Read Dearer,
90 days since the siege on Gaza began, and it is still the most important thing to be talking about, thinking about, or sharing. Today, our hero, the stalwart and revered Al Jazeera Burea Chief Wael al-Dahdouh’s son, Hamza, was targeted and murdered by the IOF. It is beyond devastating that Wael continues in the face of such soul-level sorrow. My heart aches for him. When I saw the news, I put my phone face down on my lap and stared at the wall without blinking until my eyes started to hurt.
I wrote my last newsletter two months ago and channeled all of my rage into it, at the bystanders, the hand-sitters, and the sideliners. I’m devastated to report that not much has changed since then.
And then, I had nothing left to say that seemed important enough. Writing became this rote thing I had to do for my job, but not something that meant anything to me anymore.
My rage has since calcified. Turned into stone. It all seems so bleak and utterly hopeless. Yesterday, I watched Mike Pence sign artillery shells headed for Lebanon. “For Israel,” he wrote. It is so depraved that I felt, for a moment, like I was drowning in a nightmare, thrashing the surface of the water to come up for air. But it was real. I was awake. That really happened? That really happened. What fresh hell is this?
Although my rage has calcified, it hasn’t turned into acceptance. Or apathy. I am still watching the videos. Seeing the photos. Bleeding hands reaching down through rubble to pull up a child. The face of the dead, cast in white from the explosion’s dusty fallout. The hollow eyes of those with no one left to save them. Gaza is starving to death. Gaze is bombed to oblivion. Beirut has been attacked.
Around me, life continues.
I recently watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and was reminded that videos of the US’s illegitimate war on Iraq were not allowed to be aired in the US by the media. We watched numbers roll in on-screen, disembodied from the faces they represented. It reminds me of Albert Camus’ brilliant essay Neither Victims, Nor Executioners, “...[we] are unable to really imagine other people’s death. It is a freak of the times. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding.”
That’s not the case any longer. Death comes at us swiftly through screens held in our hands. Gruesome, graphic, and often in real-time, or close enough to it that the weight of it is immediate. I hear the drones circling Motaz. I see the bodies of infants at al-Shifa Hospital, drained of life. The bodies of two men after a horrific execution in the West Bank. Stacks of the dead outside of hospitals that had tried to save them but couldn’t withstand the ferocious and unjust attacks of Israel. Dozens of bodies bulldozed and pulverized. How many deaths have I witnessed with my own eyes in 90 days? It is nothing compared to the actual death toll in Palestine; the callous slaughter of a population.
This is not the first time Palestine has been assaulted. In the words of Camus, “History seems to be in the grip of blind and deaf forces which will heed neither cries of warning, nor advice, nor entreaties.” But it is the most intense and intensely indefensible attack that has ever been carried out. When will it stop?
The words of Rachel Corrie, who was murdered by the IOF and whom I wrote about here, haunt me, “I think it is a good idea for us to all drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore.”
It has been 90 days since the world cracked open to swallow the Palestinians whole. On this dreadful anniversary, I ask that you don’t let the resistance falter, don’t let fatigue take you. Walk into the fire of the pain and let it singe you. Feel its burn. Emerge reignited. It is time now to be louder, angrier, more forceful. Let not history repeat the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats.
It’s FREE PALESTINE UNTIL PALESTINE IS FREE.