Salaam, friends.
For those of you who follow me elsewhere, you will know much of this already, but I want to write out a personal update for those of you who don’t. Last month, I slipped on wet tiles and fell down a flight of cement stairs. I fractured my spine in this fall, hitting it in the first instance on the edge of a stair before sliding down the rest. Alhumdulillah, it could have been much worse: while I am in pain, and my range of movement is limited, I can walk and move on my own. The major difficulty has been the instruction that I not lift anything for at least this first month, particularly my 10.5kg, 18-month-old toddler.
Shortly after this, my wife fell sick with a mysterious virus (literally, doctors were unable to identify it). She had a recurring fever for two weeks, and all the tests for the usual culprits - including Covid - kept coming back negative. Despite regular medicine, it kept getting worse. She took time off. I took time off. Both of us ran out of paid leave. Finally, she had to go to hospital as the fever was worsening. She was in hospital for five days. They did every test they could, and came up with nothing. One of those tests, a lumbar puncture for meningitis, is the reason she stayed in hospital so long: a complication called spinal headaches, where her spinal fluid continues to leak long after the puncture, causing severe migraines if she moved her head or sat up or stood. It can last for two weeks, and is ongoing as I write this.
I won’t go into the full ordeal. It’s been awful, but the end result is that neither of us had, or currently has, the capacity to care for our child. We had some help while she was in hospital, my brother and his wife thank God were able to take my baby for two nights, and I know that was a serious strain on them. They have six kids of their own. My sister has six kids and cares for her sick father. My aunty has a spinal problem of her own that leaves her in chronic pain and has been on the public waiting list for spinal surgery for over a year. All of my cousins have 4-5 kids of their own. People like to say, it takes a village to raise a child and I have often thought, with respect to my own family, what do you do when your village needs a village? This is the case, more often than not, with extended working class families.
I needed help because I can’t lift my baby, and for those of you who don’t have a little toddler, here are some examples of the times you need to lift your baby: to put them in and take them out of the high chair to eat, to put them in and take them out of the bath, to put them in and lift them off the bed, to take them down or up stairs (there’s two flights into my apartment), to stop them from running onto the road, to get them down off the thing they should not be climbing and could fall from, and so on. In Australia, people like to tutt about the American healthcare system and the ubiquity of American GoFundMe campaigns to survive, but while our Medicare system is undeniably better, it is also insufficient - particularly when you have complex health needs as both myself and my Indigenous wife did prior to our current predicament.
Thankfully, a friend organised a GoFundMe for us, which was successful beyond what any of us expected, and we have been able to hire a childcare worker to be with us most days, from morning to night. Hannah is home but still suffering from pain and migraines; my back pain is ongoing and I think worsening. It is so draining, emotionally and spiritually, to be rendered helpless in your own home; to have to turn your child away when they ask to be lifted into your arms, because you can’t. And the truth is, I’ve failed this test and lifted him, and the pain has sent me back and back, because how can I deny the light of my life, the beating heart of my world? His smile is everything to me, and he has been so traumatised by this experience, being away from me, being away from his mum. If either of us leaves the room, leaves his line of sight, he screams. I can deny him nothing now, if ever I was capable of it before.
This is all to say, these past few weeks, I needed a village beyond my village and one was summoned into existence from all the platforms I often cynically deride, and I’m ashamed of that now, that I let myself be convinced into the tarnishing of the whole because the structures themselves are warped by the billionaire class; recognising that is important, and so too, that many of us persist within it because we must, that we can and have and will continue to do good wherever we can. The support that has been given to us will enable us to heal, to attend specialist appointments, and take care of our health and bills through the holiday period. I am staggered by the enormity of the support we have been able to access, and equally, by how painful and difficult life has still been for us; hold that thought for a minute, as I continue to do, and now extend it. Imagine for a second not having a hospital to go to, a doctor to see, medicine to ease the pain, water, food, childcare. Imagine all the pains of *regular* life, illness, injury, parenthood, with every support ripped away amid a constant bombardment.
This is the reality for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and it is a horror maintained by the very system I—and many of you reading this—live in.
Here ends my personal update.
I don’t know what day of the genocide we’re on. I do know that anything more than Day 1 is an unacceptable travesty and we are so far past that point that all of our governments are damned beyond redeeming, and we must carry that damnation in turn. The only country in the world I reserve from this is Yemen, may God favour Yemen forever.
There are no working hospitals in Occupied Palestine. Doctors and their families have been murdered; doctors have been kidnapped. There is little to no medicine. Over 27,000 Palestinians have been murdered. Over 10,000 children massacred. We have known for two months now that every single week Israel kills a thousand children in its completely evil, unjustifiable bombing of civilians. And every single week the governments of the world have supported it, or abstained from objecting to it in any meaningful way (again, with the exception of Yemen), largely because of the US empire’s refusal to halt the genocide.
