Palestine, My Gaza

 Palestine, Palestine

It has been two years since the second Nakba began with the full scale invasion of Palestinian territory by Israel, what normality is possible in the vicinity of the current conflict, while we witness history tending to repeat itself - the haunting ghost of the past occupation still fresh in the memories of many Palestinians?

Are there any factual approaches to read through complex colonial histories, realities of the current occupation and ethnic cleansing without taking a side?

Should not any person concerned with justice and freedom retain a close connection with the struggle and exploitation of the Palestinian people?

15 May 1948 saw the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral land through a violent displacement that let to the loss of property, dignity and cultural heritage on an unprecedented scale.

It is estimated that More than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland by Zionist militia in 1948, and the project of irradiating the nation of Palestine is still in full swing.

The Nakba of 1948 left its mark on all the subsequent ones that shaped the Middle East, influencing warfare and militarism in terms of scale, technology, strategy, damage, and violence. Since then, the wars of one region have spread their political, social, economic, and psychological effects across the globe.

And to date over a two million Palestinian women, children have been killed through explosions and protracted warfare between what Israel terms terrorists, who yet are young men and their elders reclaiming their lost land and culture through the necessary violence of defending one’s kin.

“Today, we again commemorate the events of 1948 and subsequent years, which led to the dispossession and displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands,” said Cheikh Niang (Senegal), Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, as he opened a panel discussion titled “1948-2024:  The Ongoing Palestinian Nakba”.

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Contemplating the many disputed identities, memories, denied deaths that are a daily occurence in Gaza, what can we learn from the complexities of human nature, the harmonies and disharmonies characterising cycles of life in Palestine and the rest of the Middle East?

Many people of Arab descent have always admitted that cultures have coalesced since time immemorial at this site marked by a multitude of cultural and historical narratives.

These intertwined cultural and historical experiences were shattered by the creation of the state of Israel after World war 2, and through manifold stories of diverse experiences of people who lived during the 1948 war, there clearly are parallels to the sheer scale of these social catastrophes.

An inability to handle our vulnerability as the global family in the face of wars such as happening in the Middle East ensures that the realities happening on the ground become mere spectacles to which we have been desensitised through media.

And because the global family seems oblivious to the massacre of a nation because of an opaque past and an unknown future; our revolt seems to not even scathe the terrorist state of Israel.

There seems to be a certain ideological posturing and political disillusionment regarding how we think and act about the atrocities happening to the Palestine people, especially when having not spoken to anyone with direct experiences of the war on Gaza.

News bulletins around the globe are inundated with images of slaughter and devastation; and as the world silently watches ordinary people of Palestine navigate the ebb and flow of tyranny, more wars are ravaging continents and displaced populations  roam the planet with broken lives and sacks of mere possessions. 

Faced with relentless exoduses and waves of migration caused by capitalist and imperialist machinery governments are collapsing, and duplicitous media pushes even harder the propaganda of corrupt politicians to exhaust the poor masses with constant false narratives.

And more displacements in the names of wars ensue, as well as escapes they provoke; sound bombs explode over elderly patients trapped in dilapidated hospitals, while Israeli suburbanites rest watching screens depicting non-fiction slaughters. .

Their relentless quest for a better life in the face of regional disparities in the Middle East thwarted, Palestinians will now have to rather face a chilling terror gripping their minds against monstrosities of a new technological warfare.

Elsewhere, the elite are debating moralism on “issues of” maimed infants, analysing award winning images and footage; numbing their guilt with oriental music and wine over cuisines served by other oppressed people.

Desktop activists are spreading viral posters that rouse our collective guilty conscience; and children wail hungry with amputee fathers and sister tortured in secret cells since turning 10.

How do we live dreamless and bloated lives when the starved are being buried underneath the rubble of prison settlements?

Netanyahu and his congress of desolation plot of ethnic cleansing the Middle East for Zionist settlement has been watched, and who will not hold every Israeli in contempt after this resentful slaughter?

The effects of its campaigns cascades through the region, shifting political alignments, and generating new concerns over radicalization and conflict spillover as youth brigades are being recruited from “friendly nations” to join the Israeli Army with the promises of heaven on earth.

What could therefore be the remaining methods of politico-militant solidarities across our shared struggles against colonialism and Zionist apartheid can be devised akin those of hordes of youth pilgrimaging to Israel to become soldiers for wealth?

Should the world take arms against the stet of Israel or forget the Gaza war of winter 2008–2009 within its broader politico-military context?

A veritable army of dogmatised adrenaline-fuelled machismo flogging and raping women in view of their partners, strangled by boots and religious fingers; new media streaming assaults on children in this most photographed war.