Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, its defeat of an entire division of the Israeli army, and the failure of Israeli intelligence and surveillance technology constitute a “paradigm shift.”Footnote4 The attack transcended the 1948 Green Line, inflicted heavy casualties on Israeli civilians, and broke the Israeli “brand” of military invincibility. The “violent equilibrium”Footnote5 honed over the last sixteen years between Hamas and Israel has shattered. In response, Israel has delivered another paradigm shift, an attack of unbridled brutality facilitated by international, including Arab state, complicity. In the face of the greatest atrocities ever perpetrated against the Palestinian people beyond even those of 1948, and with the highest Palestinian death toll ever recorded, not one Arab regime has taken a single decisive political, diplomatic, economic, or legal action against Israel. Participation in the war has come from non-state actors like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, who have disrupted global trade in the Red Sea.Footnote6
This is not simply an Israeli war on Palestine. It is a US war on Palestine. Since 1948, the US has gifted Israel more than $260 billion in mostly military aid; this does not include the additional $14.3 billion Biden promised to Israel in November 2023.Footnote7 The dissonance between the US government’s words and actions in arming and enabling famine, annihilation, and genocide while speaking of humanitarian concerns offers a lesson we learn anew with sharpening depth and clarity. So brazen was the Biden administration’s fueling of Israel’s genocidal impunity that hundreds of US officials registered their protest.Footnote8
Ethnic cleansing is a foundational infrastructure of Israeli rule since 1948. Since October 7, 2023, the full force of genocidal intent and practice is on display, from the Israeli president’s assertion that an “entire nation” was responsible for the deaths of Israeli citizens on October 7, to the Israeli defense minister’s naming of Palestinians as “human animals,” to an Israeli parliamentarian’s demand for “a Nakba that will overshadow” 1948.Footnote9 These were not the only such threats. Israel’s security cabinet member and former head of the Shin Bet stated: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”Footnote10
US and European media have been complicit in this genocide, parroting Israeli talking points and obscuring Palestinian suffering, when covered at all. For weeks, as the death toll in Gaza climbed toward 20,000, the New York Times continually obfuscated Palestinian loss. In the first twenty days, as Israeli forces targeted and ultimately forced the closure of al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, US media produced a narrative of denial and erasure taken verbatim from Israeli talking points. Aided and abetted by Biden’s relentless gaslighting of Palestinian suffering, the US media blamed the injured for their own deaths, spreading false claims that the five buildings of the hospital were directly involved in Hamas activities. Two months later, as Israel waged a full-scale war on the entirety of Gaza’s health sector, killing nearly 300 health care workers and forcing the closure of hospital after hospital, mainstream media outlets began doing their jobs: they finally admitted that there was no evidence of military use of al-Shifa Hospital by Hamas.Footnote11
In the last days of 2023, US outlets reported that Israel’s war on Palestine “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.”Footnote12 Over a period of less than three months, Israel’s war of annihilation exceeded the destruction of the razing of Aleppo and the bombing of Mariupol, and was proportionally more intense than the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II.Footnote13 By the end of 2023, Israel had struck over 22,000 “targets” in the Gaza Strip,Footnote14 destroying 75 percent of all structures of northern Gaza and a quarter of the buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis.Footnote15 Experts have used satellite data to map the damage. The genocide has changed the very land; the Gaza Strip is “now a different color from space. It is a different texture.” Footnote16
The Israeli military has not divulged the exact types of weaponry it is using, but experts are confident that the “vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are US made.”Footnote17 Forensic analysts insist that Israel’s campaign is “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”Footnote18 Two-thousand-pound US-made MK-84 “bunker busters” have targeted Palestinians, with at least 208 of these devastating bombs dropped on the southern Gaza Strip alone.Footnote19 The US-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) “turns earth to liquid” and renders “instant death” to anyone within a hundred feet of the bomb’s impact.Footnote20 Fragments of the Smart, Precise Impact, Cost Effective (SPICE) bombs have also been found. These “smart” bombs are produced by Israeli defense giant Rafael with the assistance of US technology. What has their precision meant?
