October
7, 2024—Today, we can expect a parade of treacly sycophantism, brazen sociopathy, and humanist admonishment. They write for their mark, the reader they assume to be a dupe, slack-jawed and cowed by their prevarications. Their articles and essays will decry the same weaponization of grief they did last year, though this time the horrors leveled against the Palestinian people of Gaza will be spaced out across the paragraphs like the breath in their chests, an indication of their being human, and just as unremarkable. In spite of the displayed emotion or stated politics, their writing will, ultimately, reinforce the very same logics of revenge that have lubricated the last twelve months of Western-backed mass extermination.
There is an alternative to this narration of the settler colonial project, so often authorized to be made only by those eligible to be its beneficiaries. It is an alternative that requires Gaza. Not the maelstrom of violence and extracted image, but the Gaza of historical and geographic specificity, the Gaza where two million people lived encaged for almost two decades, habitually starved, poisoned, and bombed from the sky. The Gaza of October 6. Virtually every tactic to destroy and demoralize that Zionism has employed since Tufan al-Aqsa can be traced across our history: concentration camps, mutilation of children, starvation, collective punishment, torture. This was the status quo October 7 tore apart.
That day, a prison break. Displaced from their towns and villages all across Palestine during the nakba of 1947–1949, the people of the land held on to the promise of return, the commitment that has animated each new generation penned in by the forces of Zionism, Western imperialism, and Arab reaction. Over seven decades, they had been ethnically cleansed from their homes, pushed into a small strip of land that built upwards, forced to endure the tampering and testing. Outside their walls, apartheid highways ferried the machines for future construction and their new residents—the vengeful, the distracted—now made to taste fear anew.
Almost a year ago today, the image of the press conference at the end of the world. A crestfallen man carrying the bloodied body of a Palestinian child. The first responders at the podium, faces worn with sweat and grief. They are flung backwards, to a video of children in Gaza City, dancing and squealing with laughter, playing together in a park, and then backwards once more, to a smoldering wall, a burning Merkava, to the men who broke through. Those fighters had trained for months, and now found themselves stepping foot onto the same hills and plains that their grandfathers and grandmothers had lived upon. There, they found a record of passing time, stolen and disfigured; new bars and streetlights and parking lots, a modern, ugly world forced to look them in the eyes.
In the capitals of the modern, ugly world, some have watched these displays with dispassion, quickly processing the news in order to identify the precise calculus required of them in this moment: the appropriate choices of words that will inoculate them from consequences and guarantee their trajectories. Those men or women went home to their children yesterday evening, content in having chosen the most effective mass lie for ours; image and word flowing from Gaza’s corpses to air-conditioned rooms to the television screens of America. The lies this year have not, in fact, been qualitatively different from any of the other lies, about Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or otherwise: a thousand Arab martyrs, ten thousand Arab martyrs, hundreds of thousands maimed and disabled Arabs, the only thing to be done here is to refuse and to be blamed for your refusal, for we have precious small time to allow someone else to stand on our path and smile their jackal smile.
The man who mourns the settler mourns only the end of his normalcy. The man who yells into a flood urging calm, must in fact be believed on his own terms. He shows us what he longs for, what he desires, all his grasping attempts at providing language for the movement of nothing for no one. Allow us instead to believe the dispossessed on their own terms. They do not mourn, they cannot. Those who mourn for all people are above them. Our system of settler morality says so, it reflects its piousness back at us, insisting we self-consciously calibrate to march in lockstep with its dictates. Some will follow this bargain to the end, but others will slide off the sides, because of the force of their rejection or because they sought shelter from the pain of this world.
In Gaza, almost every place has been scarred by Zionist aggression. Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed; and half of our people huddle in makeshift tent camps around Deir el-Balah. Jewish-American teenagers fly out to join an occupation army that shoots children in the head, wears displaced women’s clothing, and records videos of themselves detonating mosques. Mass death whose aim is depopulation and ethnic cleansing, we will not be desensitized by it: the Flour Massacre, Mawasi, al-Shifa, Jabalia, a regime built on massacre returning to its founding strategy. In the West Bank, Jenin and Tulkarm and Nablus have weathered an immense storm that sought to destroy the spirit of a resistance that will not relent to any enemy. And the Lebanese people, whose fight to stop the genocide has brought on invasion by the united forces of late empire—their communiqués about the martyrs of the south still begin with Gaza.
It will take decades to understand the scale of the violence Palestinians have endured this year. The grief across the Arab world is unfathomable. Our children are not numbers. They are among the two million forgotten by a world willed to forget: Why had this been allowed to happen, why had it been made to seem normal? In each of us there is now a black hole of loss. Those who have confronted such loss in their lifetimes—dead mothers, imprisoned fathers, cancer, suicide, addiction—understood this intimately last fall. You could feel the change in their bodies; certain doors, when opened, will not shut. The old mystification was shorn not by the images of death and privation, but by insistence. Witness was insufficient; what changed us was collective work guided by the most surprising reminder that some people will not bow.
In this sense, we owe much of the development of the movement to October 7; so too, the fledgling Western left. It would be easy to become complacent or disillusioned by what has followed, but we have obligations to the martyrs, to the prisoners, and to all who fight to end this. Here, hundreds of thousands have been mobilized, joined new organizations, confronted the campus and the state. They have Gaza to thank for this, but it is not enough. Israel is the model for a global future, of fully-realized 21st century fascist nations. Its blueprint is in reinforcing duality with the American security state: the same technologies, strategies, and rationalizations will be brought to bear on coming waves of climate refugees and the lumpenproletariat who will strain the edges of the prison or ghetto. The consolidation of the means of mass death production in the hands of the ruling class and their media accomplices is a convalescent prologue to the coming decades of catastrophe.
This is a normalcy that should not be normal, and each of our martyrs fought to end it. They are dead now, did all they could. But it remains that each of their circumstances was a failure. Theirs is a fractured world, full of unfulfilled promises. No youth should know the violence that these ones know. They are up against everything: a sprawling imperial system that views them as disposable. They see their uncles taken captive for years, returning home to decades gone by. They see a world which, more than just forgetting them, cheers on their dispossession. Some turn to abnegation and seriousness in an attempt to restore their dignity, disavowing fleshy desire and parts of what is human. They pick up a video camera or a stretcher or a textbook or a gun and they begin to train, harnessing the fundamental desire for something different into a lifelong struggle.
Our martyr Basil al-Araj wrote of the unabating wonder and silly smile he experienced whenever the rain fell. For those of us who have spent years facing off against the darkness, these twelve months have shown us who can be counted upon in the ongoing crisis. These twelve months have shown us what a life’s commitment can look like. Zionism thinks it has broken our spirits, but all we see around us are people who will fight forever.
this piece can be found published in issue 13 of The New York War Crimes by Writers Against the War on Gaza