By: Soraya Misleh
The genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip entered its 18th day on October 24 without a break from the bourgeois media’s disgusting war propaganda. Already more than 2,000 children, about 1,120 women and 220 elderly people are among the more than 5,000 people massacred by the Zionist bombs. These are the names and lives that continue to be added to this tragic statistic that continues to grow. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights, about 120 children are killed every day.
There are reports of the use of chemical weapons such as napalm and white phosphorus bombs. The poetry of the Palestinian Rafeef Ziadeh comes to mind, in response to a journalist who asked her, during another massive bombing of Gaza more than 10 years ago, why Palestinians teach their children hatred:
We teach life, Sir. […] / We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies / We teach life, Sir. / But today my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits […] / And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead. / And between that, war, crime and massacre, / I vent out words and smile: “not exotic,” “nor terrorist”.
The shadow of death, whether from hunger, thirst, or bombs, continues to haunt 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. The scenes are brutal: children writing their names on arms and legs to be identified in case they are the next mutilated bodies pulled from the rubble; doctors in hospitals are without electricity and other basic necessities, and under the threat of further shelling, they receive the bodies of their own children and grandchildren. Dozens of families have been completely decimated, erased from the civil registry; journalists covering what is happening with tears in their eyes are also being killed; the 1,500 year-old Christian Church that was filled with Palestinians trying to take shelter from the relentless bombs that are aimed at them; evacuation orders and shelling of Palestinians as they make their way in the direction determined by Israel; there are threats to shell more and more hospitals, schools, homes, families, everything that moves.
An excerpt from the lyrics of the song by the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM comes to mind:
“Who’s the terrorist? / I’m a terrorist? / How am I a terrorist while I live in my country / Who’s a terrorist? / You’re a terrorist! / You’ve taken everything I own while I’m living in my homeland. / Killing us like you killed our ancestors / Go to the law?/ Why bother, my enemy / You’re witness, lawyer and the judge! / Upon the judge, my end begins / Your dream is that we grow fewer and moreover that we are a minority / Your dream is that the minority become a majority in the graveyards / […] “You let the little kids throw stones; Don’t they have a family to keep them under lock at home?!” / What? You must have forgotten that you buried our parents under the rubble of our homes! / And now while my agony is so intense you call me a terrorist?”
The Nakba continues
This is not new news for the Palestinian people in the ongoing Nakba, a catastrophe whose cornerstone is the creation of the racist and colonial state of Israel on May 15, 1948, which occurred with the planned ethnic cleansing of 78% of the historic territory of Palestine. In 1967, the Naksa (reversal) occurred with the Zionist military occupation of the remaining 22%: Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The daily reality of Palestinians is the violation of all basic human rights by the occupation forces, the apartheid regime, and the aggressive colonial expansion through racism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
And now they are facing the most brutal genocide in Gaza since the inhuman siege 15 years ago, it surpasses the bloody July and August of 2014. In that period, Israel killed some 2,200 Palestinians in 51 days, including 530 children.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israel has continued to arm Zionist settlers. Before October 7, they had already carried out brutal persecutions and attacks (known as pogroms) in Palestinian villages, killing 270 Palestinians, including 65 children. This too took on an even more brutal dimension. In just over two weeks, nearly 100 Palestinians were killed and 1,400 injured.
Repression and censorship. Organizations denounce that the number of political prisoners has reached 10,000; at the beginning of October, there were 5,200, including 170 children. Palestinian political prisoners are transferred to undetermined locations and their families still have no news of their whereabouts. The torture continues.
War Propaganda against the Palestinians
The ongoing Nakba has reached a fever pitch, with the widespread and open reproduction of the racist speeches of Zionist leaders. The media in the hands of the big capitalists insists on the lie of the circumstantial and punctual war of Hamas against Israel, and on the fallacy of the colonizer’s right to defense.
They likewise doubt that the powerful bombs dropped indiscriminately by Israel 24 hours in a row were responsible for the destruction of Al Ahli Baptist Hospital and the deaths of more than a thousand people at once. “Israel said they were not responsible,” their interlocutors shamelessly repeat. They accept the lie that the Palestinian people would bomb themselves, in the racist war propaganda of “civilization [Western, Israel] against barbarism [those Arabs, Easterners].”
The media supports the state terrorism perpetrated against the Palestinian people and denies the legitimate right to resistance by a people that have been oppressed for too long and are waging an anti-colonial struggle for national liberation surrounded by powerful enemies. And the people resist. That is why the struggle exists.
Hands covered in blood
The “international community” responsible for the Nakba in 1948 and for its continuation with impunity for more than 75 years, is dipping its dirty hands even deeper in Palestinian blood: governments all over the world are equating the oppressor and the oppressed.
This new chapter of the continuing Nakba is best represented by the attempted “final solution” by the terrorist, racist and colonial state of Israel, which has been financed and applauded by U.S. imperialism. Current President Biden’s 1986 speech is symbolic of this death pact: “We pour billions into Israel every year. It is our best investment for our economic interests. If Israel did not exist, we would have to create it.” European imperialism is not far behind.
Article published in Opinião Socialista [opiniaosocialista.com.br], 10/25/2023.
