A year of erasing a people
It has been a year of erasing a people, systematically, ruthlessly and unrelentingly. A massacre here and another there. 500 killed yesterday and ‘only’ 140 today.
It has been a year of obliterating a culture, an identity and a collective memory. A year of levelling universities, libraries and museums. A year of burning archives, photographs and centuries-old manuscripts. A year of bombing mosques and churches.
It has been a year of rendering the land uninhabitable, inch by inch. An olive orchard bulldozed here and a water treatment plant bombed there.
It has been a year of unspeakable horrors for the children. An American surgeon said that “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” Other doctors wrote about the children who were deliberately shot in the head or chest ‘..on a regular or even a daily basis.’ The iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ photo is said to have prompted the end of the Vietnam war. Today, we watch hundreds of images of maimed and burnt Palestinian children but none seems to herald an end to the inferno in Gaza.
It has been a year of killing those bearing witness. A year when a ‘Press’ helmet and vest became an invitation to the bullets of Israeli snipers and a death sentence.
It has been a year of ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ and ‘Human Shields’.
It has been a year of shame for Arab governments and rage on the Arab street. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told Antony Blinken “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do.”
It has been a year of pleas from human rights organisations, open letters from doctors, and proceedings at the ICJ. It has been a year of student encampments and protests across the globe. A year of weekly calls for a ceasefire. And all the while, Israel continued to do what Israel has always done, bomb and destroy.
It was the year the ‘Hannibal Directive’ and the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ entered the lexicon. It was the year I googled the word ‘Amalek’.
It was a year when we learned that our expressions of anguish over the slaughter of Palestinians were a threat to social cohesion. And our speaking up against genocide was bringing an overseas ‘conflict’ here.
It was the year I bought a kaffiyeh.
It was a year when I made new Jewish friends at the pro-Palestine weekly rallies. Their courage, compassion and solidarity have sustained me and meeting them every week has been a bright spot in my calendar.
It was a year of two vastly different accounts of one reality. A year of Jonathan Cook, Aaron Maté, Norman Finkelstein, Chris Hedges, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Patrick Lawrence et al. on the one hand and the complicit media on the other.
It was a year when I was dumbfounded at the ease with which the occupier was portrayed as the victim and the besieged as the perpetrators. A sleight of hand by a top magician.
It was the year that ‘impunity’ danced and sang on the rooftops.
It was the year when calls for a ceasefire were labelled antisemitic. And calls for equal rights for Palestinians were labelled hate speech.
It was a year when I sometimes felt sorry for the spokespersons of the White House, trying to field logical questions from a few outspoken journalists. How often can one keep saying, with a straight face ‘ We are waiting for Israel to investigate’, ‘I don’t yet have all the information’, ‘I have no further comments’?
It was a year when I watched ‘The Zone of Interest’ and thought of Gaza. And learned that it was a taboo to have such thoughts or make such connections.
It was the year the best of international literature piled on my coffee table, unread, while I spent hours every day reading about the genocide in Gaza.
It was a year that I learned the old Palestinian names of some Israeli towns and remembered ‘The Search Warrant’: Patrick Modiano’s profound meditation on loss, memory and the obliteration of history.
It was a year that I was consumed by guilt every time I went shopping for makeup. Standing at the counter comparing shades of lipstick, I would think of the chant at our weekly rally as we marched past David Jones: ‘while you’re shopping, bombs are dropping’. And I would think of the women in Gaza with their faces covered in dust from bombed buildings, grime from lack of soap and water, and blood from being trapped inside a shooting range.
It was a year when the politicians voiced their ‘concern’, declared that every loss of innocent life was a tragedy, renewed their commitment to the tired old two-state solution, called on all parties to de-escalate, and made hollow pronouncements about peace.. and the bombs kept dropping.
It was the year I read Mohammed El-Kurd’s poem ‘Small Talk‘:
‘”How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons away, and a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyx-iation.’
It was a year that food lost its taste as Gaza starved.
It was a year when I often imagined what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. How would the world have reacted if Arabs were behind exploding pagers in Tel Aviv? What would the headlines have screamed? How many countries in the Middle East would Israel and the US have bombed? It was a year during which I found myself playing these ‘inverting’ mental games with mainstream media headlines, news bulletins’ stories and politicians’ pronouncements.
It was a year that grief took up residence in my heart and none of the previous year’s pleasurable pastimes could dislodge it.
It was a year at the beginning of which we did not imagine that the daily carnage could last for a month. Too shocking to last for even a week, we thought. Now, a whole year later, we are told that the carnage will continue at least until after the US elections, because the American President is a lame duck and the Israeli Prime Minister is waiting for total victory. The inane details that decide who will eat and who will starve, who will live and who will die.