genocide
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
For three weeks, Israel has cut off the food, water, and power to the Gaza Strip where 2.3 million people live under brutal occupation. For three weeks Israel has starved and poisoned and dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on these people, in the form of a relentless aerial bombardment. This wholesale mass murder has been cheered on with vile rhetoric from both Israeli and Western officials and journalists openly calling Palestinians animals, or “the children of darkness” as Netanyahu put it; openly calling for the total elimination of what we have all complacently called “the world’s largest open-air prison” these past two decades. A place home to over a million children.
This is genocide.
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is very clear. The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
As I write this, 7,326 Palestinians have been killed and more than 18,000 wounded. An estimated three thousand Palestinian kids have been murdered so far. One thousand per week. 142 every day. At least.
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
As this monstrosity continues, the vast majority of Western leaders—be they supposedly “left” or “right” wing, terms which we now know to be meaningless—not only refused to condemn Israel’s clear war crimes and crimes against humanity, they actively supported it financially and militarily, as well as disseminating Zionist propaganda to justify the unjustifiable. Every step of the way toward this mountain of murdered Arabs, Western politicians and media have worked overtime to condone and ameliorate this genocide. From the initial claims that Israel could do whatever it liked regardless of human decency or international laws to suppressing criticism of Israel and trying to stigmatise and suppress protests in support of Palestine; to refusing to acknowledge the innocent Palestinians being mass murdered, to then trying to cast doubt over the reports coming out of Gaza once the number of children murdered climbed into the thousands. Millions protested around the world and still nothing was done to stop the slaughter.
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
There is no pretence any more. We do not live in free countries; any notion of the “democratic” as being inherently good or lawful is done and gone.
Israel murdered dozens of Palestinian journalists. Murdered their families. Murdered dozens and dozens of Palestinian doctors and medics. Murdered their families. Bombed hospitals. Bombed UN shelters. Bombed schools. Bombed refugees fleeing into designated “safe zones”. Conducted an open campaign of genocidal warfare against civilian heroes, while the world watched on, and now, ya Allah, now they have destroyed the cell towers and cut off all communication Gaza had with the world. They killed thousands of children on video, for everyone to see, relying on misinformation but more than that, the entrenched anti-Arab Islamophobia the Western has built up into a modern blank cheque to excuse any violation it desires. They did all this in front of us and now they’ve turned everything off to continue the horrors where we can’t see.
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
This is genocide.
Many are trying to ignore this, to deny or undermine it, and to them, and to everyone who has excused or tried to make permissible the slaughter of my people—I see you, and I will never forgive you.
To my Palestinian kin, I am so sorry, I love you, and grieve with you.
This is not resignation, habibis. I will continue doing whatever I can to resist this nightmare, to protest against it, to hold these monsters accountable; I have not given up, nor will I ever. I repeat my apology my love my grief, I make of them a refrain because they do not want you to know that you are being wronged, that you are loved, that you are grieved for and with—in the face of the relentless erasure, demonising and gaslighting, I say: I am sorry, I love you, I grieve with you. I don’t know what else I can say or do but I am determined to find out.
May Allah grant us justice in this life or the next.
Salaam,
Omar