Whatever horrors are unfolding take place in darkness veiled from the world.
All these imaginary plans are premised on an Israeli victory. And what if Israel fails to dislodge Hamas but nevertheless runs out of energy and momentum for its campaign of genocidal violence? What if even the British and American governments feel at some point that the damage being inflicted on Gaza is causing too much harm to their own interests, their own domestic standing? What happens then?
How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite?
What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.
You can replace a people with yourselves: genocide. Or you can replace two peoples with new peoples: decolonization.
One of the basic truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there are no acts within it that can accord with universal human rights: the conflict itself is the trespass. Let me be clearer: the colonization, itself, is the trespass. It is the original sin against human rights. It is the disease.
There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11.
Now, two years on, the transition was ailing. The economy was in free fall, partly due to austerity measures imposed at the IMF’s behest. Street protests were calling for the resignation of Abdalla Hamdok, the soft-spoken former UN economist who was serving as the prime minister in the transitional government, and a number of political parties had withdrawn from the FFC.
I can’t give you what you need. Look around you. Everything around us shouts your fertility. Points toward it. The whole palace is waiting on your womb. It’s the organizing principle of this entire operation. You think you can hold out against it?
The scars of war don’t go away. They stay in our souls and our memory. They remain alive in the memory of all those who have experienced war and suffered its destruction, those who have lost their loved ones. You cannot forget the horror of this war or our tragedy simply because the world wants to pull the curtain down over it, to hide the victims and reward the executioners.
