Israel’s massacres against civilians in its past military engagements have never pushed the U.S. to pressure Israel into a ceasefire. Only when Israel has suffered a military defeat has the U.S. called for a cessation of hostilities.
When Western intellectuals express dismay at the “vengeful pathologies” of Palestinian violence on October 7, they ignore its underlying military, tactical, and political precipitants.
While the world’s eyes have been on Gaza, the Jenin Brigade is facing a new Israeli onslaught that aims to exhaust the resistance group through a war of attrition. Fighters in the Jenin refugee camp say they will not be defeated.
I want to believe that mass protests, strikes, and boycotts will be more effective than violence at liberating the colonized. Yet how many liberation movements have felt forced to choose violence as the only path to freedom? Would that it were otherwise.
It’s easy to show solidarity with powerless victims who endure their suffering with stoicism. But Palestinians chose to break free of their cage, even if it shattered the image of perfect victimhood.
At a time when the rest of Palestine languishes in a post-political, post-Palestinian nightmare, Gaza shows us that Palestine is now alive everywhere.
Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes continue in Gaza, while extending them to the West Bank in an airstrike on Jenin. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid stalls, fuel shortages put newborns’ lives in peril, and clashes with Hezbollah intensify.
The annihilating violence of organized state force that is now unfolding in Gaza can never be morally equated with even the most atrocious acts of the colonized, committed in the hope of liberation.
As the Israeli army amasses 300,000 troops on Gaza’s border for a potential ground invasion, the scale of the human catastrophe in Gaza is unprecedented. But despite the carnage, people support the Palestinian resistance more than ever.
The Palestinian resistance in Gaza has shattered the Zionist state’s perceptions about itself and its enemies’ capabilities. To restore its deterrence, its slow strangulation of Gaza will no longer be enough.