I know I don’t only speak for myself when I say that I will never be the same.
On October 17th, Israel bombed the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Initial reports estimate that over 500 have been killed, although that number could realistically be higher. Descriptions from the ground are too brutal—an incomprehensible carnage; limbs strewn around the hospital, bodies burned beyond recognition, a trauma the scope of which cannot be communicated with any word in any language. Among the dead are children and elders alike, doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, those injured by previous Israeli bombings, and hundreds of internally displaced refugees seeking safety. People in Gaza have escaped one bombing in their prison just to be bombed where they seek shelter. Israel’s genocide knows no limits and shows us no mercy.
Meanwhile, the European Union and the United States don’t just turn their back; they reprimand our demand for freedom and demand instead that we apologize for our own genocide. Mainstream journalists manipulate and distort our suffering, conjuring lies out of thin air, screaming them from the rooftop just to silently backtrack. “News” outlets, not 24 hours before the hospital bombing, built the groundwork for its “justification.” While the BBC asks whether “Hamas build[s] tunnels under hospitals and schools?” they refuse to report on the dozens of war crimes of collective punishment, targeting civilians, use of chemical weapons, forcible transfer of civilians, killing journalists…I could go on. Journalism isn’t just complicit; it is an active participant in our slaughter.
The world doesn’t just turn its back but it also regurgitates lies and Zionist talking points, acting as our occupier’s stenographer while our genocide unfolds on their phone screens…but of course, it is “complicated.” And now, as Palestinians hold a press conference surrounded by only a fraction of the dead bodies, western journalism begins again to spread their pernicious lies, either pretending that the source of the “blast” was unknown or holding Palestinians to account, all of whom are too busy carrying their sons’ body parts in plastic bags in the hopes to be able to put them back together again.
There is no imminent genocide in Palestine because it started 75 years ago. Sometimes it manifests itself slowly in the obscured, daily violences of life under occupation: home demolitions, checkpoints, settler pogroms, assaulting us as we pray or gather, incarcerating our freedom fighters, our mothers, our fathers, our children. Sometimes, it is so fast that our bodies outnumber our graves. There is no imminent genocide. This is its conclusion.
We have demanded freedom in every way accessible to us. We have written books and essays, recited poetry and passed down our oral histories, we have directed movies and plays, we have sung songs and conducted music, we have marched and we have protested, and we have joined rigged peace talks and picked up arms. We have prophesied this unthinkable brutality, and we have repeatedly warned that Israel’s unchecked, U.S.-backed, fascist violence would culminate in our end. Despite every Zionist effort to silence and erase us, we have been relentless in our call for justice because the truth is on our side. Although the tides might be turning, and people are joining the cause in unprecedented numbers, we need freedom now. Yes, we need an immediate ceasefire, but we also need to demolish this large open-air prison, end U.S. military aid to Israel, and give every Palestinian their ancestral right to return and anointed freedom. If we do not do this right now, the brutality will only continue to compound until the Zionist promise of flattening us becomes a reality.
I’ve been aware of the horrors Israel has and continues to commit against Palestinians my whole life. My/our family histories are punctuated by the cruel displacement and genocide at the hands of our colonizers. If this bombing of a hospital and its patients, a war crime, does not make the Zionist project of genocide clear, then I do not know what will. We have used every metaphor, simile, allegory, and word to describe our dehumanization and resulting genocide. If the entire language we have created to call for our freedom does not move you to action, then we are, in the words of Mohammed El-Kurd, “failures…utter, disgusting, spineless failures.”
This feels like the last essay I am ever going to write because there is nothing more to say and no other way to say it. We have auditioned to the world for their sympathy for 75 years while the faces and bodies of our martyrs haunt us and their self-written eulogies follow us. I will never be the same, and neither should you.