The Washington Post yesterday released an investigation showing what any donkey could have told you from the outset, which is that there is no evidence whatsoever of a connection between Hamas and the hospitals that have been destroyed: no evidence of military use by Hamas of the rooms connected to the tunnels, no evidence the five hospital buildings identified by the IDF being connected to the tunnel network and no evidence the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The NYTimes has also just released an investigation demonstrating what Palestinians have shown us time and time again: that Israel knowingly bombed fleeing civilians in areas that it told them to flee to, using its most devastating wide-ranging bombs to kill as many as possible.
Western legacy media outlets are—in the US, at least, not Australia—beginning to turn away from repeating Israeli propaganda without challenge and to showing Israeli lies and crimes for what they are, because there is no threat in doing so now, no threat that this reporting will cause pressure to rise that might stop the Israeli government from achieving their objective: the hospitals have been destroyed, the systems that support life in Gaza have been destroyed, the people who hold the knowledge to maintain life have been killed or abducted. Doing this kind of reporting now is entirely an operation in maintaining what shreds of their reputation remain. It has nothing to do with telling the truth and nothing to do with holding power to account; these notions having anything to do with journalism have been exposed as mythical.
Fuck these “investigations” and fuck everyone who requires them to see past the racist nonsense that has been on full-blast for three months. Anyone only now listening because of these reports has been ignoring Arabs this entire time, and not just Arabs, but the human rights organisations on the ground, the doctors and medical staff and journalists who have repeatedly refuted Israeli propaganda. In fact, it is because the NYTimes and WaPo and BBC are so notably Zionist in their orientation, so obviously and profoundly hostile to Arabs and to Palestinians in particular, that they are given credence by the public when they do finally release their flaccid reports articulating what we already know to be true.
And still, I want to take this moment to repeat what I have said before: these investigations are meaningless because there has never been justification, legal or moral, for these horrific Israeli attacks. These reports that go to great lengths to show Israel lied, that there was no evidence for its attacks on hospitals, implicitly support the notion that justification might have previously existed for these crimes against humanity. There is no justification for these crimes. None. There never will be. This is incredibly important to understand: even if Hamas militants were in the hospital, it would not justify bombing it and in the process murdering doctors, nurses, children and babies. Israeli snipers assassinated doctors. They cut the power to hospitals. They killed babies in their incubators. They left those babies to rot. And all of this was accepted by our governments and our media as permissible and justifiable in pursuit of murdering Hamas militants who have cumulatively never committed even a fraction of the evils of the apartheid Israeli state. Only a profound, pervasive, relentless racism can create this kind of genocidal consent that abrogates every existing legal and moral framework.
In fact, we still have virtually no acknowledgement in Western media that under international law, armed resistance to occupation is a legal right. We still have nothing but a demand for the goals of the apartheid state which occupies Palestine—the elimination of Hamas—in flagrant violation of international law, and despite the daily atrocities committed by Israel. It is also still true that more condemnation and concern is expressed here about protests against these horrors than against the perpetrators of genocide, the mass starvation and displacement of two million people. We still have the US refusing any and all attempts to mandate a ceasefire. Australian media in particular has been utterly disgraceful and unrepentantly racist. I’ll need an entire newsletter to discuss the details of that and inshallah if I have the energy I will do so soon. In short: the Anglosphere’s political and media classes have been facilitating this genocide and defending it at every turn: they continue to do so now, even as these reports signal a slow turning toward an end.
Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with Israel murdering Palestinians en masse every day. It leaves us with Israel bulldozing what homes and structures have survived their carpet bombing. It leaves us with Israel bulldozing injured Palestinians and burying them alive. It leaves us with Israel ripping up a Palestinian cemetery and desecrating the dead. It leaves us with Israel stealing the organs of murdered Palestinians. It leaves us with the field executions of Palestinian civilians and the torture and murder of Palestinians in Israeli camps. It leaves us with more than half a million people in Gaza starving.
When you’re in crisis, you need a village. Sometimes the village needs a village. Do you see where I’m going with this? We are the village, always. Palestinians need us to amplify their calls for ceasefire, to protest, to disrupt, to rise up, to boycott. Whether you’re tired or injured or whatever, there is always something you can do, a positive action you can take. Please do not listen to anyone trying to dismiss or diminish our efforts, however “small” they seem. Even a poem can change and charge a million hearts, as Dr Refaat Alareer has shown us, Allah yerhamu. It is his instruction I am following now, continuing to write and witness in the face of every imagined futility and the State’s hostile refusal, the constant gaslighting.
Speak out and act out until this ends, and apartheid is abolished forever. Speak out and act out until genocide is rendered an impossibility for everyone, everywhere.
Salaam,
Omar