By Soraya Misleh
Israel continues to impose hunger and thirst on 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza, while dropping bombs on their heads and firing indiscriminately on the entire population. They fire on everything that moves, and children and women are its most frequent victims. The scenes are macabre.
Entire residential blocks have been reduced to dust in a matter of minutes. The image of shattered children, once again, is shocking. This marks yet another chapter in the year-long horror story of genocide that has already claimed at least 180,000 Palestinian victims in the narrow strip alone. Most of them are women and children. According to a researcher at the University of Edinburgh, there will be 335,500 deaths by the end of 2024 (14% of Gaza’s population) if the carnage continues.
What is underway now, in northern Gaza, is what is called the “Generals’ Plan”, which was presented to Zionist leadership by a group of retired officers under the leadership of Giora Eiland. It is an updated version of the infamous Dahiyeh Doctrine, which was developed “in the field” during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 in the Beirut suburb of that name. In other words, it was a plan exercised on Lebanese bodies in previous decades and is now bring used again.
The Dahiyeh Doctrine aims to cause maximum destruction to the entire population in order to turn it against its own resistance. It is not working. Like its new version, the “Generals’ Plan”, which has confined 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza without food and water, while burning them alive, bombing their schools and hospitals, and promoting more and more massacres, is not working.
With no way out in the veritable concentration camp in which Israel has transformed Gaza, many Palestinians refuse to leave their homes. The situation in the south is equally untenable, as there are no safe areas in the ghettos in which they are trapped.
Palestinians, most of whom are young – in Gaza half the population is under 18 – know that resistance is not a choice. Resistance is existence under the constant threat of being wiped off the map.
This is occuring throughout occupied Palestine, which is being subjected to genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonization, apartheid, and racism. And it is a sentiment that is shared in among refugees and Palestinians in the diaspora. There have been 76 years of continuous Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe that brought about the formation of the genocidal State of Israel in 1948.
Proof of the ongoing will and practices of resistance are in expressions from all sides. Following the assassination of Palestinian fighter Yahia Sinwar, who died with a gun in his hand fighting for the freedom of his people, Palestinians and the Arab people have been repeating: “Resistance never dies.”
As Palestinian Marxist revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani said: “We write for Palestine with blood”.
The role of international solidarity is to support unconditionally the heroic and historic Palestinian resistance. The world’s oppressed and exploited understand that this struggle for liberation is also theirs.
To this end, it is urgent that we widen Israel’s international isolation by increasing the pressure for all states to immediately break off relations with this military enclave of imperialism. In this way, we will deepen the beginning of the end of the Zionist colonial project and work towards a Palestine that is free from the river to the sea.