At the time of this writing, a conservative estimate of the Palestinian death toll far exceeds 22,500, with at least 55,000 wounded, over 70 percent of whom are men, women, children, and the elderly who are noncombatants.Footnote21 An additional 7,000 people are missing, with most buried under the rubble. At least 5,000 are now disabled.Footnote22 A new acronym has taken shape in this genocide: the Wounded Child No Surviving Family (WCNSF).Footnote23 At least 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.Footnote24 The dead, wounded, and missing total over 4.5 percent of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people.
Any honest observer of this war understands that the target of Israeli force and its US-supplied weapons is the Palestinian civilian. Hamas combatants are the “collateral damage.”Footnote25 There are no “safe zones” in the Gaza Strip.Footnote26 Indeed, after the dust settles, Israeli and US citizens alike will have to contend with their support and funding of a genocide that inordinately targets children, estimated at 40 percent of the climbing death toll.Footnote27
But we are not numbers. Those are the words of a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip.Footnote28 The poetry and labor of these youth as of so many remind us of the dreams and hopes now lying under the rubble. But those dreamsFootnote29 and hopes will live despite the effort to annihilate Palestine and the Palestinians.
We witness this genocide. We watch as the entirety of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people become displaced, subjected to transfer and expulsion from their homeland that both US and Israeli officials discuss today as “humanitarian.”Footnote30 We watch as Israeli soldiers round up men and boys, strip them to their underwear, and line them up with their hands above their heads, while women and other children are blindfolded in Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City.Footnote31 We watch young children crumpled in pain over stretchers carrying their parents; we see mothers and fathers screaming in grief over the bodies of their children.
We watch our people attempt desperately to unearth with their bare hands the remains of their loved ones from under the rubble.Footnote32 We watch as Palestinians discover five decomposing premature babies in what remains of al-Nasr Hospital,Footnote33 and discover scores more left on streets made dangerous by constant bombardment and sniping. We watch as the Israeli army delivers back to Gaza a truckload of eighty Palestinian bodies it massacredFootnote34 and we watch our exhausted people struggle to identify those bodies before burying them in ditches. We look at these mass graves, at all those bodies wrapped in blue shrouds. We watch knowing that there is no turning back from this genocide.
We face the realities of the world to come. We know that the pace of death in the months ahead will be equally relentless. The “perfect storm for disease has begun,” said UNICEF’s chief spokesperson on December 12, 2023.Footnote35 Kidney failure and diarrhea caused by dehydration have quadrupled during this war. Hunger, the lack of water, refrigeration, medical supplies, and a devastated health sector will lead to epidemics of dysentery, hepatitis, acute respiratory infections, and other contagious and preventable diseases in the months to come.Footnote36 Disease, as one retired Israeli general explained, is an effective tool of war.Footnote37
We witness how Palestinians in Gaza live in hunger. We know what starvation does to the body: feeding on stores of fat, moving to the muscles, eroding the heart, shutting down the immune system, rendering concentration impossible, and ending in a slow and painful death.Footnote38 We watch as Israel hones starvation as a weapon of war.Footnote39
We watch as the very field of medicine has come under attack.Footnote40 We watch Ghassan Abu Sitta, the Palestinian surgeon specialized in conflict medicine with wartime experience in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, treat the injured at al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals. We watch him narrate how white phosphorous shelling induces a chemical burn in “the deep structures of the body.”Footnote41 We listen as he reveals the destruction of Gaza’s health sectorFootnote42 and how hospitals are depleted of morphine and analgesics. We watch as doctors amputate the limbs of their own children and as pregnant women endure C-sections, all without anesthesia.Footnote43
We watch as Israel turns knowledge producers into enemy combatants. We watch as Israel kills journalists. At the time of this writing, Israeli has targeted 102 journalists since October 7, more than one journalist a day.Footnote44 None of us will forget the day Wael al-Dahdouh wept over his spouse, his child, and his grandchild.Footnote45 He went back to work the next day. We watch as digital creators, photojournalists, and freelance journalists like Motaz Azaiza, Hind Khoudary, Bisan Awda, and Plestia Alaqad relay the voices, experiences, and realities of life under genocidal war.Footnote46
We watch as poets, writers, and scholars are slaughtered one by one under the force of the world’s fourth largest military.Footnote47 We mourn as acclaimed academic, novelist, and poet Refaat Alareer, a critical force in the creation of We Are Not Numbers (and who was writing for this journal at the time) loses his life to Israel’s arsenal. We mourn novelists and educators like Heba Abu Nada, Omar Abu Shawish, Abdul Karim Hashash, Inas al-Saqa, Jihad al-Masri, Yusuf Dawas, Shahadah al-Buhbahan, Nour al-Din Hajjaj, Mustafa al-Sawwaf, Abdullah al-Aqad, Said al-Dahshan, and Salim al-Nafar.Footnote48
We watch as institutions of Palestinian social, cultural, political, and educational life are destroyed. We watch as an estimated 70 percent of Gaza’s schools are reduced to rubble.Footnote49 We watch as Gaza’s Central Archives is obliterated, incinerating 150 years’ worth of archival materials.Footnote50 We watch as Israel destroys every single one of Gaza’s eleven universities, including al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Gaza,Footnote51 where many of our contributors studied and earned their degrees.
