It's been a year
The above photos were taken by me from my trip to Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago.
It’s hard to believe or accept that it has been a year of a genocide broadcast live against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and now we’re also watching the most recent attacks in Beirut that is also targeting civilians.
I keep wondering if Israel will ever run out of weapons, or money to purchase them, because that seems to be only way this can stop.
The hypocrisy and level of dehumanisation and racist attitudes by politicians in the west and the majority of western mainstream media towards the loss of lives and destruction has never been more apparent to us who live in this part of the world.
It’s hard to feel hopeful that things will get better, but still, one is trying hard to hold on to hope and the belief that this situation cannot go on forever.
Below are extracts from A Year of War Without End by Lina Mounzer for The Markaz Review published on October 4 which articulates what many of us are feeling right now. Do make time to read the complete essay here.
…looking back, one year on, I can see how so many things were clear right from the outset. First, the violence was so earth-shattering it had immediately hacked the world in two: into those who knew what was happening and those who denied it, and it felt imperative to take your stand and determine who stood with you. Second, this was so undoubtedly a genocide I had no problem using the word in my editorial. The Israelis, after all, had declared the intention so brazenly that the statements would end up as evidence before the International Court of Justice. Third, that Israel’s actions, and unwavering US support, suggested that a regional war was not only “possible, [but] imminent.”
Now, nearly one year later… it is no longer only Gaza, but Lebanon too, and the West Bank, being ground to dust under Israeli bombardment. The so-called “rules of engagement” have all been pulverized, as has every humanitarian law, and every red line past which we couldn’t have imagined the war would be allowed to go. And yet it goes on. And on. And on. And on. For an entire year, taking us all with it into an abyss which cannot be exited but only traversed. We have indeed used all the words that once seemed unthinkable to use in public to describe Israel. Yes: occupation, apartheid, colonization, forced expulsion, ethnic cleansing, Nakba, genocide. We have used them all, shouted them from megaphones in the streets and cities of the world, spoken them to news anchors, decreed them from podiums, in international courts and repeated them in writing — in arguments and articles and editorials and social media posts and comments and flyers and and and. We have used them all, used them up, in fact, repeated them to the point of semantic satiation. And still the war goes on. And on. And on. And on. Nothing changes. But everything has changed.
The Western press translates us into the language that makes them most comfortable with our elimination. Our neighborhoods aren’t the places where we played and grew up and raised children and visited friends, they are “strongholds.” The bodies of our men are not the beloved chests we lay against or hands we held or were held by or the strong arms that carried us or the soft lips that kissed us good night. They are “suspects,” they are “militants,” they are “terrorists” and their deaths are always justifiable because they are men and our men are villains and that’s the way it has always been, that’s the way we’ve always been, to them.
Nothing has changed. Because the world has always seen us — Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs, Middle Easterners — this way, only now we are seeing this, too. Or rather, we see the extent of it, the inescapability of it. The fact that even those who thought of ourselves as exceptions — because of our passports or our languages or religions or politics — are not.
Because, ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.