican government during the 1910s. Pontecorvo and Solinas’s screenplay for Battle of Algiers was based in part on the memoirs of Yacef Saadi, who wrote them in prison after serving as a leader for the FLN.

The Battle of Algiers begins in 1957 where a group of revolutionaries are meeting their end. It opens with an Algerian man who is still recovering, having just been tortured by the French military. Enter, the commander Col. Mathieu (played by Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the entire cast) instructs the man to put on a French uniform. With tears in his eyes, the man does so begrudgingly. In the next scene, Col Mathieu is speaking to the revolutionaries led by Ali who are hidden in a wall. They are told to give up and the story cuts back to 1954.

Before the Algerian revolution was sparked, Ali was a hustler wielding cards to sucker unsuspecting French citizens. Subsequently getting into an altercation, he is sent upriver on a five-month stint in prison, where he witnesses an inmate being executed by guillotine. Upon his release, Ali is more than ready for revenge. In the wake of the attempted assassination of a French police officer being sabotaged, Ali discovers it was a test orchestrated by FLN leader El-Hadi Jaffar. Saadi Yucef who plays El-Hadi Jaffar and Samia Kerbash who plays Fathia were both actual members of the FLN. Upon passing this dangerous test, Ali is accepted into the organization. Then he is forced to navigate a world of violence, traitors, and a nation’s youth being exposed to traumatic experiences or mistakenly caught in the crossfire. His journey is nothing short of compelling - as are most of the fearless fighters showcased on screen. The targeted killings of military officers and police led the occupying force to inflict unbridled state-sanctioned pain against the Algerian rebels and noncombatants alike. In one scene a car full of French soldiers places a bomb outside a residential building killing scores who were sleeping inside their beds. Col Mathieu looks to ratchet up the unrest so he can give the French forces an excuse to carry out even more brutal retribution.

When exploring similar historical events, two of the foremost intellectuals W.E.B. Dubois and C.L.R. James both acknowledged the atrocities carried out by the likes of John Brown during his uprising that preceded the Civil War, and the Haitians during their Revolution against the French. Nat Turner, who inspired John Brown, was similarly a religious fanatic, whose gospel was also rooted in blood and brimstone. Both men were more than willing to take lives and a large number of innocent civilians were killed in the process. But Turner was enslaved and dehumanized along with other Blacks who were subjugated to some of the worst conditions known to humanity. His blind rage was not necessarily admirable, but it was understandable. And as Turner’s Rebellion killed around sixty people, two times as many Blacks were killed in response. Most of them uninvolved with Turner’s actions were nonetheless horribly executed by White mobs. In James’s Black Jacobins detailing the Haitian Revolution, the racism and extraordinary number of mass murders were appalling. In an even crueler twist of fate, Haiti has been ordered to pay France billions in reparations due to revenue lost for their slaves and colony.

Pontecorvo and Solina displayed an understanding of the consequences when targeting civilians going about their business in a public space. Especially in the iconic scene where a group of women remove their hijabs before cutting their hair - changing their appearance to look more like their European occupiers. Armed with explosives, they are instructed to blow up a cafe full of French civilians. It is a tough scene to watch yet these guerilla bombing campaigns of terror undoubtedly turned the course to the FLN’s strategic favor. These attacks combined with labor strikes were an attempt to hit the security and economic sectors hardest while promoting solidarity.

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza in 2007, only under extenuating circumstances, are Palestinians allowed to leave the open-air prison. Reports of cancer patients and other preventable diseases have led to unnecessary deaths that could have been avoided if they were allowed to travel to clinics outside Gaza. And a majority of young people have never experienced any life outside the towering 21-foot-high walls that surround them, chock full of surveillance, AI systems, snipers, or remote-controlled devices that can shoot citizens, as well as drones hovering overhead every moment. These capabilities are laid out, once again from The Palestine Laboratory,

The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes.48 The system is most extreme in the city of Hebron, where facial recognition and numerous cameras are used to monitor Palestinians, including at times in their homes, instead of the extreme Jewish settlers living there, who routinely express genocidal threats against the Palestinians. The IDF claimed that the program was designed to “improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population.” In 2022, Israel installed a remote-controlled system for crowd control in Hebron, a tool with the ability to fire tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets, and stun grenades. It was created by the Israeli company Smart Shooter, which claims to successfully use artificial intelligence when finding targets. Smart Shooter is a regular presence on the international defense show circuit and has sold its equipment to more than a dozen countries. Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.

