“I feel that I have changed in a way I cannot ignore, not even for a moment. What happened? Something inside me has undoubtedly broken, and it happened swiftly, almost as if it was against my will. Perhaps things have become harsher in front of me, but they are undoubtedly clearer and more transparent. This clarity brings with it a strange and unexpected sense of relief.”
A Palestinian girl and a younger child enter a destroyed home in Gaza. Image via Telegram: ‘Gaza Now’
Nadeen Khoury and Abdallah Alqudah
A year of death has passed since Israel’s heinous attack on Gaza, endorsed by Western governments and leaders under the pretext of Israel’s right to self-defense. Yet, the events of October 7, a direct consequence of the failed Oslo Accords and the erosion of Palestinian rights through one-sided concessions, have reignited the Palestinian cause on a global scale. At the same time, the aftermath has exposed the failure of the toothless human rights organisations that once again proved themselves paralysed when it comes to protecting Palestinians.
The Israeli government has unleashed an indiscriminate, full-fledged war on everyone living in Gaza and the West Bank, backed by the strongest militaries and governments of the world. Has the international community not seen the horrors committed, or have they seen everything and simply chosen to disregard the humanity of the Palestinians? The answer seems painfully clear: the world has turned a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians, dismissing their rights and their very existence. We cannot ignore the fact that the international community has failed the Palestinians, and we must demand accountability and action.
Last October, both of us initially attempted to document the genocide in writing coming from the belief that one never owns their story if it remained untold. In December, these attempts were hampered by the sheer scale of the increasing devastation and the overwhelming reports of the massacre, making it impossible for us to conduct this feat both emotionally and articulately.
In the months that followed, the genocide continued to take more atrocious forms, resulting in extensive damage to the already precarious infrastructure (due to decades of siege and occupation), where 80 per cent of residential units became irreversibly damaged and no longer inhabitable. At the time of writing, more than 200,000 people have been killed or severely injured in Israel’s brutal campaign with children being disproportionately affected. The impact on the most vulnerable makes our choice of the word “catastrophic” sound like a chilling understatement.
“What more horror and dystopia does the so-called civilised world need to see in order to at least name things as they are, and call a genocide and its perpetuators by their names?”
The courageous independent reporting of Gazan journalists, many of whom have been murdered and hunted down by the Israeli military, has filled social media airwaves, documenting horrific massacres being committed against Palestinian civilians. It is the first time a genocide has been live-streamed to the world. Despite the International Court of Justice asking the Israeli government perpetrating these atrocities to take ‘provisional measures to prevent genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,’ some voices, even those claiming to seek an end to this war and acknowledging its horrific and unprecedented nature, still avoid using the term ‘genocide’ because we must be ‘nuanced,’ ‘politically correct,’ or ‘balanced.’ This selective sensitivity exposes a disturbing indifference to the suffering of Palestinians.
For many of us, watching the worst modern-day genocide unfold before our eyes in real time compels us to abandon the linguistic trap of being “nuanced” and “politically correct”. We have shed the burden of justifying ourselves to those who refuse to see the truth about Palestine, those who adopt the comforting fiction of ‘both sides’ to avoid having their privilege and public image challenged. We have learned that ‘balance’ is a weapon of suppression, and our voices will only be heard if we speak with raw, unwavering vocality that echoes Palestinian steadfastness. For us, what is happening is deeply personal as it forces us to reexamine our relationship with the West and its self-proclaimed and patronizing custodianship over human rights.
The Western governments’ endorsement of “neutrality” towards Israel's atrocities against a besieged population for over seventeen years has revealed the true color of these governments and created a retrospective disillusionment in all their non-governmental organisations and charities that claimed to work for our “development” yet turned out to be just another arm of their complex hegemonic structure. We are reminded that so-called rights are reserved for those who fit specific criteria, for those deemed worthy, and for those viewed as equals. We've come to understand that human rights are dictated by a person's ethnicity or country of origin.
It took genocide for us to see this, to force us to unsee that distorted image. We have realised that these so-called human rights do not apply to Arab populations, that the dismembered bodies of Palestinian children being collected in plastic grocery bags do not count, and do not matter. We have seen that even when an Israeli official publicly calls Palestinians "human animals," it wouldn’t matter because, at the end of the day, they are Arab.
