A Textbook Case of Genocide
Raz Segal
On Friday, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” Over the last week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.”
Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.
Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of U.S. President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.
The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the U.S. dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.
Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.
(Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. Courtesy: Jewish Currents. Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture on the Jewish left and the left more broadly. It was founded in 1946.)
Impending Genocide
Sai Englert
In Gaza, Israel is gearing up to commit genocide. It is not doing so quietly. It is repeating its intent every day, announcing it to the world in both its words and actions. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described those in Gaza as ‘human animals’ while declaring that Israel was cutting off water, fuel, electricity and food to the entire blockaded strip. Likud officials have called for nuclear strikes as well as a second Nakba. Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, has rejected the distinction between civilians and combatants, asserting that ‘it is an entire nation out there that is responsible’. Israeli military officials have made clear that their aim is ‘damage, not precision’. All the while, Israel has subjected the 365-square-kilometre area to relentless shelling, dropping the same number of bombs on its 2.3 million inhabitants as the United States unleashed on Afghanistan in an entire year at the height of its murderous invasion. Hospitals, mosques, schools and homes – all have been deemed adequate military targets. At least 2,750 people have died so far, over one million have been displaced, nearly ten thousand are wounded.
Half of Gaza’s inhabitants were told to relocate to the south of the strip via military-approved ‘safe routes’. Israel then bombed these routes while people were doing just that. Many other Palestinians refused to follow the order. They know better than anyone that this is a straightforward attempt at ethnic cleansing. Nearly 80% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, expelled from their lands in 1948 and refused their right to return by their colonial rulers. In the south, the situation is dire too, thanks to continual aerial bombardment, shortages of water, food and electricity, and the influx of new arrivals. Israel continues to block the entry of humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing, which has been hit repeatedly by air raids.
Israeli officials, including Netanyahu himself, have announced that this is ‘only the beginning’. More than three hundred thousand troops have been mobilized and are awaiting orders to launch a ground offensive which could, we are told, last months. The resultant death and destruction would be unimaginable. There is a high likelihood that the entire northern Gaza Strip would be razed to the ground, and that the inhabitants of the enclave would be corralled into an even smaller area – forcing them to choose between death, unbearable captivity, or exile. Israel justifies this indiscriminate bloodshed as a response to the killing of 1,300 Israelis in the days following the Palestinian break-out on 7 October, and the need to prevent Hamas from carrying out further operations. Its current assault must be understood, first and foremost, as a response to the political humiliation it suffered at the hands of the most isolated section of the Palestinian population.
After eighteen years of siege by land, air and water, during which Israel’s stated policy was to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger’ by severely restricting food access, while regularly ‘mowing the grass’ – i.e., carrying out campaigns of assassination and mass killing – Palestinians in Gaza finally managed to tear down the barbed wire that kept them captive. Through that act alone, they endangered the political future of Netanyahu and his coalition, along with the process of normalization between Israel and the region’s most autocratic and repressive regimes. In addition, they punctured Israel’s illusion of omnipotence, exposing its vulnerability for the whole world – and, more importantly, for all Palestinians – to see. Retribution will now be conducted by all available means – including forced displacement or outright annihilation.
The question facing all of us in the West is how to stop the impending genocide. Our rulers have made it clear that they will allow Israel to carry out its plans – invoking the country’s ‘right to defend itself’ by carpet bombing a civilian population. The US and the UK have sent battleships to demonstrate their unflinching support. Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Tel Aviv to give Netanyahu the EU’s backing. Keir Starmer insisted that Israel had a right to cut off vital supplies to the entire blockaded population. Simultaneously, our governments have tried their best to repress Palestine solidarity movements on the domestic front: France banned pro-Palestine demonstrations altogether, Berlin followed suit, and the UK considered joining in. Of course, this follows a years-long attempt to criminalize the Palestinian cause and stamp out the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, under the guise of ‘countering terrorism’ or ‘fighting antisemitism’. Why is our political class so invested in suppressing criticism of the apartheid regime? The answer is obvious. Western states support Israel in order to maintain their power at a crucial crossroads of world trade. Challenging that power is impermissible, because any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its crimes is – by definition – an attempt to hold our own states accountable for their involvement in them. Not only are our rulers prepared to let Israel level Gaza; they will even provide it with diplomatic cover and military supplies.
What is standing between Gaza and genocide, then, is political pressure – an internationalist movement whose aim is to force Western governments to backtrack and restrain the Israeli killing machine. Last weekend we saw the first stirrings of this movement in its current phase. Across the globe, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – turned out to march. Sana’a, Baghdad, Rabat, and Amman were filled with protesters as far as the eye could see, bringing cold sweats to the rulers of the region, who see the connection between their populations’ demands for Palestinian liberation and demands for their own. In London, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, in New York, Brussels and Rome, in Cape Town, Tunis, and Nairobi, in Sydney and Santiago, people took to the street to demand an end to the onslaught, an end to the siege, and a free Palestine.