In The Battle of Algiers, when a group of French civilians joyfully letting loose at a dance hall is suddenly cut short by an explosion inside the club, it was hard not to see the comparison between October 7th. On that day a music festival full of carefree civilians who consciously or unconsciously participated in an active occupation became both crossfire by the IDF and the intended targets by members of Hamas. Made up of mainly young men, who perhaps were unleashing decades of pent-up aggression. The actions are admonishable, the loss of innocent lives is tragic, and the horrific consequences are comprehensible.

Israel’s catastrophic response exposes how the manufactured so-called rules-based order on which there is a broad permissive framing of what are considered war crimes, historically leaves imperialists like them unpunished. Just the other day, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, when asked if the double-bombing of a refugee camp that killed one hundred and ninety-five people constitutes a war crime, said, “I'm not in a position to say if it is or it isn't”.

Because it does not fit the model of imperialist or colonialist propaganda, The Battle of Algiers is rarely shown on TV or streaming beyond the Criterion Channel. Thus, most modern audiences have not seen Pontecorvo’s masterpiece. And being in French, with subtitles filmed in black and white does not help it reach American viewers. But interestingly, The Battle of Algiers is one of the few films in Oscar history to be nominated in two separate non-consecutive years. Originally it was a foreign film nominee in 1966, and then again it was nominated for screenplay and direction in 1968. Furthermore, It was screened by the Pentagon in 2003 for officials and civilians to showcase the challenges of occupying a country that wanted anything but.

Following civil wars in the 80s against various Islamist groups, the FLN regained control of the country in 2002. To this day Algeria mostly remains a testament to a modern society and thriving culture - not being occupied by foreign powers trying to extract valuable resources and labor. Whereas Hamas was propped up by the Israeli government to undermine and destabilize the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO. As usual with these Faustian arrangements - they come back to haunt you. Hamas is a religious fundamentalist organization with troublesome elements, yet it is also the only security force the Palestinians have to rely on. We do not need more religious fundamentalist countries but it should be up to the indigenous peoples to decide their future. The best hope we have right now is a ceasefire - and ideally a peaceful resolution that specifically addresses the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation.

It's Not a Hamas-Israeli Conflict: It's an Israeli War Against Every Palestinian

By Ramzy Baroud

Republished from MintPress News.

At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict.’

But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful.

The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself not as a regional superpower but as a global power. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible.’

Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this.

The ‘Israeli miracle victory’ against Arab armies in 1967 was a watershed moment. Then, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, declared in a speech that “from the podium of the UN, I proclaimed the glorious triumph of the IDF and the redemption of Jerusalem.”

In his thinking, this could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”

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The sentiment in Eban’s words echoed throughout Israel. Even those who doubted their government’s ability to prevail over the Arabs completely joined the chorus: Israel is unvanquishable.

Little rational discussion took place back then about the actual reasons why Israel had won and if that victory would have been possible without Washington’s complete backing and the West’s willingness to support Israel at any cost.

Israel was never a graceful winner. As the size of territories controlled by the triumphant little state increased three-fold, Israel began entrenching its military occupation over whatever remained of historic Palestine. It even started building settlements in newly occupied Arab territories, in Sinai, the Golan Heights and all the rest.

Fifty years ago, in October 1973, Arab armies attempted to reverse Israel’s massive gains by launching a surprise attack. They initially succeeded, then failed when the US moved quickly to bolster Israeli defenses and intelligence.

It was not a complete victory for the Arabs, nor a total defeat for Israel. The latter was severely bruised, though. But Tel Aviv remained convinced that the fundamental relationship it had established with the Arabs in 1967 had not been altered.

