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Nada Elia

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Signs pleading for help are seen in the windows at the Cook county jail complex in Chicago, Illinois, on 9 April. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

Everywhere, COVID-19 has revealed the disproportionate effect of the disease on communities that are already disenfranchised by state-sanctioned violence, including the incarcerated. April 17, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, brings new urgency to calls to free all prisoners in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

A Palestinian man stands on his property overlooking the Israeli settlement Har Homa, West Bank, February 18, 2011. (Photo: UPI/Debbie Hill)

The “Deal of the Century” has reinvigorated the discourse naming Israel’s practices as apartheid, but Nada Elia says we must push for a denunciation of the entire scope of the initial catastrophe that befell Palestinians last century, rather than its recent manifestations.

Relatives of Palestinian Mohammed Shurrab, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike, mourn during his funeral in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on November 14, 2019.

Nada Elia says that once again she is reading the statistics about casualties in Gaza and is deeply disturbed by the emphasis on the number of women and children. “This does not do the Palestinians any favor,” Elia writes, “as it inadvertently reinforces the racist Zionist narrative that treats every Palestinian man as a fighter, a militant, a terrorist.”