We are not in the aftermath. We remain in the continuation of genocide. As our people in Gaza continue to be massacred and besieged and the settler project devours the West Bank, we face a reckoning. The Zionist settler state continues to act with complete impunity. Three years of Israel’s genocide have martyred over 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza and injured over 175,000. Over 1,400 Palestinians have been murdered in the last year under the façade of the “ceasefire.” Hospitals continue to receive the bodies of our fathers, mothers, brothers, and daughters. Families continue to survive in stasis, in tents meters from the rubble of their homes. One year into the false promises of the illegitimate Board of Peace, Gaza’s people are still denied the materials for self-sufficiency and the machinery for reconstruction.
People of conscience across the world have borne witness to these atrocities and understand that Zionism is a threat to humanity. For the first time in U.S. history, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis. AIPAC funding has become politically toxic for candidates running for office. Tens of thousands of people will take to the streets for an international day of action this weekend, in protest of the ongoing genocide.
Though consciousness has shifted in favor of the Palestinian cause around the world, as we write this today, Zionism and the institutions that sustain it are hard at work, attempting to re-legitimize the genocidal settler project. Our enemy is desperately attempting to rebuild an image indelibly seared by genocide.
As families in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran are sifting through the rubble of their homes, politicians and lobbyists are deepening the political and economic foundations that embed support for Israel in the global order of things. This leads us to the contradiction of this moment. How can Zionism, condemned by the majority as a genocidal ideology to its core, still remain entrenched in our communities? The weapons components that line the Occupation forces’ arsenals are trucked through our streets. The funds that enable the genocide are approved by our representatives, and the institutions that provide narrative cover for this death machine are still welcomed in civil society. We cannot allow this state of affairs to continue. We must not allow Zionism, and all those complicit in genocide, to be normalized, rehabilitated, or left unpunished. Zionism must remain condemned and isolated until it is liquidated and our people are liberated.
Israel’s redemption scheme
In this moment of so-called “ceasefire,” the Zionist entity is attempting to polish its sullied image. In March of this year, the Zionist government increased its hasbara (propaganda) budget to $730 million. The enormous funds will be used for PR campaigns directed at Western, primarily American, audiences to garner sympathy with Israel. These campaigns attempt to regurgitate Zionist lies across establishment press syndicates, social media platforms, college campuses, and the like.
These propaganda channels attempt to spread falsities, create distractions from, and justify the horrific crimes against humanity that Israel commits in Gaza. Hasbara relies on a long history of racist, colonial narratives about Palestinians: debunked claims of human shields, Hamas hospitals, or terrorist journalists. Israel needs these lies to be accepted by the world, giving it full permission to commit genocide or to create doubt that its policies of extermination constitute a genocide at all. Simultaneously, the specter of antisemitism casts over all criticism of the Jewish state, a deliberate PR tactic to malign the Palestinian struggle and frame the pro-Israel position as “progressive.”
Israel’s “public diplomacy” efforts do not end at the level of PR. In response to increasing global isolation and unpopularity, Israel has extended its bloody hand to nations willing to overlook its continuous massacre of Palestinians. Israel is attempting diplomatic and economic normalization by exploiting rising rightwing currents with overlapping interests and a desire to benefit from defense technology developed by the Zionist entity. In Latin America, the right wing and increasingly fascist governments of Argentina and Paraguay have only deepened relations with Israel since the genocide began. Israel has similar ambitions in Africa, attempting “security cooperation” and economic partnerships with Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, and Uganda, while at the same time seeking deeper influence within umbrella institutions such as the African Union. Meanwhile Israel buries its historical role in the destabilization and massacres in Latin America and its well-documented part in the deadly exploitation of Congo. In reality, Israeli technology, weaponry, and political strategy is “battle tested” on Palestinians and exported to repressive regimes around the globe. One can step foot in Palestine, Lebanon, Argentina, Morocco, or the Philippines and may be subjected to the violence and brutality that Zionism has mastered, mass produced and exported.
This investment in propaganda and desperate diplomacy are clear attempts to manufacture global amnesia of the last three years of atrocities in Gaza. These efforts will prove futile. No amount of money can erase the scenes of horror as Palestinians were incessantly bombed, displaced and starved in Gaza. The images of maimed and lifeless bodies of Palestinian children are engraved into the minds of the millions. We will never forget the burning of families in their tents, the massacre of innocent people seeking aid, nor the targeting of journalists, healthcare workers and all those who defended and sustained life in Gaza. The clean image the zionist entity is spending millions of dollars to portray stands in stark contrast to its gruesome reality. Israel will never be able to reconcile this vast dissonance and Zionism will not survive this reckoning.
A world that rejects Zionism
As members of the Palestinian diaspora and organizers with the Palestinian Youth Movement, we have a responsibility to struggle for a world that wholly rejects, abandons, and dismantles Zionism across the political, economic, and ideological spheres of our societies, wherever we live. It is because the diaspora exists everywhere that we must make Zionism unacceptable everywhere.
As people of conscience, we must excise our governments, companies, and institutions from complicity in this genocide. There is no way to do this except with the support, action and power of millions. Our unrelenting refusal to accept Zionism puts the war machine in crisis, especially when coordinated, mass formations across the world march to the gates of the empire with clear, unanimous demands. Our resolve is unshakeable as we confront municipalities and companies that facilitate deadly weapons cargo to Israel. Our continued exposure of Zionist lies force those complicit in the genocide of our people to face the steadfast dissent of generations of exiled Palestinians and millions of people in solidarity with our cause.
The movement for Palestine is not going anywhere and the pressure on Israel will continue to mount until our demands are met. We continue to demand an end to the 19 year long siege of Gaza, the entry of aid and the reconstruction of the strip. We demand an end to complicity with settlements in the West Bank. We demand immediate intervention on the conditions inside prisons and the release of our people from Zionist cages. We demand a comprehensive, two-way arms embargo on the Zionist state, to stop the flow of weapons that are used to maim and kill our people. And we demand that the architects of genocide be held accountable. Their hands can never be scrubbed clean of their crimes in Gaza, and we will never normalize the continuation of the genocidal state.
We must never forget the reality that our people continue to live through. Three years into the genocide, two decades into a criminal siege, and a century into Zionist occupation, the conditions of our people continue to deteriorate. In Gaza, the occupation is bombing families while denying them the means to live and rebuild. In the West Bank, our people face the accelerated project of ethnic cleansing and annexation continues through land seizures, settlement expansion, and an increasingly emboldened settler class that assaults Palestinians communities daily. In the prisons, conditions have deteriorated as the Israeli prison administration ratchets up physical, sexual, mental, and medical torture. These conditions are the outcome of Zionism, which exists to wage a genocidal war on Palestinian life, land, and political identity. Our ability to confront Zionism wherever we are is our best contribution to our national liberation, for our people’s ability to remain and rebuild a free Palestine.
The Palestinian resistance tradition refuses to understand martyrdom as finality, but as “امتداد,” as continuation. Every universe extinguished is carried forward into our present and our future. For the living, our people under genocide and our prisoners experiencing living death must remain the compass of our struggle and the engine of our organizing. For the land, we remember that across Palestine the land is the battlefield as it is the home, and that Palestinians remain rooted in it and continue to resist erasure.
For the martyrs, for the living, and for the land, we carry all of this with us until liberation. We carry a torch that will sear the genocide into the image of Zionism so deeply that it will never be concealed or rescued by the passage of time, political masquerading, or bribery. The world will be a better place when Zionism is finally condemned as eternally irredeemable.
