NefeshBarYochai
2024-10-10 20:24:13 UTC
Reply
PermalinkA year ago, Palestinians began to experience new levels of their
ongoing catastrophe, the Nakba, which started 76 years ago. In
response to the attack that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and caused a
major embarrassment to the Israeli army and intelligence, Israel
unleashed an extermination campaign on Gaza, leveling entire
residential blocks, destroying education and health institutions,
eliminating the basic infrastructure needed to sustain a society, and
burying entire families under the rubble. In the West Bank, Israeli
settlers set out to forcibly expel Palestinian rural communities and
steal the lands of Palestinian towns and villages. The Israeli army
ramped up its spree of raids on refugee camps, destroying their
infrastructure, and systematically forcing inhabitants to live in a
situation similar to the one lived in Gaza.
I have lived in Palestine almost all my life. The Nakba has always
been part of my consciousness. Its continuity has been my reality.
However, there are particular dimensions to the experience of living
the Nakba that I had never known, except in the memories of those who
lived in its early years. My father, who grew up in the 1950s and
1960s, always struggles to contain his tears when he describes the
refugee families, expelled from West Jerusalem, Lydd, Ramleh, and
their surrounding villages, and how they were still sleeping in
stables and caves in our hometown in the late 1950s because all the
houses were taken. He would describe how they had lost all their
possessions and were forced into underpaid labor in the fields to
sustain themselves, how some of their children had bare floors for
beds, and how they had gradually started to become part of the towns
social fabric. Some of them, with peasant origins, took their sick
children to the church in our Christian town and, despite being
Muslims, had them baptized out of simple religiosity, imploring the
Virgin, the saints, and the prophet Muhammad to heal them because they
couldnt afford medical care.
The fresh face of the Nakba
When he was 17, my father and his friends were guarding the towns
entrance with sticks during the 1967 war. A Jordanian officer stopped
to ask for a cup of water from his car on his way out of the town and
told them: Go home boys, the country is lost. Every time he tells
this story, my father shakes as he weeps. His voice trembles and his
eyes take a devastating look of deep sorrow, as if he had just
witnessed his entire world crumble before his eyes. He had grown up
listening to refugees telling the terrifying stories of Zionist
massacres in Qibya, Deir Yassin, and Dawaymeh, and watched them live
through the humiliation and misery of being homeless, gradually losing
every hope of going back to their homes. My father and his entire
generation felt, during the Arab defeat of 1967, that their turn had
come and that their entire world, their memories, their traditions,
their life in their town, their future dreams, all crumbled before
their eyes. That aspect of experiencing the Nakba first-hand is
something I didnt know until last year.
On October 12, 2023, I decided not to work from home, despite the
Israeli checkpoints and settlers blocking or threatening roads all
around us. I stayed in Ramallah until late in the night, refusing to
give up the slight piece of normality I had in my everyday life. But
the roads were completely closed after settlers attacked Palestinian
cars, and I was forced to stay that night away from home. Then, at
around midnight, in a popular cafe in Ramallah, the fresh face of the
renewed Nakba, which Palestinians in Gaza were already reliving,
looked at me through my phone screen. A friend sent me video footage
of my towns streets, a few minutes prior, where tractors loaded with
mattresses and furniture were rolling down the road. Israeli settlers
had just expelled 40 Palestinian Bedouin families from their community
in Wadi Siq, 10 minutes away from our town. They had lost their
grazing lands, their homes, and part of their livestock, and were
looking for an empty lot of land to stay the night.
As I watched, terrified, I received another message from a colleague
who thought I was at home, telling me not to go out because settlers
had shot at a Palestinian car two hours earlier on the road to
Ramallah, the same road I take every day just 10 minutes away from
town in the opposite direction. A Palestinian family from the
neighboring town was in the car returning from a family dinner. The
mother was wounded, and her 17-year-old son, whom I had known as a
child, was killed.
I could hear the voice of that officer whispering in my ear from 56
years away: Go home, boy, the country is lost.
My voice trembled, and my eyes were suddenly taken by a deep,
devastating sorrow, as I could picture my entire world crumbling. My
tears blurred my phone screen.
Denial of humanity
Three days earlier, on October 9, Israels war minister, Yoav Gallant,
announced to the entire world what his state was going to do to the
people of Gaza. We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza; there will
be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, Gallant said, and then
concluded with one of the most honest expressions by an Israeli leader
ever: We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.