This epiphany does not only challenge our perception of the West’s past practices towards us, but it also exposes their intent to maintain them through more “creative” methods to maintain that hegemony over us. Their politicians’ words, proclaiming arms embargoes and revisions to their support of Israel, are contradicted by their actions. They claim to seek a ceasefire, yet veto UN resolutions and actively oppose any attempts to hold Israel accountable or impose any sanctions.
To add insult to injury, Western governments have used Arab “allies” as pawns in their game, appropriating their supposedly sovereign land for military bases and allowing them to facilitate Israel's crimes. All of these examples of how the West views us – as tools when we could be used, or as numbers when we are killed.
An Israeli soldier walks by a tank in a rubble-strewn street in Gaza. Image via Telegram, Documenting Israel.
This dehumanisation is lodged in an orientalist, racist, and colonial legacy that is at least one hundred years old in Palestine alone. According to Edward Said, “All the transformative projects for Palestine, including Zionism, have rationalised the denial of present reality in Palestine with some argument about a “higher" interest, cause, or mission.”
Said calls upon us from the past to understand the historical and ideological roots of the current colonisation of Palestine. What happened to Palestinians is not an isolated phenomenon but is profoundly embedded in a long history of “Orientalist” thought and colonial conduct of which the Zionist state is a featured product. The purpose of its entire existence is to protect and maintain such thought and conduct.
The current state of occupation is, therefore, the evolution of colonial perceptions, policies, and actions in the present, perpetuating the denial of Palestinian history and the present. The very existence of the state of Israel must compel the least informed of us to question the legitimacy of the “higher” purposes that come at the expense of another people's rights and existence.
In addition, the colonisation of Palestine not only resulted in establishing a colonial settler state, but it also necessitated the “dismantling of indigenous Palestinian society.” Rashid Khalidi states that the main purpose of the influx of Jewish settlers to Palestine was to create that distortion in the indigenous Palestinian social fabric.
This dismantlement is proof of the brutal nature of colonial power employed to crush Palestinians, their resistance, and causing their dispossession. This would not have happened without the active role of the British Empire in facilitating the Zionist project during and after the First World War and Second World War, showing the true scale of force that has historically been used to suppress Palestinian agency and the right to self-determination.
This historical and ideological colonial structure, which denies Palestinians the right to exist freely and independently, continues to operate powerfully in the present day. These colonial mechanisms extend to Western media as a particularly effective channel to perpetuate these practices. They dim the stories of Palestinians and try to silence their voices. Particularly, throughout the past year, they validated the dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims, consequently sanctioning all the barbaric practices we are witnessing against the Palestinian population.
These political and media covers have induced a reactionary growth of awareness of the undeniable human cost of Israel's atrocities and the historical wrongs they've committed, vitalising a new wave of resistance in various forms. The collective moral failure of the West in handling this catastrophe revealed this underlying colonial structure that reinforces the very orientalist worldview that has allowed this violence to persist for so long.
Despite the demonisation of Palestinians and the silencing of any dissent against Israel's atrocities weaponising the label “antisemitic”, we find ourselves at a turning point where the narrative is no longer the oppressor’s. The magnitude of the ongoing Nakba has left us questioning our humanity's essence and what it necessitates, particularly for those who have previously believed in the ‘universality’ of human rights. Today, we feel morally and politically compelled to take the lead in confronting the lies of Western powers and the hypocrisy of their claims to promote human rights. As the Palestinian pastor Dr. Munther Isaac puts it, “To our European friends, I never, ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again.”
Today, we rise from the ashes of this unceasing trauma with a renewed commitment to social and political activism for Palestine and the colonised Global South. As Edward Said states, "It's not that we have lost faith, but that we see that the gods we thought were so powerful can be challenged, and can be defeated and that there is a responsibility to do that."
This awakening calls for a fundamental shift in our understanding of the colonised world and our responsibilities within it. We must confront the colonial history that has fueled the dehumanisation of Palestinians and work to dismantle the systems that perpetuate it.
We feel indebted to the Palestinian struggle that liberated us as individuals before it will liberate Palestine. In Said’s words, “If anything can denature, neutralise, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life, it is turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. The truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
So, how can we not completely change amidst all this death and destruction, endorsed by the silence, complicity, and inaction of Western and Arab governments alike? What more horror and dystopia does the so-called civilised world need to see in order to at least name things as they are, and call a genocide and its perpetuators by their names?