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| #GazaUnderAttack by Palestinian artist, Mira Shihadeh |
It is not outside the realm of possibility that Gaza and its inhabitants will be wiped off the face of the earth.
And I promise you, if this happens, we will collectively never recover.
Not only Palestinians, or Arabs - but all of us, the entire world, will never recover the stain this will leave on our human history.
I want to remind you, as we stare in horror and disbelief at the escalation and sheer destruction of the violence in Gaza and Israel, that the borders for Gazans are closed. They are sealed. There is literally nowhere for them to go.
No shelter.
No safe spaces.
No fleeing across the border into other countries or towns.
They can walk into the sea and drown, or they can sit in place and be obliterated.
There is no other option.
Israelis, on the other hand, do not have this restriction.
In many cases, they carry dual citizenship, and have no restriction on their mobility.
In many cases, Israelis have chosen to relocate to Palestine from places like Poland, Ukraine, Brooklyn, and New Jersey.
In many cases, they’ve made these choices fairly recently in the last 75 years, and even when they haven’t, they’re still able to go elsewhere if they must and they can escape to safety if they choose to. The operative word being “choose” - to have a choice.
Gazans and other Palestinians, in an overwhelming number of cases don’t even have Palestinian passports and travel documents, much less a second citizenship. Those of us who are not living in Palestine, and those of us who have fled and lived in exile for 75 years, are not allowed to return to visit our family homes or, if we are able to visit (as I am), are not ever allowed to live on our own land.
Our Palestinian family has withstood the humiliation of a 75-year occupation, brutal at times, violent, cruel, and systemic.
I’ll tell you a few truths about our families, friends, and colleagues:
I have a friend whose elderly father woke up one morning in Jerusalem and went downstairs to open his front door, only to be confronted by a brick wall that had sprouted overnight.
Confused, he went back upstairs to look out the second floor window and saw an IOF soldier standing guard. When he asked him what was happening, he was informed that this was now an extension of the separation Apartheid wall.
“But this is my front door! How am I supposed to leave my house?”
“I don’t know. Jump out the window.”
Jump out the window.
And so his neighbors got him a ladder and that’s how he gets in and out of his own house.
*The petty absurdity and humiliation of occupation.*
Another truth:
There’s an IOF Watchtower on the “Jerusalem ID Only” road between Ramallah and Jerusalem. The area is a no-man’s-land stretch of road right after the checkpoint that gets you out of Ramallah if you’re lucky to be let out (which is entirely subject to the discretion of an 18-year old IOF conscript).
On either side of that road is a single home, each with a balcony on the second floor facing the other. There are about 2 lanes of asphalt road that separate the two homes, along with a fence on either side.
The two homes belong to two brothers.
The brothers are not allowed on the asphalt paved road because they don’t hold Jerusalem IDs. If they are caught on that road, they will be shot by the IOF on sight.
The brothers have been unable to visit each other FROM ACROSS THE STREET since 1967.
In order for them to see and hug each other in person, they must get permission from the Israeli authorities to travel. This may or may not be given.
Then, they must travel AROUND the country to get to the other side, in a journey that can take anywhere between 4-8 hours, if it’s permitted at all.
Every single morning, the brothers step out onto their respective balconies and share a cup of coffee from across the street just to say “good morning” and check in on each other.
*The petty absurdity and humiliation of occupation.*
Another truth:
Israel does not have a written constitution, and this is a strategic and purposeful move. Without codified governing law, it is governed by flexible policies that can be easily and expeditiously amended to suit the occupiers.
Municipal laws in different areas of Israel dictate how people live. In Jaffa, for example, it is illegal to renovate the facade of any building without the permission of the government. If you’re a Palestinian family living in the home you’ve owned for generations, you’re inevitably going to need to make renovations at some point. That’s fine, but you need permission.
A light burns out on your front porch. Sometimes, you’ll find the light has been broken (and we know the Israelis often ensure that happens. An errant rock hits the light bulb. An errant soccer ball smashes your front window. Oops 😬). You can’t fix that without a permit. But you ALSO can only use a select number of service providers to fix it, all approved by the municipal authority. Of course, the cost of these services is prohibitive and normally out of reach for your average family. So what happens when it’s your light, and your windows, and the steps of your front entrance, and your roof - all considered part of the facade of your building and, therefore, ineligible for renovation without permits?
Well, eventually, your home becomes uninhabitable. And you are forced to leave. But what happens when a Jewish, Israeli family moves in? Well, the government is pleased to cover all the expenses for renovation and upgrade of your new home. Naturally.
*The petty absurdity and humiliation of occupation.*
(Don’t bother asking your Israeli friends to verify these policies because they won’t know about them since they don’t apply to them. But you can check out verified affidavits and oral testimonies gathered by Israeli Human Rights organizations - I won’t even ask you to simply believe the first-hand accounts of actual Palestinians, God forbid - and you can start by consulting https://www.adalah.org/en for more on this. It’s infuriating, just be warned.)
But why am I sharing all of this?
Before anyone accuses me - and there’s been plenty of that in the past few days - of trying to use FACTS and context to justify any violence and abuse against civilians, let me just say that what I’m doing is simply providing the context for why this is where we’ve ended up. Not why it’s deserved or why it should be celebrated, but why it has happened and why it’s not a fair fight or a “conflict” among equals, but a reckoning for the future and dignity of an oppressed group.
