Holding Gaza close this Ramadan season and beyond

It is just after sunrise on the first day of Ramadan, and I am in Mali. This landlocked West African country is one of the most vulnerable in the world, and notorious for land grabs. My mind is indeed on land grabs, but it is thousands of miles away.

I’m so angry about Gaza. It’s the kind of anger that leaves me shaken but not shocked, like a heartbreak long in the making, or a confirmation of terminal illness in the family that could have been prevented.

On one side, this is not mine to grieve. I am not Palestinian, nor do I live the kinds of struggles that come with daily life in Gaza. This time around, I do not personally know any of the dead—at least not yet. When I go to a protest in any given part of the world, I most often emerge with a camera full of images of smiling and determined faces, colorful flags held high.

In Gaza, emerging from a peaceful demonstration unharmed—or even alive—is clearly not a given.

On the other side, I grieve this because it is deeply personal. Despite the roll of the dice that dictated the circumstances of my birth (and thus privilege), I have lived in Palestine—and visited Gaza several times, some of those visits taking place in the aftermath of massacres. I saw things there that no one should see, and these things will haunt me forever.

I met some of the most welcoming, intelligent, and resolute people that one could imagine—living in unbearable conditions—and I am fortunate to count them among my friends and colleagues. They are comrades who hold me accountable at times like these.

Most importantly while in Palestine, I unlearned the stubborn kinds of politics that hold on like a vice until something tears them away, unlocking the potential for freedom. So I was fortunate to have seen such unthinkable things, because seeing is believing, and believing can be a catalyst for action.

This also hits home in a more uncomfortable way, and that is that my country of origin, the U.S., provides the military power that is necessary for the Israeli army to go on killing sprees in Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied territories. That has always been the case, but the nationalist soaked belligerency of this current U.S. administration has fast-tracked Israeli atrocities in Palestine that are also done in the name of nationalism.

In the hardline love affair between Israel and the U.S., both parties have become drunk on power, with the European Union and others enabling the dysfunctional relationship through aid, trade, and other means. When it inevitably ends, the hangover will be debilitating but the sobriety to follow will be sweet. Occupation, militarization, and empire are simply not built to last—although their ultimate duration depends on those who facilitate them.

So because of this, it is mine—if not to grieve, to act upon. This so-called “conflict” is all of ours.

A Palestinian medical worker reacts from tear gas during clashes with Israeli security forces in a tent city protest where Palestinians demand the right to return to their homeland, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the “Nakba”, and against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem at the Israel-Gaza border, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 15, 2018. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images)

What does this mean? Our actions must be constant. It’s easy—and appropriate—to feel so much emotion when the headlines and feeds of our social media are bubbling over with memorials to baby girls and double amputees whose lives were ended abruptly.

But death in Gaza doesn’t always happen with a well-documented strike of the sword. More often, it’s a slow drip of poison drowned out by background noise. Sometimes it comes by the way of a contaminated aquifer, an encroaching invisible border, or a staple food source blacklisted.

There are things we can do about this. We can invest in Palestinian-led sustainable development, and when necessary, humanitarian relief. We can divest from those who profit from Israeli militarization and occupation. We can educate ourselves, and then others, and we can take it to the streets.

And we can strengthen the movement to change the system, from anti-war to agroecology, because it is all intertwined. There is a place and a need for each of us—for our individual arsenals of talent—that can collectively arm the twin struggles for sovereignty and justice.

Today, back in Mali, I will join a small local delegation to the site of a Chinese land deal where communities will describe experiences of dispossession and strategies of resistance. Rural Malians know these things because they have lived them time and again.

Perhaps for that reason, there is a sense of unshakable solidarity with Gaza here. As West African Muslims celebrate the arrival of their holy month through fasting and prayer, they do so holding up Palestinians. They match that with action in the fight against land and water grabs, not only in the Sahel but also around the world.

And so can all of us do our part to hold Gaza close, even if that means holding Israel accountable.

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The UN has called for an investigation of this latest massacre , and independently other nations have too. How far will these investigations go, it is hard to predict, but most times the US vetoes votes at the UN, and sabotages any attempt to hold the occupiers accountable. Every time these poor Palestinians are attacked, and there is a massacre, one only hope that perhaps this time, the world will finally act and do what is right by these people. Israel has turned out to be a vicious nation, it lies, and justifies all its crimes, by blaming Hamas. This time too, they have their hasbara all over the comments sections calling all who died “terrorists” or members of Hamas. Hamas does not matter, the people who are suffering do.

At least the international community should make sure the occupation ends, and these people are given their freedom. Killing Palestinian civilians have become easy, and a bad habit for these killers. It is because the US keeps protecting, aiding, and arming them, that they find it that easy. The US makes sure they are never held accountable, just like the US never is, for their massacres of Muslim nations.

Here is Max Blumenthal being interviewed about this massacre:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=289&v=jO79yZg1P_4

From the AP

“Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Those damn Chinese.

When one achieves martyrdom, which might be called ritual suicide, it is the context of Gaza’s despair that is the essential fact, rather than this “peaceful demonstration” rhetoric. Israel is at war against Gaza and Gaza is at war against Israel and this “peaceful demonstration” is a form of propaganda.

my view says that the suffocation of Gaza will not achieve the goal of surrender by Hamas without the wars and the fence picnic riots, and so the siege should be lifted. but this was not a march against the siege, it was a march of return. not a peaceful demonstration.

there is no level of communication between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza and one is allowed to blame Israel for this situation. Personally I think the movement towards Jewish statehood was a natural occurrence given the historical context and the harmful exile of the Palestinians follows from the event quite harmfully and naturally. (a contradiction: both harmful and natural. imagine that? a contradiction.) but it is the role of the rejuvenated yehudi people to be resilient and move on to the next stage and undo the harm or ameliorate the harm or fess up to the harm, and that has not been the next stage. (it is not realistic to expect such a stage, but it is befitting to be disappointed by the retarded progress rather than a desired progress.)

Palestinians who have suffered by the natural Jewish land oriented movement are naturally angry and so a demonstration is perfectly understandable. but yes. gaza is a prison. don’t go near the wall and think it’s a picnic. call it a picnic riot. call it the fence suicide martyr movement.

now that we have got that out of the way, ramadan karim.

Thanks for a powerful statement from one who cares about the people who live in Gaza. I’m struck by how different is the tone in the NYT. Today, for example, the headline on one story about Turkey tells us that “Ties With Israel Sour as Erdogan Seizes Gaza Issue Before Election.” Clearly, one infers, Erdogan is seizing on a pretext for political purposes, it can’t be real concern about a real problem. Not to worry, however, “For all the rhetoric, he has not been able to change the situation for the Palestinians, and perhaps he does not intend to.”

@Yonah Friedman
“I’ll give you my perspective as of this hour”
You then miss out on one vitally important aspect of the Great March of Return.Yes Yonah it`s that word”return”. Despite all the predictable but in this instance frenzied ZioHasbara the Palestinians of Gaza succeeded in getting across a simple message which Western society to date at best have simply not appreciated or at worst have chosen to ignore – they were trying to return to the lands and the homes which were stolen from them by warmongering foreign colonists.

Adds a whole new dimension to it all don`t you think Yonah ? No longer simply a question of Hhhhggggamas terrorists at war with the only Western ” Democracy” in the Middle East but a question of whole families imprisoned in the largest and longest lasting concentration camp in history trying to escape and return to their homes.