100 days. and I feel numb.
It started, this time, with something unusual. Something unheard of. We have become used, over the past 24 years of intifada suppression, to the regular bombings of Gaza. We heard the Israeli minister say in 2006 “We have decided to put the Palestinians on a diet”, carefully calculating the number of trucks allowed to enter the tiny coastal enclave based on the Israeli calculation of the population of Gaza (a perpetual underestimate) and the Israeli calculation of the caloric intake that each Gazan should be allowed.
And yet, the Gaza Strip flourished. Despite Israel’s imprisonment of its population, guard towers looming large all along the north and east, and fishermen not allowed to go past the 3-mile Israeli-imposed nautical ‘border’. Cut off from the world. Cut off from relatives in Haifa, Nazareth, Isdud, Lod. Cut off from family in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nablus, Jenin, al-Khalil. The lucky few who have escaped Gaza in the past eighteen years, through international visas – students, relatives of people living in Europe, the US and elsewhere – all tell harrowing tales of Israeli harassment, bombardment and deprivation. But they also share that joy – that glint in the eye of the people of Gaza – that unabashed love of life so apparent in the Gaza version of Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ – made nine years ago – made after the 2012 bombardment of Gaza but before the horror of the July – August 2014 bombing campaign – which lasted an endless 56 days of bombing – over 2,000 killed, over 250,000 displaced. That was the worst one yet – we thought, oh it couldn’t get any worse than 2014 (the so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’). Anees al-Farra, who helped make the video (the brainchild of Mohanad Barakat), shared with Al Jazeera in 2015, after enduring that bombing campaign with his family, seeing scenes of destitution he had not imagined possible, watching friend after friend move abroad, “If happiness existed in Gaza,” he said, “it would be temporary, with an expiry date that would wipe it all away.”
That expiration date, it seems, was October 7th, 2023. A day when the prison gates were broken open, when Hamas fighters – most of them having lived their entire lives in this prison – attacked Israeli military bases and civilians in Nahal Oz and Be’eri settlement communes (kibbutzes), the settlement of Sderot, and even a techno dance party that was being held just a few kilometers from the prison walls of Gaza. 953 Israelis were killed that day and over 200 taken hostage.
Israel has used that as justification for its carpet bombing of the prison it had created – people fleeing from north to south, running, getting shot in the back, stopping, getting crushed under the rubble as Israeli air forces drop thousands of tons of bombs. Nowhere to run.
Nowhere to hide. And yet … managing to keep most of the hostages alive. When a prisoner swap was negotiated (not 1,000 Palestinians for 1 Israeli like in 2012 with Gilad Shalit, but virtually a 1-for-1 prisoner swap), the Israelis and foreign workers who were released came out smiling – in a flurry of interviews upon release, saying they were treated well but subjected to the same terror of Israeli bombardment that all the Palestinians in Gaza were experiencing.
Then they all got ‘briefed’ by the Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet and shut up – none of them did interviews after that (except the one handpicked by Shin Bet to tow the party line). Why not? Why are they being shielded from public view? Why are Israeli officials ignoring the pleas of the family members of remaining hostages to stop the bombing and negotiate a swap? What happened to Gilad Shalit? Well, after 5 years held by Hamas in Gaza (during which time he was photographed playing football with kids, barbecuing with families and generally treated with a guarded kindness by a people who are naturally welcoming of everyone – having for many generations played host to many, many visitors from east and west, north and south) he was released, then sent off to France (where he was from originally, having made ‘aliyah’ to Israel to serve in the occupying army) and safely stooged into a position as a sports commentator where he could be kept quiet about his time as a prisoner of Hamas in Gaza.
And here we are. Here I am, a hundred days and a hundred phone calls and letters to Congress, protests and sit-ins and union resolutions and impassioned pleas to deaf ears later. Another sleepless night in paradise … the screams from Gaza’s children just keep breaking through my screen, and I can’t find a bit of rest in my cozy warm house, four walls and a roof over my head. A windy, chilly night it is, in a city where nearly 365 unhoused people died on the streets this past year – almost one for each day…but they mostly died in winter…or trying to cross busy streets at night…. abandoned by families and communities who have for centuries built a legacy of shunning and discarding ‘undesirables’ – even from among their own kin.
