Every day is worse than the last.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza hasn’t been able to update the number of casualties because the health system has collapsed entirely under the awful, indiscriminate Israeli bombing. They can’t count the dead anymore. Over 12,000 have been killed and 40,000 injured last we knew, already an evil sum, an unjustifiable disgrace unleashed in 40 days. Hundreds of bodies lie decomposing in the streets. Al-Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, already struggling with little to no fuel and providing refuge to thousands of displaced people, has been stormed by the Israeli army in yet another blatant war crime. This comes after an extended siege where Israeli snipers were firing into the hospital, killing doctors and patients.
For days, they have claimed that Hamas had a sophisticated command centre under the hospital and that hostages were there—neither of which was true. No evidence has been provided that substantiates this, despite those claims being backed up by US president Joe Biden. 39 premature babies were in incubators in Al-Shifa hospital. No power was provided, no effort made to save them. Several of these babies were killed, that we know of, along with 70% of the patients in the ICU. “ABC News quoted a doctor at the hospital as saying 43 of the 63 intensive care patients have died due to a lack of oxygen.”
The genocide continues, aided and abetted by the US and its proxies, and laundered by a complicit, racist media machine that treats all Israeli claims as credible and all Palestinian claims as suspicious, all Israeli life as sacred and all Palestinian life as of no importance. A new report on the past month of coverage outlines the gross prejudice displayed by the three largest US news channels, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC—it found that all three consistently favoured Israeli views over Palestinians, all three used emotive language to describe the “unjustifiable massacre” by Hamas while referring clinically to a “death toll” for Palestinians, so much so that by October 24th, though more than 3000 Palestinian children had been killed, they were mentioned less than the 30 Israeli children killed by Hamas, and when they were mentioned, their deaths were rarely described emotively.
Right now, Gaza is cut off from the world. There is yet another telecommunications blackout. The massacre of Palestinians is ongoing. The demonisation of protests against this genocide is ongoing and the crackdown on dissent is also increasing in deeply alarming ways. There are too many to list, though I’ll make an effort later if I can’t find an existing summation. A new front in the disinformation campaign is TikTok which Zionists and their conservative allies find frightening due to their inability to buy its influencers with the same ease they buy politicians. Recently, young people on TikTok were sharing a “Letter to America” written by Osama bin Laden that was published on the Guardian and has been available as such for over 20 years. The Guardian removed the letter in response, a cowardly and stupid decision that achieved precisely nothing.
As I understand it, these mostly American young people—described on various sites as “dozens”—were surprised to find in this letter that bin Laden was a) capable of writing and b) motivated by the colonisation of Palestine by Israel and America, among other injustices. I’m not going to comment on that because, frankly, this indication of the level of education in the world is depressing, and because I already lived through 9/11 and the subsequent bin Laden hysteria once. What I did comment on, and what I think is instructive of the moment we find ourselves in, is the justifications that bin Laden outlined for his attacks on civilians.
Compare this with statements from Israeli officials, like President Herzog who said “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” This idea has been repeated by numerous Israelis on the record, as well as US officials and media, on the basis that Hamas was elected in 2006 and therefore everyone in Gaza is apparently culpable for their actions, extending so far as one MP saying “The children of Gaza brought this on themselves.” This idea has been implicitly endorsed by the West’s continued support of Israel’s cutting off the supply of food, water, and power to 2.2 million trapped civilians, to say nothing of bombing them indiscriminately—all of which are clear war crimes, like targeting hospitals, and ambulances, and journalists, and schools, and killing UN workers, which Israel has also done with impunity. Unsurprisingly this view has filtered into the public as seen by this comment published in an Australian newspaper today:
You will note that this logic is exactly the same as that cited by Osama bin Laden and by Hamas more recently. This terrorist logic has been endorsed by world leaders and by Israel enthusiastically in its blatant, explicit mass murder of Palestinians. That is far more alarming to me than some kids on TikTok discovering that the billionaire jihadist trained by the CIA had more reasoning behind his atrocities than the simplistic “freedom is evil” rhetoric they had crammed down their throats.
Nor is pushing for collective punishment new to Israel, as this problematic essay in NY magazine pretends, calling it a “disturbing rhetorical turn”. In 2012, Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli prime minister Arial Sharon, called for Israel to “flatten Gaza”, writing in the Jerusalem Post that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza” because they elected Hamas. This article by Alia Brahimi in 2014 puts into perspective how long this dehumanising rhetoric has been circulating in Israel:
Western media and politicians continue to refer to Israel’s “higher morality” as fact when it is complete fiction, and continue to call for a “restraint” it has never shown; Israel has undeniably committed more horrors, more massacres, more atrocities than all the Palestinian armed resistance across 75 years of dispossession and occupation combined, and what’s more, they’ve done so in the past 40 days alone, but it was true before October 7th as well. 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced, half of them children. Tens of thousands have been murdered. They are being starved to death while Israelis make TikToks laughing at them, dressing up as poor Arabs, gloating that they have water and power, or pretending to be abused Palestinian prisoners. Unsurprisingly these TikTok trends did not bother conservatives.
What are we to make of this terrorist logic being embraced by a nuclear-armed military superpower that has illegally besieged and occupied this city for 16 years? How has it been allowed to continue this long? What are we to make of the US government refusing to acknowledge the Geneva Conventions apply to Gaza as much as anywhere else? Or of the US president justifying the war crime of assaulting a hospital and refusing to provide evidence for it? What are we to make of international media everywhere refusing to cite international law, the obligations of the occupier versus the rights of the occupied, in prosecuting this unjust slaughter with prejudiced coverage? Why is everyone ignoring the fact that Netanyahu is an indicted criminal in charge of an extremist regime trying to circumvent the Israeli legal system? Why are all the Zionist pundits in the West who lovingly polish Israel’s “morality” unwilling or unable to speak to the thousands of unjust arrests carried out against Palestinians, and more recently, the hundreds of Israeli citizens who are deemed to have harmed the “morale” of the war effort or in any way exhibited sympathy with the massacred Palestinians?
For the record, I entirely agree with people who say there can be no equivalence between Israel and Hamas, even if they are using the same logic of terror and punishment for all. There can be no equivalence because one is subjugating and imprisoning the other, there can be no equivalence because one has the economic and military power of the world’s most violent and aggressive country behind it, because one has an army, airforce, and navy and can, as it has shown this past month and numerous other times, unleash thousands of cataclysmic bombs on Arab cities to the indifference or outright glee of the Anglosphere. The only lens that matters is power because with power comes real choices, something that has been denied to Palestinians for decades, along with their human rights.
Some well-intentioned comments have warned that this TikTok moment was orchestrated to tie people who are “pro-Palestine” to terrorism, and as such not to engage with any of it. Listen. I have been tied to terrorism my whole life by virtue of my face, my blood, my faith—friends, stop letting your voice be curtailed by the racist hysteria of empire. They warp even the most innocuous language. They have demonised even peace. They have murdered children en masse. I will no longer be giving their paranoid fantasies a hold on my life. What I am oriented toward in my criticism and my practice, always, is power and its misuses; the power here is in the “progressive” Guardian removing a letter, the power here is rich Jewish celebrities telling TikTok executives to ban “from the river to the sea” and using anti-Semitism, their own fears, to obscure the real genocide that is occurring every day; the power is trying to get you to orient toward policing ordinary people with no platform, on social media that is already overwhelmingly censorial to Palestinian people and any voices that dare to so much as name their land.
Free Palestine! From the river to the sea, habibi.
Salaam,
Omar