And, with time, the ‘conflict’ became less Arab-Israeli and more Palestinian-Israeli. Other Arab countries, like Lebanon, paid a heavy price for the fragmentation of the Arab front.

This changing reality meant that Israel could invade South Lebanon in March 1978 and then sign the Camp David Peace Accords with Egypt six months later.

While the Israeli occupation of Palestine grew more violent, with an insatiable appetite for more land, the West turned the Palestinian struggle for freedom into a ‘conflict’ to be managed by words, never by deeds.

Many Palestinian intellectuals argue that “this is not a conflict” and that military occupation is not a political dispute but governed by clearly defined international laws and boundaries. And that it must be resolved according to international justice.

That is yet to happen. Neither was justice delivered nor an inch of Palestine retrieved, despite the countless international conferences, resolutions, statements, investigations, recommendations, and special reports. Without actual enforcement, international law is mere ink.

But did the Arab people abandon Palestine? The anger, the anguish, and the passionate chants by endless streams of people who took to the streets throughout the Middle East to protest the annihilation of Gaza by the Israeli army did not seem to think that Palestine is alone–or, at least, should be left fighting on its own.

The isolation of Palestine from its regional context has proven disastrous.

When the ‘conflict’ is only with the Palestinians, Israel determines the context and scope of the so-called conflict, what is allowed at the ‘negotiations table,’ and what is to be excluded. This is how the Oslo Accords squandered Palestinian rights.

The more Israel succeeds in isolating Palestinians from their regional environs, the more it invests in their division.

It is even more dangerous when the conflict becomes between Hamas and Israel. The outcome is a whole different conversation that is superimposed on the truly urgent understanding of what is taking place in Gaza, in the whole of Palestine at the moment.

In Israel’s version of events, the war began on October 7, when Hamas fighters attacked Israeli military bases, settlements, and towns in the south of Israel.

No other date or event before the Hamas attack seems to matter to Israel, the West and corporate media covering the war with so much concern for the plight of Israelis and complete disregard for the Gaza inferno.

No other context is allowed to spoil the perfect Israeli narrative of ISIS-like Palestinians disturbing the peace and tranquility of Israel and its people.

Palestinian voices that insist on discussing the Gaza war within proper historical contexts–the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the siege on Gaza in 2007, all the bloody wars before and after–are denied platforms.

The pro-Israel media simply does not want to listen. Even if Israel did not make unfounded claims about decapitated babies, the media would have remained committed to the Israeli narrative, anyway.

Yet, suppose Israel continues to define the narratives of war, historical contexts of ‘conflicts,’ and the political discourses that shape the West’s view of Palestine and the Middle East. In that case, it will continue to obtain all the blank checks necessary to remain committed to its military occupation of Palestine.

In turn, this will fuel yet more conflicts, more wars and more deception regarding the roots of the violence.

For this vicious cycle to break, Palestine must, once more, become an issue that concerns all Arabs, the whole region. The Israeli narrative must be countered, western bias confronted, and a new, collective strategy formed.

In other words, Palestine cannot be left alone anymore.

Liberatory Violence Is Never "Unprovoked"

By James Dugan

In today's world no one is innocent, no one a neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. He who takes no interest in politics gives his blessing to the prevailing order, that of the ruling classes and exploiting forces." —George Habash

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding” —Frantz Fanon

With Israel in particular, it is immediately apparent how willfully ignorant Americans are to the level of sheer violence that it takes to uphold a settler society. Every day that Israel exists as an apartheid State is a violent event for Palestinians. Further, every missile that strikes Gaza and every raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank is propped up by financial support from the United States. The focus of condemnation should therefore be Israel and the United States for creating the material conditions that have necessitated a liberation movement.

