Free Palestine: “Today my body was a televised massacre”

2023-11-02 15:54:33

Por: Soraya Misleh

The genocide in the narrow Gaza Strip entered its 18th day on October 24 without the repugnant war propaganda of the bourgeois media giving a respite. There are already more than 2,000 children, some 1,120 women and 220 elderly people among the more than 5,000 massacred by Zionist bombs. These are names and lives that continue to add to this tragic statistic, which only grows. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights, about 120 children are murdered every day.

There are reports of the use of chemical weapons, such as napalm and white phosphorus bombs. The poetry of Palestinian Rafeef Ziadeh comes to mind, in response to a journalist who asked him, during another massive bombing of Gaza more than 10 years ago, if it would be okay for Palestinians not to teach hatred to their children:

We teach life, sir. […] / We show life after they built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last heavens. / We teach life, sir. / But today my body was a televised massacre, / made to fit into effect phrases and word limits. […] / And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, a thousand dead. / And between that, war crime and massacre, / I release words and smile: “Not exotic”, “not terrorist”.

The shadow of death, whether from hunger, thirst, or bombs, continues to stalk 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. The scenes are brutal: children writing their names on their arms and legs to be identified in case they are the mangled bodies of the day; doctors in hospitals without electricity and structure, under threat of new bombings, receiving the bodies of their own children and grandchildren; dozens of families completely decimated, erased from the civil registry; journalists covered with tears and also being murdered; 1,500-year-old Christian church full of Palestinians trying to take refuge from the relentless bombs that target them; evacuation orders and bombings on the Palestinians while they make the journey towards the direction determined by Israel; threats of bombings on more and more hospitals, schools, homes, families, everything that moves.

A fragment of the lyrics of the song by the Palestinian hip hop group DAM comes to mind:

“Who is the terrorist? Am I the terrorist? / How can I be the terrorist when you took my land? / Who is the terrorist? You are the terrorist! / You took everything I owned while I lived in my homeland. / You are killing us like you killed our ancestors. / Do you want me to go to justice? Because? / You are the witness, the lawyer and the judge! / If you are my judge, I will be sentenced to death! […] / You attack me, but you still scream when I remember that it was you who attacked me. / You silence me and scream. / ‘But you let the children throw stones! Don’t they have parents to keep them at home? / THAT?!?! / You must have forgotten that you buried our parents under the rubble of our houses. / And now, while my agony is so immense, you call me a terrorist?!”

Continue the Nakba

This is not new news for the Palestinian people in the continuing Nakba, a catastrophe whose cornerstone is the formation of the racist and colonial State of Israel on May 15, 1948 through planned ethnic cleansing of 78% of the historic territory of Palestine. In 1967, the Naksa (reverse), 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 fundamental human rights by the occupation forces, the regime the apartheidaggressive colonial expansion through racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

And now they face the most brutal genocide in Gaza since the inhumane siege 15 years ago, which surpassed the bloody July and August 2014. In that period, in 51 days, Israel killed around 2,200 Palestinians, including 530 children.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israel further armed Zionist settlers. Before October 7, they had already carried out brutal persecutions and attacks (known as pogromos) in Palestinian villages, 270 Palestinians had already been killed, including 65 children. This also took on an even more brutal dimension. In just over two weeks, almost 100 Palestinian deaths and 1,400 injuries.

Repression and censorship. There are organizations that 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 remain unaware of their whereabouts. The torture advances.

War propaganda against the Palestinians

The continued Nakba reaches a high pitch, with the racist speeches of Zionist leaders being openly reproduced. The media in the hands of the big capitalists insist on the lie of the circumstantial and specific war Hamas versus Israel, on the fallacy of the colonizer’s right of defense.

It even raises doubts about whether the powerful bombs dropped 24 hours in a row and indiscriminately by Israel were to blame for the destruction of the Baptista Al Ahli hospital and the death of more than a thousand people at once. “Israel said no,” his interlocutors repeat without shame. They accept the lie that the Palestinian people would have bombed themselves, in the racist war propaganda of “civilization.” [occidental, Israel] against barbarism [estos árabes, orientales]”.

These media support the state terrorism perpetrated against the Palestinian people and deny the legitimate right of resistance of a people who have been oppressed for too long and who wage, as best they can, an anti-colonial struggle for national liberation, surrounded by powerful enemies. And resist. That’s why it exists.

Hands covered in blood

The “international community”, responsible for the Nakba in 1948 and for its continued unpunished for more than 75 years, sinks its hands dirty with Palestinian blood even deeper: governments around the world equate oppressor and oppressed.

The level of this new chapter of the continuing Nakba can be considered as the attempted “final solution” by the terrorist, racist and colonial State of Israel, financed and applauded by US imperialism. The speech of Biden, the current president, in 1986 is a symbol of this death pact: “We allocate billions every year to Israel. 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 Socialist Opinion [opiniaosocialista.com.br]25/10/2023.-

Translation: Natalia Estrada.