These scenes were extraordinary – but they alone will not be enough. In the US, activists have targeted the offices of key policymakers, staging protests and sit-ins, demanding that they drop their support for Israel’s crimes and take action to end the assault. Shaming politicians in this way will be an important tactic in the days and weeks to come. The recent history of the solidarity movement offers other methods that may also prove effective. In the UK, Palestine Action has spent years targeting armaments factories and stopping the production of weapons intended for use against Palestinians. Dockers in Italy, South Africa and the US have refused to handle Israeli cargo during previous military assaults on Gaza, disrupting the flow of goods and weapons to the country. During the winter of 2008-9, as Israel launched its first massive assault on the strip following the imposition of the blockade three years earlier, students across the UK occupied their campuses, calling for their universities to show concrete solidarity with Palestinians and for their government to cut diplomatic ties. They used the occupied spaces to host lectures, discussions and debates. Amid growing repression against the Palestine solidarity movement, such spaces could once again play a crucial role in enabling street-level organization.
It is up to activists themselves to decide which methods are most suited to their local and national contexts. Yet, across the board, there can be no return to business as usual. We have a collective obligation to ratchet up the pressure on our governments, and on Israel itself, to stop the genocide and mass displacement. In the UK, several trade unions expressed support for the demonstration last weekend, as well as their concern about the situation in Gaza. Can such concern be translated into meaningful interventions? Can union militants move from making solidarity statements to taking solidarity industrial action? If lecturers and teachers, dockers and train drivers – to name but a few of those who turned out at the rally in London – could organize work stoppages, demanding that the government reverse its position and stop the ongoing mass murder, then Britain’s leaders would not have the political space to give Israel a carte blanche.
Today, Palestinian unions have called on trade unionists across the world to show their solidarity by refusing to continue with the provision of arms to Israel. They have asked that workers in relevant industries make the following commitments:
- To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
- To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
- To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
- To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
- Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and, in the case of the US, funding to it.
These demands must now be brought to workplaces and unions across the West, where they will find important allies among existing campaigns against the arms trade. Points four and five are not industry-specific, and can have a much wider application across the labour movement.
The task ahead of us is clear. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba are not acts of God. They can be prevented. Our governments have so far refused to raise objections. Let us remind them of the costs of their complicity.
(Courtesy: Sidecar, the blog of New Left Review. The New Left Review is a British bimonthly journal covering world politics, economy, and culture, which was established in 1960.)
Over 1 Million Displaced in Gaza, Unprecedented Destruction: UNRWA
Courtesy: Al Mayadeen
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has confirmed that their centers in southern Gaza have received approximately 400,000 displaced people, with the agency estimating that there are over one million displaced people in total.
UNRWA emphasized that the level of destruction in the Gaza Strip is unparalleled and that the needs of the displaced population surpass their capacities. Additionally, the agency warned of the severe health risks faced by the people of Gaza, who are forced to consume contaminated water.
It also stated that the power stations ceased to function, leaving people in the darkness since the beginning of the ongoing aggression. These statements from UNRWA coincide with the ongoing bombing campaign that has been continuous for ten days.
(Extract. Al Mayadeen, an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel based in the Lebanese capital Beirut.)
World Health Organisation Condemns Israel’s Evacuation Orders to Hospitals in Northern Gaza
Ben Cowles
Israel’s evacuation orders to hospitals in northern Gaza are a death sentence for the sick and injured, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned at the weekend.
The Israeli military ordered 22 hospitals’ staff and patients in the northern half of the strip to head south as it continued to lay waste to entire neighbourhoods and its soldiers gathered at the border in what appears to be preparation for a land invasion.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled to southern Gaza after the Israeli government ordered them to do so. But many are afraid to flee after the Israeli military bombed a convoy heading south, killing about 70 people, including children, on Friday.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees estimates that a million people have been displaced in Gaza in a single week.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, over 2,300 people, including almost 500 children, have been killed by Israel’s bombing, which began after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli citizens last week.
Health workers in northern Gaza warned today that thousands of people could die as packed hospitals began to run out of fuel and supplies.
Last week, the Israeli government put Gaza under a “complete siege,” cutting off electricity, food, fuel and water.
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of pediatrics at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, where seven newborns in the intensive care unit are on ventilators, told reporters today that the hospital would not abandon its patients despite the Israeli orders.
“We cannot evacuate: that would mean death for them and other patients under our care,” he said.
On Saturday, the WHO condemned Israel’s evacuation orders, warning that such a move would worsen the current humanitarian and public-health catastrophe in Gaza.
Those in intensive care or who rely on life support; patients undergoing hemodialysis; newborns in incubators; women with complications of pregnancy and others all face imminent deterioration of their condition or death if they are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical attention while being evacuated.
“Forcing more than 2,000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity… could be tantamount to a death sentence,” the WHO said in a statement.