A city that doesn’t care enough about its own people to put a roof over everyone’s head, and instead is complicit — funding and supplying this relentless bombing campaign that has killed over 24,000 people in the past 100 days, over 10,000 of them children. We say “they are not numbers”, but after the first month, after the first 10,000 names, after the Ministry of Health, which was keeping track of the casualty toll all across Gaza, was itself a target of bombing, it’s been hard to even keep up with the names of those killed, let alone the numbers.
But we remember Reem. Reem, with her Princess Leia buns, held in the arms of her weeping grandfather. That indelible image – one of the many things that have changed us all forever these past 100 days of misery.
One of the thousands of images and videos that I have watched on Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram (and have not looked away) these past 100 days. And if you are still somehow ignoring it, somehow remaining unchanged in your devotion to ‘the system’ that is killing us all in its own way (though the Palestinians are the most direct and immediate targets right now) somehow dancing above this mire in your cloud of paradise, know that you are dancing on the bones and blood of human remains (sometimes, in the US, quite literally, as many sites of the massacres of Native people remain unmarked a century later.
Imagine standing in a city – abandoned, evacuated, electricity cut off, internet cut off. Black and brown residents ordered into the city’s largest stadium “for their safety”, then abandoned there. Young, brave ones who dare to go out of the stadium, prying open doors of nearby shuttered shops to try to find water and diapers for the families stuck in the stadium are shot and killed by white shop-owners for ‘looting’. Prisoners abandoned in cells by guards who decide to save their own families, and leave the prisoners to fend for themselves.
People crying out for help, holding up ‘HELP’ signs written hastily on cardboard and shown to passing helicopters – helicopters that the people in the stadium know are not there to help them. Helicopters that instead go to wealthy white neighborhoods to airlift the city’s elite. And when the people in the stadium organize, mobilize and decide that they have strength in numbers, and try to cross the bridge to escape the fate of death, they are met by an armed white militia, including police, off-duty police, and armed settlers, who shoot with live ammunition and force the crowd back to the stadium.
This is not a description of Gaza right now (where the fate of the hundreds of men, women and children who were stripped and hog-tied by Israeli soldiers in Gaza City’s largest football stadium remains unknown). Nor is it some future dystopian sci-fi. This was what happened in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. I arrived in the immediate aftermath, and saw the traumatized city that remained, after the hurricane that caused the flooding that caused the levees to break had passed, and ‘hurricane fema’ came to ‘establish order’ with military force. Military vehicles patrolling the streets – they still had the tan ‘desert camo’ from their use in Iraq and Afghanistan – the latest target of US imperialist wars for oil and empire.
My point is – this is not new – the military occupation of colonialism and conquest has the same look and feel everywhere it goes. From Gaza to New Orleans to Ferguson to Baltimore to McAllen to Laredo to Guantanamo Bay. And from Kosovo to Gorajde, from Artsakh to Venezuela to Bolivia to El Salvador to Honduras to Guatemala to the Philippines to Maui to the Congo to Namibia to South Africa to East Timor to Burma.
The echo of imperialism is wide, and it rings and clangs in our heads. But the cries of our shared humanity fills our hearts, because we know it is all one struggle. And, as my friend Yousef Al-Jamal said, and wrote in the front of the anthology “Light from Gaza” as he handed it to me on October 1st, just a week before all this latest escalation started, “Gaza is the conscience of the world”. If we can all just recognize that, and reach out to the children of Gaza (as South Africa and Namibia did last week with the genocide case at the Hague), we can try to preserve a shred of our shared humanity and stop living lives/lifestyles that require monster armored bulldozers and F16 fighter jets killing children to prop them up.