The purported concern about violence rings empty when it is devoid of any reference to Israel’s history as a settler colonial project; without any reference to the Nakba of 1948 or the 11-day bombardment of Gaza in 2021 which resulted in hundreds of lost lives and thousands of destroyed residences. Throughout the onslaught, hospitals and news agencies were deliberately targeted by the air strikes—which of course utilized U.S.-made warplanes and bombs. The conditions of colonialism and apartheid ensure that even the most ordinary day is subjected to violence in less blatant forms (e.g. the violence like hunger and poverty that Kwame Ture described as being “so institutionalized that it becomes a part of our way of life” and is accepted as normal). But 2021 was also preceded and followed by other explicitly jarring events, such as the senseless shootings during the Great March of Return in 2018-2019 (over 8,000 hit with live ammunition, over 30,000 injured) and the settler rampage of Huwara earlier this year (leaving hundreds of homes and vehicles torched).

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All of this illustrates that, as put by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals.” Israel’s colonization of Palestine is the embodiment of violence—and any notion that violence is “committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer [ ] blurs the nature of the historical processes.” Dunbar-Ortiz’s point has been reiterated by many voices committed to self-determination, decolonization, and universal freedom. Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian educator instructed that "with the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” Walter Rodney, the radical Guyanese intellectual, put it similarly, "Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

With this framework in mind, to call the recent militancy “unprovoked” is to ignore the systemic nature of oppression in Palestine. To those that opt not to ignore it, the response was inevitable for the same reasons that Angela Davis called certain tactics taken during the black liberation struggle inevitable: “Because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions. You have to expect things like that as reactions.” An acknowledgment of how violence permeates prior to the reaction is crucial.

And it should be clear that what we expect and what we desire are not always one and the same. Malcolm X, an early advocate of Palestinian liberation articulated this point well: "I don't believe in violence that's why I want to stop it. And you can't stop it with love. So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defense and that vigorous action we feel we're justified in initiating by any means necessary." When Palestine resists its oppression, it acts in self-defense; it aims at “the recovery of human dignity.” For anyone whose crucial guiding moral and political directive is self-determination and freedom, it is clear which side of the struggle we stand on.

To a Free Palestine in our lifetimes.

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." —Assata Shakur

“The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. . . . [V]iolence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.” –Kwame Ture

Sheikh Jarrah Is Not a New Event! It is Our Relived Generational Trauma

By Nazek Jawad

Growing up in Damascus, I didn’t realize the occupied Palestinian territories were a separate political entity from Syria, until I was in fourth grade. Up until then, I thought it was a part of Syria. This is how present the Palestinian cause has been in our daily lives. The shadows of generations of Palestinians, who were forced out of their homes, followed us in schools, in the streets, and in our homes. The shadows of the Palestinian “Children of the Stones” shared our desks with us in the classrooms. We grew up with the open wound of Palestine. We grew up with the pain of women protecting their olive trees from being uprooted by military tanks. With the agony of the stolen childhood of Palestinian kids, who looked like us, but had to become men at ten years old to defend their livelihood, their homes, and their families. 

In 1993, while the usual images of the Israeli destruction of Arab land in Palestine were on the front page of one of the daily newspapers, on the back page was an image of Hillary Clinton with Big Bird. I remember gazing at that image, staring at Big Bird’s fluffy yellow feathers and rounded big eyes. I felt sunnier just by looking at Big Bird. I stared at Clinton’s cheerful smile and in my eight years old mind I gushed to myself: It must feel lighter to exist on the other side of the world, without the weight of all what’s happening here- life tastes differently there, it is not as salty! That brightness of the image illuminated how life feels like, without the weight of an existential threat looming in the background.

Every night when the clock hits 8:30pm, it was the time for the news segment, a time for another Palestinian tragedy. In my child mind I would think to myself: Is this the one? Is this the tragedy that would finally get the world moving to help us end this misery? Does the world know what’s happening? Is everyone around the world watching the news? 

Silence. Silence was the answer to all my questions. Silence was the world’s answer to all what was happening.

You see, in a child’s mind the sense of humanity remains untouched and pure, from all man-made divisive concepts. You don’t know nationalities nor borders. All what you know is humanity. You understand people around the world as a continuum of individuals around you-you imagine them like your neighbors. When a suffering happens, it doesn’t matter on which side of which border it took place-in your mind, the world exists in one stretch. What matters is the world’s response, and its absence has always aggravated me, and later when I grew up, it pained me, as I understood the world is choosing to stand still while we bleed.