Before October 7, we recall, there were seventy-six cultural centers, three theaters, five museums, fifteen publishing houses and bookstores, eighty public libraries, and 145 heritage sites in the Gaza Strip.Footnote52 The Israelis have bombed the Gaza Municipal Library and the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center into rubble.Footnote53 Thousands of books and documents, and all of these communal spaces now lie burnt to the ground. Just as genocide targets families in their entirety, attempting to erase the next generation by killing children in the thousands, a policy of epistemicide mandates the destruction of cultural and historical sites, libraries, and bookstores.
We watch as Israel flattens centuries-old places of worship, killing and injuring hundreds seeking shelter inside them. We watch as survivors of the bombing of the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, said to be the third oldest church in the world, scream into cameras that the Christians of Gaza are becoming extinct, pleading to the Christian world to act.Footnote54 We watch as the oldest mosque in Gaza, the seventh-century Great Omari Mosque, is bombarded, knowing that it is one of 104 mosques and three churches destroyed by Israel in Gaza since October 7.Footnote55 We know that making life unlivable and the Gaza Strip uninhabitable—a promise on which the Israelis delivered slowly for the last sixteen years and rapidly since October 7—is predicated on devastating these infrastructures. As one Israeli general hoped: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”Footnote56
Palestinians in other parts of Palestine have also been subject to Israeli brutality. We watch as Israeli forces conduct nightly raids in the West Bank. We watch as the bloodiest year for Palestinians in the West Bank got even bloodier. Since October 7, Israeli forces have killed more than 300 Palestinians in the West Bank.Footnote57 The Netanyahu government has prioritized the Israeli army’s aiding and abetting of settler terror, going so far as to deploy most of its soldiers there. Today, that aiding and abetting has reached new heights, with the government openly arming settlers and citizens alike.Footnote58
We watch as a new McCarthyism attempts to shut down speech and action in support of Palestine and the Palestinians in North America and Europe. We watch as cynical indignation renders the call for freedom from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River a marker of “genocidal intent.” We will never forget the policing of dreams of liberation at the very moment that an actual genocide is taking place. The attempt to erase, criminalize, and exclude Palestinians from the category of the human, and the uses and abuses of colonial language, are as old as the hundred-year war on Palestine.Footnote59
There are other things we must watch. People the world over have come to the basic conclusion that Israel’s regime of apartheid and settler colonialism will breed and engender resistance. A global movement of unprecedented numbers and commitments has rocked the world, demanding a ceasefire on every continent. We watch creativity and courage flourish. We watch as songs from the past, notably that of Palestinian George Totari who wrote “Leve Palestina” in exile, become the anthems of people calling for freedom.Footnote60
Most importantly, we watch the Palestinians themselves, shaping life under the force of death. We watch as displaced Palestinians in makeshift tent camps bring joy to throngs of hungry and cold children in song and dance. We watch as a new generation, like the nine-year-old Lama Jamous, report, record, and voice the realities of Palestinian life under the force of genocide.Footnote61
Palestinians are not the embodiment of a future threat. The rhetoric that the young who are now disabled, orphaned, and bereft will grow to become vengeful is a denial of everything we have learned about Palestinian futurity over the last seventy-five years. Palestinians teach us to live despite the trauma, despite a foreclosed future. As long as Palestinians exist, we will write, make music, archive, and labor, tirelessly, again and again, for freedom.
Rashid I. Khalidi
Sherene Seikaly
Excellent Notes & references on website
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2023.2304504
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