Gallant didnt say that his siege targeted only Hamas, nor did it. The
siege he announced and that his army continues to impose includes two
million Palestinians, half of whom are children. Israel had just told
the entire world, unchecked, that it sees all Palestinians in Gaza as
less than humans, closer to animals. And since there is no essential,
intrinsic difference between any Palestinian in Gaza and any
Palestinian anywhere else, that declaration includes all of us,
Palestinians; the 14 million of us around the world. The radicals
among us and the moderate. The political and less political ones.
The young and the old, men and women, Christians and Muslims, and even
those who collaborate with Israel. It is an entire nation that was
excluded from the human race, officially, by a key minister of a state
who is a key ally of the worlds only superpower.
What followed was the wiping out of the entire material components of
Gazas civilization, and the physical elimination of 2 to 3 percent of
its population by Israel. The siege that Gallant announced provoked
the spread of starvation and disease in the Gaza Strip. But this
racist, criminal logic has been doubled down by the leaders of the
majority of Western countries. As the U.S. president and his secretary
of state continue to insist that they are trying their best to reach a
ceasefire, the U.S. administration continues to provide arms and
political support to Israel. According to a recent report by Brown
Universitys Costs of War project, the U.S. has provided 17.9
billion dollars worth of military assistance to Israel since October
7, more than in any year since the U.S. began to grant military
assistance to Israel. It has also been the year in which Israel has
killed more Palestinians than in any other year since Israels
foundation.
Palestine at the heart of a new world
With every school bombed, with every hospital destroyed, with every
family expelled from its home, the leaders of the Western world,
especially the U.S., have been telling us straight in the face that we
are human animals. That our lives arent worth anything. That our
existence is undesired. However, this has also been a year of
Palestinian steadfastness, and of global solidarity with our people.
After a year of genocide, 18 years of blockade on Gaza, 56 years of
occupation, and 76 years of Nakba and ethnic cleansing, Gaza is not
dead. Its social cohesion still stands. The resolve of its people to
start life from scratch has proven time and time again, after every
Israeli withdrawal from any destroyed neighborhood, to be unbroken. In
the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and everywhere else on our land,
Palestinians continue to live and recreate life every single day,
without having submitted. It has been a year of resilience and
perseverance. Something that only humans, on the highest levels of
humanity, can do.
The country is ours, my father and his friends replied to that
defeated officer in 1967. We wont leave.
57 years later, as I watched the Nakba renewed on my phone screen and
the voice of that officer whispered in my ear, my fathers young voice
sounded in my other ear: We wont leave.
That voice, also coming from the rubble of Gaza and its tent camps has
grown over the past year. It has been amplified by the millions of
citizens in the streets of all major cities around the world against
the deafening silence of their governments. They are all replying to
all those who continue to deny our humanity.
We wont leave our land, and we wont leave history because neither
history nor geography would make any sense without us.
We, the human animals, gave the world Christianity and with it, the
values of compassion, justice, and human fraternity upon which all
modern humanist philosophies were built. We are part of the Arab and
Muslim civilizations that gave humanity mathematics, chemistry, and
modern medicine. We, the human animals gave the Western imagination
the names of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and continue to give
these names, through our resilience, the life that makes them more
than mere names in the Western imagination.
We gave the world most of the traditions that mark most of your
holidays, and continue to preserve the origins of these traditions in
our everyday culture. We, the human animals gave the Arab world its
first feminist movement, its first female radio anchor, its first
female photographer, and its first women-led rally, and gave Arab and
world literature Mai Zyadeh, Mahmoud Darwish, Samira Azzam, Hussein
Barghouthi, Ghassan Kanafani, and Edward Said.
And as the powerful of this world continue to try to erase our
existence, they continue to destroy the foundations of the corrupted,
inhumane world system that they built, excluding us. And before the
new world, more humane and just, is fully born, with Palestine at its
heart, they will see their world crumble before their eyes until
nothing will be left of it to be sorry for. After all, what is any
world worth without Palestine?
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/after-a-year-of-extermination-palestine-is-still-alive/
These good Palestinian men, wome, and children have earned the right
to label themselves as 'Holocaust Survivors' and demand reparations
from the Zio-nazis.