The images of the past year are seared into my memory. The worst one I remember was the image of what was left of a body that got completely smashed between two cement pieces as the building had fallen around him, in one of the many many many many thousands of bombs that were dropped on Gaza this year. The body was so mangled and smashed it looked like minced meat. And I will never get that image out of my head.
But there are so many others. So many, many videos of children screaming in pain, blood streaming down their faces, burned from head to toe, looking out from a sea of bandages and ointment, or children with no bandages, covered in cement dust and blood, carried into chaotic, undersupplied hospitals, frantic scenes – so many of these scenes, night after night, over and over again.
And we are not even living it. We are just watching it on our screens, with our own screams of powerlessness feeling as futile as those of the Gazans, screaming out in pain every day and night for an entire year.
The protests became popular for a while. People came out in tens of thousands for Gaza, back in the winter.
But the scenes on our screens are relentless. The man desperately pumping his hands on his wife’s chest to try to save her with cpr, even though she is clearly gone, her body broken and misshapen.
The recording of little 6-year old Hind, the ‘call heard round the world’, as amy goodman called it. Her little voice desperately pleading for help, the paramedics trying to reassure her, their phone calls to the Israeli military liaison, their attempt to reach her, and the silence when Hind’s voice let them know that the medics had been killed, and Hind was next.
The many, many videos of Israeli soldiers mocking, dehumanizing, putting on Palestinian womens’ bras, riding childrens’ bikes, laughing as they blow up home after home after home after school after mosque after hospital.
How can it have been an entire year??? In any case, it seems like lifetimes. We have lived, those of us with family in Palestine (and yes, my spouse’s family is my family) waking up each morning to new scenes of horror.
And in the midst of all of this, the most steadfast, the most joyful, the most resilient videos have come out of Gaza – the children dancing dabke on the ruins, the volleyball games on the beach with tents in the background, the videos of people returning to the ruins of their homes, digging them out, planting seeds, planting gardens in the refugee camps, sharing bread, the relentless gaze of the food vlogger staring into the phone camera as he prepares hundreds of meals with whatever is on hand to share with incredibly grateful children, the reporting by Wael Dahdouh, who went from the funeral of his children immediately back to the camera to continue reporting, because it was that important to tell the world what was happening in Gaza so that someone, somewhere, would get the message and put an end to it.
And all around the world people were listening. People were watching, people were paying attention – for once! The word ‘Gaza’ was on everyone’s lips.
A week before October 7th, 2023, I hosted a Palestinian journalist from Gaza at an event in our town. He was part of an anthology ‘Light in Gaza’, which is a beautiful compilation of poetry and prose by Palestinian men and women writers from Gaza. His name is Yousef al-Jamal, and he was a student of Refaat al-Areer, who became one of the symbols of Gaza with his poem “If I must die, you must live, to tell my story…” that became so iconic during this year of protests, was written on countless protest signs, painted on kites flown high above cities across the world, was read at so many vigils by tearful, passionate youth as they occupied their campuses, set up tent cities like was done to oppose apartheid South Africa in the 80s, in short, one of the fallen heroes that have built this movement for a Free Palestine that is closer to fruition than it has ever been in my lifetime of activism and journalism on this issue.
But on October 1st, 2023, when Yousef came to our city to speak, there were only ten people in attendance. One woman, an older Palestinian, broke down in tears after Yousef spoke, saying that she was afraid, in the first seventeen years of her job at a university in the US, to tell her colleagues that she was Palestinian.
But now, a year later, students are walking out by the hundreds on her campus, shouting from the rooftops “You are not alone!! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!!”
The word Palestine is on everyone’s lips, and even more than that: Falasteen. The soft ‘F’ as it’s pronounced in Arabic. The word Falasteen lands like the soft feather of a dove on the pain of this war, this genocide. And everyone who has been part of this struggle for the past year (upon decade upon century upon millenia) knows that Falasteen is the sound of freedom – not just for the Palestinians, but for every anti-colonial struggle for freedom on earth: from Pays Basco to Western Sahara to Maui to Standing Rock to Ireland to Sierra Leone. We are all standing together on this, a global solidarity that has not been seen since the ports shut down to end South African apartheid and did.
So on this one year anniversary of the day that Israelis woke up to the blowback of what 75 years of occupation had wrought, let’s remember that Falasteen is for them too – those that are awake to the nightmare, those that are standing in opposition to what is being done in their name (and there are many), those who are still awakening, even those who are asleep.
Falasteen hourriye
Min al maaye la al maaye
Say it with me now. This will be the mantra for our freedom – and we will play it with drums and with smoke Signals and tiktoks. Because freeing Palestine is the breath that the world has been needing since 1945, when the camps were liberated and the ‘world leaders’ and the people woke up to the horror of what their playing at war had wrought, and when the US became worse than their ‘enemies’, forcing the survivors of their horrific atomic bomb into laboratories for decades after their experiment in how deadly one people can be to another with a single bomb (which wasn’t enough for Eisenhower, who had to do it a second time).
Since then, it’s like the world has been holding it’s breath. I do not, for one, find it ironic that the country that is cracking down the most on pro-Palestine protests, attacking an arresting Palestinians in their homes for organizing protests against the genocide in Gaza, has been Germany. I find it frightening and arrogant. Allied with Israel, Britain and the United States in an unholy alliance to preserve the last vestiges of white supremacy “coded as ‘Western culture’ or ‘civilization’”, the wealthy elite of these nations are supporting death camps every bit as bad as Guantanamo Bay was (and is), in which thousands of people are being held in the name of “Israeli security” and literally tortured to death.