I’m providing this context so that you understand that it’s difficult for us Palestinians to feel equal sympathy and empathy for the challenges faced by a family who moved to Palestine based on birthright and now occupies the home of a family that’s been inhabited for literal generations to the suffering of the people who have been forcibly evicted and ethnically cleansed - whether in an instant during the Nakba and any other instance of eviction, or over time through the implementation of Apartheid policies that slowly and routinely chip away at the rights of the indigenous population. Either way you look at it, it’s ethnic cleansing at best, and now with the annihilation of Gaza, it’s genocide.
A holocaust, if you will.
Plain and simple.
Let me also mention another phenomenon of occupation. When you see fanatical settlers burning down olive groves, razing homes, burning crops, destroying property, desecrating holy places, and pouring cement into water wells, what you normally see on the other side of that fight are Palestinian families defending their homes, their homeland, their properties, their treasured heritage.
Ask yourselves this: does this destruction and desecration seem to be behavior that is in line with the values of a people who are indigenous to a land? Does this seem like behavior that you’d see from people who love and care about a place? Because it doesn’t to me. They are able to destroy and dismantle because this land is not embedded in their souls. It is not imprinted on their hearts. It is simply ideologically imposed on their sense of entitlement, and they will never be connected to it in the same way as those who literally lay down their lives to protect it. Remember that when they call themselves “Indigenous” to this land.
Back to the horrors unfolding as we speak. I have Israeli friends who are hurting and desperate at the losses they and their communities are suffering. As a human being who is not a savage, I hurt for them and I don’t wish any of this on them or their loved ones. But it would be disingenuous for me to neglect the fact that there are inevitable consequences to choices. If you choose to build a life on land that is colonized and settled, and has been historically inhabited for centuries - millennia, even - prior to your arrival, in homes that were lived in by families much like your own, it isn’t beyond the realm of comprehension why you might find it difficult to live peacefully and in harmony. Let’s at least agree on that, right?
Like, it’s not INEXPLICABLE that a country established and built on the foundations of violence will be confronted with resistance at some point, right? We can all agree that, like it or not, resistance isn’t always polite and non-violent, right? I don’t think these are unreasonable truths to admit. They are painful and result in unnecessary and devastating losses, absolutely, but it can’t be controversial to speak these truths, right?
It’s horrific and it’s tragic, but it’s also not inexplicable, no matter how hard we try to erase the context of its genesis.
Israelis have an overdue reckoning with their government and the failures of the state in protecting its citizens - not only from the seemingly sudden uprising of Hamas, but from the 75 years of policies that have placed Israelis in the position they are in today - as occupiers, as colonizers, as citizens that inadvertently uphold a system of brutality and humiliation on a daily basis of an indigenous population that has just simply had enough. This is a reckoning that is far overdue and Israelis should be absolutely livid that this is what it’s come to. Be enraged at Hamas, by all means, but remember why they have been empowered and by whom.
Most Palestinians I know - and I count myself among them - have no issue with a scenario where the liberation of Palestine includes the incorporation of current residents of the Israeli state as equal citizens of one state. Truly, and without exaggeration, this is not the issue.
The liberation of Palestine need not be predicated on the expulsion of its Jewish/Israeli population.
But the dismantling of the system of Apartheid, the racist structure within which Palestinians are placed, the dehumanization and campaign of discrimination being framed by language we’ve heard from Nazis and others (the Rwandans and Serbians come to mind), referring to us as “human animals” as a way to radicalize entire populations globally against us - THAT is what needs to be destroyed.
The liberation of Palestine means an end to the occupation of all its land. That’s all there is to it. We can “mental gymnastics” our way around this and weave narratives that circumvent the ultimate outcome, but that’s the only solution.
I have a meeting in a few hours with a group of colleagues from donor foundations in the Arab region to discuss how we might be able to secure the transfer of funds and supplies to Gaza immediately and in the future.
The main fuel-operated generator that supplies much of Gaza ran out of fuel at 2 PM local time on Wednesday.
This means hospitals cannot save lives. Internet is down.
There is even less electricity than the one or two hours a day that were originally provided.
There is no water.
My colleague, Ammar, was speaking with me yesterday and the line went dead immediately after I heard a huge explosion. He survived, And when he called me back, his voice was shaking.
There are no supplies left in Gaza.
One of our member organizations with an on the ground presence stocked up on and distributed supplies on Tuesday.
By Wednesday, when they went to replenish, there was nothing left.
NOTHING.
No bread.
No water.
No basic necessities.
You wonder how people are radicalized? This is how.
On one side of the border, a group was attending a rave with music and drinking and dancing. Mere miles away, an entire population that’s been trying to live with a modicum of dignity for the past 16 years was struggling to breathe. Both sides have lost a lot and it is tragic. But only one side didn’t have much to lose to begin with and may have even less to lose - whatever that means - by the end of this.
Remember that when they ask you how we got here.
*The petty absurdity and humiliation of occupation.*
The thing is, though, as I write this I honestly don’t know if there will be anyone left to help in Gaza and I’m telling you, if that happens, we will never ever recover.
🇵🇸🙏🏻❤️
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| Photo Credit: Hani ElShaer |
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