Reflections of a Year into Genocide
365 Days. 8760 hours. 525,600 minutes. 31,536,000 seconds of horror, bloodshed, and pain. But I wish that were all, the truth is this horror hasn’t just lasted a year— but over 80 years. The Nakba has been a continuous process of displacement, erasure, and genocide that the Palestinian people have been subjected to. This last year has brought many things to reflect upon, and rather than write this piece as an official statement, I seek to use less detached language and appeal to our humanity when discussing the ongoing onslaught that is in the backdrop of every political action since the 7th of October. The level of destruction brought on by the Israeli Occupation Forces is not something new, it is an aspect of daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. For years, Israel has killed doctors, journalists, and aid workers with impunity. Civilians are collateral damage and it is clear that the metric of success for any military operation is the number of innocents slaughtered. Women and children are not spared— they are hunted. Palestinian children don’t grow up with stories of a monster under their bed but one that is willing to kill them in their sleep from the skies. This genocide is simultaneously unique and a reflection of history’s ability to repeat itself, or at least rhyme. I draw many parallels to the United States’ invasion of Vietnam in the late 1960s. Just as today there was a contentious presidential election where the ageing incumbent stepped down due to his controversial war policy, and an out-manned, out-gunned, Indigenous population was resisting their brutal occupation by a government entirely established by imperial powers. More importantly, the Vietnam War was the first war in which journalists were on the ground recording the violence and broadcasting it for the American public to see time. This is what makes Gaza’s genocide so unique: the use of social media to report on the crimes against humanity. For the first time, people are watching a genocide live-streamed on their cellular devices. The victims can recount their stories for millions around the world to see.
Consequently, it has sowed distrust in the traditional media institutions whose proximity and inextricable interconnectedness with power have made them incapable of amplifying the voices of the marginalised to purport the narrative of the instigators. The shows of solidarity from Buenos Aires to Bergamo to Bangkok are heartwarming and a sign that the global majority cannot be bludgeoned into silence.
On the other hand, the radical apathy towards the Palestinian plight by Western powers, although unsurprising, still comes to me as a massive disappointment. Regardless of how much theorising and material analysis one does about the nature of settler colonialism and capitalist imperialism, I still naively possess an optimistic, perhaps romantic, intuition that there are still human beings capable of empathy in Western governments. Does anyone care? Surely, right? With potentially 200,000 people being murdered and countless maimed, someone has to feel something. A tinge of remorse? Shame? Some sort of emotion that is...human? To this day it truly puzzles me how people can treat other human beings as garbage, as numbers with no life, no humanity. How can I, as a Lebanese person, continue to live in a country that uses my tax dollars to massacre my people? How can I continue to study at an educational institution that treats my voice as less than?
No reflection is complete without asking the question that we all have been: what is to be done? It feels easy to sit back and watch the contradictions of the settler-colonial state eat it to its core, but insofar as the occupation remains entirely subsidised by our governments, direct material action on our part is required. Global mobilisations of the masses clearly show that change can only realised from the bottom up. Strike action, protests, and means to amplify our voices are needed. Institutions of social, political, and economic governance cannot continue to carry on “business as usual” while being complicit in genocide. Importantly, we must not lose touch with our humanity and become desensitised to the constant violence transmitted to our phone screens. Palestine will be free in our lifetimes, and as today marks one particularly brutal year in an unfathomably violent 80-year occupation, it’s important now more than ever to not forget this crucial fact.