We are watching the worst and the best of human nature emerge, all at the same time. The videos of Israeli soldiers, laughing and dancing as they blow up children, as they blow up the future, as they blow up the past.
And then the videos of the refuseniks, the emerging anti-Zionist Jewish movement that shows up so beautifully and humbly to protests and actions and to the community that this liberatory movement has wrought across the globe. Many of them are young, their grandparents were the generation of the Holocaust, they hold that memory, that trauma, that fear, but they have refused to let fear be their guide. I have seen so many hundreds, if not thousands, of these american and british and other nations of jewish youth holding ceremonies, singing, chanting, sharing grief, holding space, being in true solidarity with their palestinian comrades on the campuses and streets and community centers where events have been held over this thousand-year-long last year.
So I go back to that day just over a year ago, when Yousef spoke in our town on October 1st, 2023, and I was so disappointed in how few people came out to the event to hear about Gaza, and Yousef asked us, in his earnest, pleading way, “Has the world forgotten about Gaza?”
At the time, I am afraid that if I had answered him truthfully, I would have had to say “yes” – forgotten, or at least tucked away conveniently in a quiet part of the global memory, much like the fact that the US is still running a torture prison in Cuba for over two decades, where innocent people are “disappeared”.
Now, a year later, though there have been ebbs and flows, people are talking about Palestine, about Falasteen, everywhere on earth, from the halls of power to the workers in the fields. Because Palestine’s liberation is global liberation, and people see and recognize and feel and understand that. It is scary to some, but to most, it is like taking a breath of clean, sweet air after breathing smog for decades.
If you are still waking up, and afraid of what the world has become as you slept, welcome. Watch Al Jazeera’s incredible synopsis of the past year, and remember that this kind of truth-telling is why Israel has banned Al Jazeera completely. Remember what journalism was?
This feature-length investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long conflicthttps://t.co/YtZhI8vC4P@AJIunit
— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) October 2, 2024
Even Al Jazeera has not documented the minute details of every single day of the past year, every incident, as the IMEMC has done. More than any other time in the past, the IMEMC has shared the work of hundreds of citizen journalists on the ground in Gaza, who are unpaid but desperate to share their reality with the world by posting on social media. We owe an un-ending fount of gratitude to these incredible human beings who have put their lives on the line again and again to ensure that the world sees the reality that they have been living every single day. They’ve allowed us to continue this scrappy little site that was founded in Beit Sahour during the second intifada, in 2003, even without funding, to bring the daily news of those killed, wounded, and abducted in Palestine to an English-speaking news audience every day since then.
Follow these citizen journalists, check their links and if they have a fundraising link support them. Gaza needs all the help it can get, from everyone everywhere who is able.
So now, Yousef, I can answer you truthfully: No, the world has not forgotten about Gaza. Gaza is leading the world into a Free Palestine, Falasteen Hourra, which will free the world. But I would have to tell him through tears, knowing how much he has lost this year, as has every Gazan still living, knowing the pain they have endured this past year, on the top of a lifetime of pain.
And I want anyone reading this to know, that what you see now, the rubble and the suffering in Gaza, is real, the pain is deep, the 15,000+ children that have been buried this year should have lived to adulthood in a safe, happy and free Falasteen. Palestine should never have been made to pay for Europe’s crimes by imposing a new colonial state on their land just as colonialism was coming to an end (relatively speaking) worldwide.
This is Gaza ten years ago:
And though many of the people and places in the video are gone now (destroyed and killed this past year), that resilience, that joy for living, the incredible ability to wake up after having lived through the Nakba in 48, the Naksa in 67, the first intifada in 87, the second intifada in 2000, the Israeli bombardments in 2008-9, 2012, 2016, 2018, 2021 and the entire past year non-stop, and still to be able to wake up smiling into the sun, heating a metal pot of coffee over a fire, and to look into some young person’s Iphone camera and smile – that is the resilience that is Gaza, that is Falasteen.
That is the resilience we all need to find in ourselves, the steadfastness, the sumud, to take that deep breath, to speak truth into places of power, to know that things are changing and we need to hold on to all our siblings, which means everyone in the world, including that gentle dove of a sister to us all, Falasteen.
When I feel like succumbing to the death trap of capitalism that has its robot claw on us all, I remember the voice of the earnest young man, a shabab from Falasteen, who stood on the pickup truck at one of the protests this year and looked out at this crowd of young and old Americans, immigrants and refugees, descendents of enslaved people and descendents, no doubt, of enslavers, of people from every religious faith and no faith, and he said “Repeat after me: I promise. I will never. Let palestine go.” And I heard all their voices responding, and envisioned Falasteen as the world’s little sister, with all of us forming a human chain to hold onto her and keep her from swinging off the cliff and into the abyss.
Thank you everyone in Gaza and Falasteen for showing the world the true meaning of sumud – many of us are just learning (or re-learning) what you have passed down for thousands of years. And even though I feel guilty every single day when I wake up and see what the government that I pay taxes to has wrought, I turn that guilt into action, and do whatever I can do that day to use whatever power/leverage/money/time I have to call for a Free Palestine, to push for an arms embargo, to stop the funding to Israel, to boycott and spread the word about boycotting, to cost this war-industrial-technological-complex as much money as possible and to refuse to pay into it myself. If you want to get involved and aren’t, try this page for a start.
