I am writing this while the terrorist Israeli Occupation Forces are attacking the Tuffah, Daraj, and Shuja’iyya neighborhoods in Gaza. They are forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes towards Remal in the west of Gaza City which itself is under heavy bombardment. Hundreds of bodies are scattered in the streets. No Red Cross or Red Crescent relief or medical workers are allowed into the areas to provide medical attention or essential supplies.
A few days ago, I received the news of the martyrdom of Saadi Mdoukh, our friend, music producer, and the videographer who produced our best video clips (Mariyamiya and Mweil El Hawa). He was in his late 20s – early 30s, full of ambitions, dreams, and hopes. He was killed together with members of his family in the very locations where we shot the second video. He said when we filmed the video that he chose this location because it was “full of the anemone flowers which grow on martyrs’ graves.” Now the anemone flowers will decorate his own.
What did we — Saadi, Reziq (the composer of the song), and I — talk about that day? What was Saadi’s reaction when the word “martyr” was uttered? There is a strong belief amongst Palestinians that martyrs experience a strange feeling before they are killed. They feel something is going to happen to them, but they don’t know what it is. Is this why Saadi suggested that we shoot the video clip in that place, amongst the anemone flowers? Did he want to get more intimate with them, the anemones?
His martyrdom coincided with the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of one of the most revolutionary, talented writers in Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani wrote about ordinary Palestinians living their abnormal, miserable lives in the diaspora after the 1948 Nakba. He wrote about the Palestinians’ heroic resistance to genocidal Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression. Towards the end of All That Is Left to You and Returning to Haifa (both of which I taught at what used to be Al-Aqsa University before Israel bombed it) the choice is clear: resistance is existence. If you refrain from resisting your occupier, you die a meaningless, miserable death, a fate the heroes of Men in the Sun could not avoid.
But the people of Gaza, two-thirds of whom are refugees from Israel’s 1948 genocide of the Palestinians, and entitled to their right of return to their towns and villages, have made up their minds. In the face of one of the worst genocides ever committed in real-time in front of the eyes of a deaf world, the people of Gaza have decided to challenge Israel’s myth of invincibility. Ironically, just as the colonial West, namely Europe and North America, looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the so-called international community is finding a way to do nothing as apartheid Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian children and women in Gaza.
Palestinian lives do not matter at all. If they did then why has this unprecedented genocide, following 17 years of an incremental genocide while Gaza was placed under siege, been allowed to last for 10 months? Why have over 38,200 Palestinians, 70 percent of whom are women and children, 95 percent of whom are civilians, lost their precious lives?
The fascist Minister of National Security of apartheid Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, summed it up when he recently tried to have a new law passed that would allow Israeli prisons to summarily execute all Palestinian prisoners without trial: “All Palestinian prisoners are to be executed and shot in the head”! Indoctrinated Israelis, supported by Western leaders, do not accept Palestinians as equal citizens because they are accustomed to believing in their own superiority as a white colonial society.
The dilemma revolves around maintaining Israel as a state for Jews only while another people lives in the land. Gentile Palestinians, especially the dark-skinned refugees of Gaza, are expected to ignore the past and their own suffering, that they can be content with the crumbs of bread offered to them while being kept inside the walls of the Gaza zoo, which has now been turned by Israel into an extermination camp.
I am thinking of Saadi, and the thousands of young men whose lives have been cut short; what did they want? The great revolutionary intellectual and freedom fighter, Amilcar Cabral had an enlightening answer: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. . .”
Saadi, like Khalil Abu Yahya and Tasnim Thabet (my former students who were killed together with their families) wanted to live a better life, send their kids to schools, get a higher education, find better jobs, become teachers, directors, movie makers, and to live in peace.
But!
Woe unto us, ya weili, because they were not allowed to live a normal life.
I have much sympathy for Haidar Eid’s arguments, and Mondoweiss is one of the few places where Palestinian voices can make themselves heard. However, it is not true that the West looked the other way during the Holocaust. Yes, prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, too little was done to rein in Nazi persecution of Jews or to take in those who fled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. After war broke out, even though saving Europe’s Jews was not the top priority of the allied nations, no effort was spared to defeat Nazism. Tragically, the death camps were beyond the reach of allied forces until their murderous work was almost done.