October 7 created a new world, but there is so much left to be done 

“There is no form of violence that Israel can hope to punish us with for the first time now.”

This is part of an argument I made in a piece published in Mondoweiss on October 13, 2023, not even a week after Operation Al Aqsa Flood disrupted the status quo, seemingly permanently. 

It is surreal to re-read the piece after all that we’ve seen and experienced this past year. We indeed expected a bloody crackdown to follow, but it seems impossible to have immediately conceived of the scale. I am unsure that we can even now; in many ways, it feels that we are dangling off a cliff, neither collectively falling to a permanent end nor on sturdy ground. 

It’s not that I think the decolonial lens through which I made sense of the scenes from that day was incorrect; of course, it was the Zionist settler-colonial movement that engineered the Nakba massacres of 1948 that initiated the violence, and that the instigator of violence is never the oppressed. All talk of October 6 as a peaceful day, the last day of a “ceasefire” is wishful thinking, even when engaged in by Palestinians. Organized and collective resistance does not spring out of a vacuum; rather, it is part of an inevitable process “that necessarily entails upheaval, social unrest, and conflict, paving the way for a new social and political order that reflects the aspirations and values of the liberated people.” 

In purely logical terms, the same hegemonic Western powers, especially the U.S., that not only allowed but materially supported ethnic cleansing, massacres, and the building and maintenance of the concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip in the name of upholding the foul ethno-supremacist regime that is Israel, were always going to rally behind it as it desperately tries to shove the genie back in the bottle. Certain details, such as the Biden administration’s full-throated support that is particularly craven even compared to previous administrations, have certainly exacerbated the monstrousness of the genocide. Still, Palestinians and those actively in solidarity, those intimately acquainted with the history of this struggle and the inner machinations of Zionist society never expected liberation to come either without a price or purely through negotiations or simple persuasion. 

But, as many reading this will either say about me or about themselves, we are not in Gaza. It is not us paying the price, it is not us who have been deprived of the ability to sit and theorize and analyze instead of having all our energy diverted to survival. Sure, the West Bank has had killings and arrests, even a massacre from an F-16 bombing of a coffee shop in the Tulkarem that left most of those inside “in shreds”. But there’s a reason why scenes such as that or the repeated invasions and destructions of the Jenin refugee camp are compared to Gaza to convey the scale of destruction. Gaza, where hundreds of thousands have been killed or are missing. Virtually every single Palestinian in Gaza has had their home destroyed or damaged and is living in a state of constant displacement and torturous back-and-forth “humanitarian” evacuations that have not saved the tents and displacement shelters from being targeted. 

Agonizing and utterly depraved scenes and images will stay with most of us forever. I will never forget seeing the 19-year-old journalist Hassan Hamad’s body parts, including pieces of his scalp and distinctive curly hair, in a small cardboard box, nor his colleague Ismail Al-Ghoul’s headless body. I will never forget the sound of Hind Rajab’s voice, just a little girl who was worried about inconveniencing her mom with the chore of washing the blood off her clothes as Israel murdered every family member around her and the paramedics who tried to save her, before extinguishing that little voice from our world forever. I will never forget Refaat Alareer sharing poetry and shaming the architects and those complicit in the genocide to the very end, or him saying he would throw the toughest thing he has in his house, an expo marker, at the invading soldiers if it was the last thing he did. 

I close my eyes and see the premature babies Israeli soldiers ensured would decompose in their incubators, the scores of bloody mangled children, and the men digging through the rubble, the tents and the skin infections and bug bites ravaging the population as basic infrastructure has been decimated. I hear the screams of those being told their loved ones are gone and I hear the warplanes. 

All the while, as evidenced by the year- and counting- of this hellscape, it appears that those who analyzed that “calling for a ceasefire” would take up the same sort of impotent rhetorical space that “calling for a two-state solution” does were on to something. Israelis have gone from calling for the destruction of Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran, with no sparing of expense or political defense to rein in those fanatical delusions. The marches, boycotts, and legal and diplomatic advocacy all carry on, not meaningless, but not the urgent intervention so desperately needed. 

The Axis of Resistance continues to put their bodies on the line, making it so that while the horrors we have witnessed are beyond what we could have conceived a year ago, so too are the consequences for the settlers. It is indisputable that they will never feel fully safe and far removed from the violent implications of their existence, and never before has the Iron Dome been so sorely tested as our skies were lit up with the resistance rockets, and never before have we seen so many eliminated genocidal foot soldiers and destroyed military equipment, sights we also could not have pictured a year ago. 

So long as the massacres continue to rage in Gaza and now Lebanon, there is certainly nothing for most of us to be self-congratulatory about. We have not grabbed the levers that can compel these enemies to humanity to stop. Too many of us have been pacified by photos of settlers in the airport, telling ourselves tales of how easily they’ll all run away, and that will be that. 

October 7, 2023 and all the acts of armed resistance since have literally and metaphorically opened a gap in the fence. We can feel that the day the fence no longer exists is on the horizon, but getting to that point will take years of pain and suffering to actualize that perhaps the euphoria of the first day of the Flood masked, at least for me.

Today, October 7, 2024, there was another march in Ramallah chanting in support of the resistance, attempting to dispel the imposed cloud of pseudo-normalcy by the occupation and their PA guard dogs. More youth were arrested and threatened with petty property damage charges by those dogs, underscoring the neoliberal sense of priorities we are all meant to partake in or else, as the multiple Palestinians killed by the PA this year demonstrates.

As I write this, I take pauses to listen to Abu Obaida speak, the first time he has outside of a voice recording in quite some time. 

What he has said so far that I am taking to heart:

“The enemy does not understand the lessons of history, the facts of reality, nor the culture of our people.”

On a more immediate and practical level:

“The West Bank must escalate.”

Calls for cyberwarfare and online attacks.

Finally, especially to the Muslim world, to go beyond verbal condemnations; after all, are we waiting to hear news of the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque?

I grind my teeth as I anxiously contemplate the future before us. I am nine months pregnant with our first child. Deep in my heart and in my bones, I know she will see a world without the savage moral stain that is the Israeli occupation. I know she will eventually live in a world where what we have seen and been put through as a people will be unthinkable, solely the stuff of nightmares.

But to make that possible, there is so much left to be done. 

There must be more direct action, more of a social cradle for the resistance and the families of those killed and imprisoned, and more consequences for Zionists and their ilk. No turning away, and no internalizing the logic that opting out of resistance is what will save us rather than make us easier prey.

We live in an entirely new paradigm, really an entirely new world than that which existed a year before. The ugly, racist, untenably violent logic buttressing our lives has been irrevocably exposed.

Will we allow that logic to prevail? 

We owe it to the martyrs that the answer cannot be anything other than a resounding NO.