From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free

Read Time: 5 minutes

Israel continues attacks throughout Gaza, including hospitals and in the south of the besieged enclave, where ground operations are intensifying. So far, at least 32,975 people, including more than 13,000 children and more than 8,400 women were killed by the Israeli militants, more than 75,577 people were injured and near 8000 people are missing. Also at least 457 people, including more than 117 children were killed by the Israeli militants, and more than 4,750 were injured in the occupied West Bank.

Latest data from the World Health Organization, the Palestinian government and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs show that more than 50% of Gaza’s homes including 360,000 residential units, 396 educational facilities, 83% of groundwater inaccessible, 267 places of worship and most of the hospitals have been destroyed or damaged under Israel’s bombardments and there is literally nowhere safe to go.

For the past 6 months, the people of Gaza have endured a living hell and the entire population is at risk of famine. On top of the mentioned horrific death toll, many more people face are facing death simply due to hunger, preventable diseases, diarrhoea, and cold and the situation is particularly worrying for children, pregnant women and those who had already been suffering medical conditions.

But that is not the issue here today. The story of Gaza in the last 6 months was not only the massacre of nearly 33,000 women, children and men and the displacement of two million people and the torture of a thousand people with the weapon of starvation and thirst. Gaza was the collapse of all dominant and moral value systems of the United States and European Countries and their “human rights” who provided Israel with all the money, weapons and green lights to conveniently commit the genocide making them blatant partners. It was a disgrace for the “Islamic World” and Muslim states who continued their 5-time daily Salah routine and celebrated their Ramadan, and their good night sleep never got interrupted while the kids in Gaza had no where to run away from Israel’s fighter jets bombings in the dark of the nights and smoke of the days.

The story of Gaza, the first ever live broadcasted genocide in the history, was a shocking and transforming experience for its observers on the individual level too. Many of us, watching the daily images and news of this genocide, oscillated between grief and rage out of desperation which led to our exhaustion, and gradually changed to our different selves everyday a new video appeared on the social media and the smartphones in our hands. Regardless of our whereabouts, be it Iran’s Tehran, UK’s London, US’s Washington DC, Ghana’s Accra or Yemen’s Sana’a, we nearly reached emotional collapse and seeing other people’s indifference to Israel’s atrocity, we became strangers to our environments too as the past 6 months in Gaza drew a dividing line across everything making a simple question. Which side of the line did we stand on?

Closing the eyes and looking around was not an option. No one can say they didn’t know or they didn’t see. All of us saw it. What was our position as we witnessed those mutilated bodies of the kids who otherwise would have been just suffering the largest open-air jail of all times hoping for a chance of freedom and prosperity in future? What did we do when we saw the out left bodies of entire families under collapsed building concrete decks? How did we position ourselves to this contemporary holocaust? The answer is disappointing. Except for Iran, South Africa, Yemen, and generation Z in England and America, who were the only bright and shining spots of humanity against this dark indifference of humans, and who turned their heads towards the heartbreaking cries for help of Gaza children and mothers and became their voice in the international community, the rest of us failed. How hard was it to push our state representatives to accelerate the ceasefire process? Or did we care at all?

Was the genocide justified to us? How did we fail to loud our voices in rage and grief as we witnessed the news of the death of the kids due to lack of first aid kits, the newborns whose mother went through labor on the staircase of whatever’s left of Al-Shifa and many other bombed hospitals in Gaza and died along. How did we sit until the Israel’s gruesome kill machine slowed it down for a recess as the UN Security Council reached its already too late resolution for a non-binding ceasefire for the sake of Ramadan, and to resume genocide this time in Rafah soon?

Then there is this other question. Having witnessing our indifference, do we not need a humanity test? Because there is definitely something that is not right about us. When October-7^th happened, all of us – of course having deliberately forgotten the 75-year occupation and previous massacres the most horrific of which was killing nearly 3000 Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982 by the Israeli troops who also killed a total number of near 10000 civilians from 2000 up to this very September 2023, nothing classified! – were so quick to condemn Hamas’ “alleged” crimes out of our “apparent” sense of Humanity! But what happened to us as the number of kids who were slaughtered by the Israel’s army throughout the last 6 months landscape was exceeding 5000, reaching 10000 and now picking at near 14000 among more than 33000 other civilians our humanitarian gesture didn’t re-translate itself? Suppose we didn’t know what kind of entity Hamas attacked then and what kind of monster were Palestinians trapped under, or suppose we were unaware of the excessive, chilling and limitless atrocities this little monster is capable of then, do we not see it now?

As a reminder, it has to be mentioned that Israel, as the 7-decade long occupier, as the state which doesn’t belong there, and the oppressor who has never hesitated a massacre, has never had legitimate right to self-defense although Hamas’ “retaliatory, not initiative” operation on October-7^th inflicted – as Iranian Supreme leader puts it – an “irreparable defeat” upon them. Due to the awakening of world’s conscious as the number of people who have been watching this mass killing of helpless people in Gaza is growing by the day, the Israel state began to produce its export productions under other countries’ brands because people around the world have stopped buying Israeli brands. The number of people who believe in Israel’s stability and safety has already started to shrink while the number of tourists who revise Tel Aviv as their destination increases. Shaking the hands of politicians and envoys and basically anyone representing an Israeli state or company will never be easy again as the stains of the innocent blood on those hands are too set-in to be washed off as the people of the world know that if it is not possible to help people of Gaza, it is easy to avoid any one who befriends Israel. Sympathy with the un-masked monsters no longer pleases anyone. Maybe soon we will even be witnessing western countries getting prepared to re-host the migrants who were brought to Palestine to fulfill the bogus dream of Zionists’ Promised land. And maybe soon enough everybody has to forget about the two-state solution as the made-up occupying state dismantles as destiny might have decided a one state for the ever-true owners of Palestine.