It has been over a week since Hamas fighters broke through the siege that Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip for over 17 years. The war that Israel has launched in retaliation against the largest, and daring, attack it has experienced since 1973 has been massive. Like every war, it is devastating, cruel, and unjust, as innocent civilians are always the ones who bear its costs, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
So far, 1400 Israelis have been killed and 2600 have been injured by Hamas fighters. On the Palestinian side the casualties continue to mount: 3,785 have been killed, around , over 12,400 have been injured, and thousands have been displaced.
Israel’s relentless bombardment has destroyed entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, reducing them to rubble. The images remind us of Mariapol in Ukraine during the Russian assault in 2022, or in Aleppo during the war in Syria, but at a much more concentrated scale since Gaza is only 350 square km. Palestinians have no place to go, even though their displacement and elimination from the land of Palestine is exactly what Israel is determined to accomplish.
For all Palestinians, this war is a continuation of the Nakba. For those inside Gaza, it means a life of starvation and despair, if not death and displacement. For those living in the diaspora, it brings back memories of other wars experienced or witnessed. Feelings of survivor guilt mix with revived trauma, either experienced firsthand or transmitted intergenerationally.
What comes strongest to mind is the 1982 Israeli war on Lebanon. Then too, violence was conducted to eradicate Palestinian “terrorists,” as Israel had then defined the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The devastation then was also enormous: villages were looted; camps were destroyed; Beirut was strangled by Israel’s 88-day siege, which deprived its inhabitants of water and electricity; and Palestinians were expelled or massacred afterwards in Sabra and Shatila.
That time too, the whole world watched events unfold, the Arab world did nothing, and the victims were blamed for the atrocities inflicted on them.
For me as a Palestinian living in the US for nearly twenty-five years, this war, like the others before it, is a reminder that the Nakba will never end so long as Palestinians continue to exist. The sense of helplessness and the urge, if not the obligation, to do something, is overwhelming. Yet one cannot but ask, how much longer can we still try to speak and not be heard? How can we bear the injustice of Western superpowers allying with the apartheid regime of Israel? What impact can our determination to cry out, speak out, demonstrate, fundraise, organise, and lobby, have on US foreign policy and the mainstream Western media that continue to dehumanise us?
Every war is conducted not only on the physical front but also through the control of images and narratives. CNN and MSNBC, mainstream liberal news channels, started by trying to explain the Hamas attack, interviewing American analysts, ex-military officials, and previous diplomats about its causes and implications. Many emphasized that this attack revealed not only Israel’s intelligence failure, but also a policy failure: the Israeli strategy of imprisoning 2.3 million Palestinians behind a wall, under siege, and fragmented from those living in the West Bank has not worked.
Some of those interviewed went as far as to say that Israel cannot ignore the Palestinians’ plight and must address it, not ignore it.
Yet, as the days went on, the Israeli narrative started to dominate. While some news anchors refrained from using ٲԲⲹ’s conflation of Hamas and ISIL, they focused on Israeli suffering and fears. Images of dead Israelis and interviews with their grieving relatives predominated the one-hour news slots. Palestinian suffering was relegated to static camera shots showing pulverised destruction that looked surreal, suspended, as if one was looking at a video game.
The reality of Palestinian bodies under rubble, of children crying, and families devastated, were all left out. The news reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself and refrained from explaining the reality unfolding in Gaza, let alone provide Palestinian or Arab perspectives.
But something has shifted. The vehemence with which Israeli propaganda is trying to control the narrative is an indication of how worried Israel is at the progress Palestinians have made to affirm our existence. Unlike 30 years ago, when Palestinians were either ignored or defined solely as “terrorists,” today we are present and vocal in every university, are elected into the US congress and city councils across the country, and have created our own news outlets. We no longer need “permission to narrate,” as put it, even if Israel is determined, and has put substantial resources toward denying us any forum.
The facts unfolding on the ground have made it clear who the perpetrator is and who the victim is. The siege of Gaza, Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, house demolitions in East Jerusalem, and the discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel have all shown that Israel is a settler colonial state that enforces an apartheid system of oppression.
The courage of those who broke through the barbed wire, sailed by boat to return to their ancestral homes, or flew with their hang-gliders over the wall of the largest open-air prison has shown that Palestinians will continue to defy the gravity of settler colonialism to be free, whatever the cost.
President Biden, in a press conference on 10 October, the US’s unequivocal support for Israel’s legitimate right to fight “evil”. He also chose to end his speech by recalling his meeting with Golda Meir in 1973, the Israeli Prime Minister who famously denied the existence of the Palestinian people (“there is no such thing as Palestinian ”). Meir told Biden at that meeting that Israel’s strongest weapon is the fact that Israelis have nowhere else to go. Fifty years after that declaration, Palestinians are also showing that they will remain on their land and are not going anywhere. It is now for the international community to remind Israel of this fact and bring an end to both Palestinian and Jewish suffering.
Leila Farsakh, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Here most recent books include Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determinntion and Decolonization Beyond Partition (2021) and The Arab-Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagements in Palesitne and Beyond (2020).
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