In geography classes, we practiced the map of the Arab land with all its pieces intact. Where the world map outlines Israel, we wrote Palestine! That was our form of defiance. It was our small way of claiming our agency, and resisting the injustice of land dispossession. That small dose of self-made justice felt very empowering. It helped ease the frustration at times, especially on days when the American UN ambassadors raised their hands to veto a UNSC resolution condemning an Israeli aggression. So, there you go! For each one of your vetoes, we will draw a map. We will mark Palestine with capital letters. We will hang the map on every wall. On every door. On the sun! That land is Palestine, and all the millions of dollars sent in aid to Israel will never be enough to erase Palestine from our consciousness, from our being. 

You see, a child’s mind does not understand politics, but can feel hostility. We didn’t understand the political calculation behind the imperialist aggression against our region, but we felt the animosity against us. To be denied a mere condemnation, we knew our suffering is not seen. We knew the wailing of Palestinian mothers over the dead bodies of their children and the ruins of their homes is not heard. We felt the rejection. We are not wanted, not even to exist on our own land. But, what does a child do when they are rejected? They fight back claiming the very identity that has been taken away from them by force! It simply did not matter what all American Foreign Affairs Secretaries planned and negotiated and announced with Israeli and Arab leaders. For us, these borders that we practiced and perfected, are the borders of Palestine.

In history classes we learned about the Israeli occupation, the failed Arab revolution to free Palestine, and all the UN resolutions. We memorized the dates of every peace treaty, the names of the towns of every massacre, the numbers of deaths, and the names of all the Arab martyrs. We gazed at images of the Golan, the occupied part of the Syrian land, which we knew we will never see, not even in our dreams. A land that is only a couple-hours’ drive from Damascus, but seemed impossible to reach. It’s beautiful, I always thought. I could almost smell its scent out of the page of my book, but I could never touch it. This wound grows to be another extension of you. The loss becomes your shadow. Your land is who you are. As you grow older, you move around the world knowing your existence is simply incomplete. 

After every history lesson, we had so many pressing questions for our teacher: Where is the world from what’s happening? How is this massive generational injustice even allowed to continue in an advanced world? Isn’t this the same world that preaches to us about international law and human rights? Well, what about our rights? 

Once again. Silence. Silence was the answer to all our questions. 

But there’s no such thing as silence in a child’s mind. A child’s mind will always find answers. We realized then that our human value is not equal to others. We learned at an early age that it didn’t matter whether our cause is a just cause, our human suffering is insignificant to the rest of the world because we are weaker. Only those who are strong can move the world when they are touched. 

I always thought, how unfortunate for us that the world doesn’t measure our strength by the thousands of years of our civilization. It doesn’t measure our strength by the hospitality of our homes, the tastefulness of our food, the craftiness of our people. Somehow, by some arbitrary measures, which we didn’t decide, we ended up on the weaker side, while our survival over that land, and the creativity and endurance it takes to continuously inhabit a place for thousands of years, measured up to nothing. 

When you are a victim on the weaker side, the world sits in silence watching, desensitized to your bloodshed, and when you resist, the world roars pointing at you calling you a villain. When all liberation movements around the world are celebrated, while you don’t even have the right to resist-you realize then that you don’t matter. It’s that simple. It’s that painful. 

For seventy-three years we have been reliving the same devastating images, hearing the same condemnation statements, frustrated with the same inaction. For seventy-three years, the only thing human race has been successful in recycling is human misery, and an agonizing inaction to this misery.

This relived trauma in our region has been passed down generation after generation, because no one can wash away the daily lived sense of loss. We simply don’t have the privilege to forget. We don’t have a choice but to feel the pain of our missing pieces. How can you forget when all you feel is the pain of that void?

Today, with all what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, I am thinking about the entirety of the region where I come from, that has been subject to injustice that feels as ancient as time. When the world is celebrating technology that reduces physical distance, this region feels more isolated than ever. I will never understand such cruelty. How could a place that has given so much to the world, a place that has been a safe haven to so many civilizations, be faced with such harshness? What could be worth of unconceivable amount of human suffering?

I will never understand.