Hospital directors and health workers are now facing an agonising choice: abandon critically ill patients amid a bombing campaign, put their own lives at risk while remaining on site to treat patients or endanger their patients’ lives while attempting to transport them to facilities that have no capacity to receive them.
Meanwhile, United States war ships have reportedly been deployed to the region, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to return to Israel on Monday after visiting Arab governments in an attempt to prevent a wider Middle East conflict.
(Courtesy: Morning Star Online, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.)
Dispatches from Gaza
Alain Alameddine, Maya Rosen, and Julia
[As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza enters its 11th day, communication between the besieged enclave and the outside world is quickly becoming impossible. “Given the scale of Israel’s assault—which U.N. experts have warned amounts to ‘collective punishment’ in violation of international law—journalists are facing unprecedented challenges in obtaining and sharing information,” The Washington Post reported on October 16th. These obstacles are reflected in the three dispatches from Gaza collected here. The first, which was written when Israel had just announced it would cut off water and electricity to the Strip, was sent to us via email on October 9th, accompanied by instructions for how to proceed “in case I am unable to reply because we are out of electricity, or because I am martyred.” One week later, written communication was no longer feasible, and the latter two dispatches came in as strings of WhatsApp voice messages on October 16th. The first dispatch comes from Mohammed Zraiy, the Gaza coordinator for the One Democratic State Initiative, a Palestinian group that advocates for a secular democratic state in Israel/Palestine. The latter two come from Khalil, a Gaza-based student, teacher, and activist for the Palestinian right of return, and Rania Hussein, a 51-year-old human rights worker in Gaza City.
As Khalil points out, this week’s brutal bombardment is greater in degree than past wars, but not different in kind: Gazans are crushingly accustomed to being “deprived of our rights, blamed for our own suffering, failed by the international community.” Amid such assaults, they are often asked to testify in the media to the horror they have lived through, but rarely asked about their interpretations of the events that affect their lives, or afforded generosity when they explain their perspectives. By bringing their varying political aspirations to readers in their own words, we hope to cultivate the conditions for a shared conversation about a just future. In advocating an end to occupation, colonialism, and genocide, Khalil says, he is calling for liberation “not only for the colonized people, but also for the oppressor, who is controlled by this ideology they wield to control us.” Zraiy, too, when asked what he would say to Israelis if given the chance, emphasized that by calling for a state where Palestinians and Jews could live together in freedom and equality, he is calling for Jews to support a course that “will free you—and us, its primary victims—from colonialism.” This shared commitment to freedom, he writes, is “the only way to peace.”
“A people under occupation has only three options: To resist, to resist, and to resist.”]
●●●
Alain Alameddine: How is the situation on the ground?
Mohammed Zraiy: There’s no electricity, no internet, no medicine, no water, no food supplies, indiscriminate bombing—houses, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, United Nations buildings, civilians, ambulances, paramedics and reporters have been targeted, entire neighborhoods have been flattened, thousands have been martyred, including 10 people in my immediate family. It’s a massacre—and it is but one of many stations in Israel’s ongoing Nakba against us. For 75 years, we have been fighting for our liberation against occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism.
AA: How does this make you feel?
MZ: It’s a constant weight; we all feel it on our chests. In Gaza, we are used to war. It’s been part of our lives since we were babies. As we grew into adulthood, stuck in refugee camps, without basic rights like work or freedom of movement or travel, everything felt gloomy. This military operation [by Hamas], however, felt different. Now we feel sadness, fear, and pride. Sadness for those who died in the massacres. Fear for those who will die here. And pride for having broken the hubris of an army that has long wielded the sword of genocide to tamper the spirit of resistance. A spirit of defiance burns in our hearts.
I come from Tal Jemmeh, which was razed to the ground [in 1948] and supplanted with the colony of Re’im. [On October 7th], I followed the news minute by minute, as the resistance battled the occupying army and freed my grandparents’ town for several hours. I watched as Palestinians ran into the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 shouting, “We got back home, we got back home!” I felt then that return is possible—but only through resistance. The spirit that has grown in refugee camps will blossom into freedom.
AA: You mentioned sadness and fear. Do you wish the Palestinian counterattack had never happened?
MZ: We are human—we don’t want to kill, we don’t want to die, we just want to live. Destiny so willed it that when deciding which land to colonize (to use Herzl’s frame), the early Zionist fathers chose Palestine instead of the other lands they were considering stealing (to use Ben-Gurion’s frame). For 75 years, agents of this settler colonial project have been working to ethnically cleanse us from our lands, and couldn’t care less even about international law that is biased in Zionism’s favor, let alone about human rights (or, as the colony’s government described us, “animal” rights). A people under occupation has only three options: To resist, to resist, and to resist. It’s the settler colonization of Palestine that I wish had never happened, not our reaction to it.
AA: So, you don’t blame Palestinians for the counterattack?
MZ: Do you know that most inhabitants of Gaza are not from Gaza? We come from the Palestinian lands occupied in 1948, like Al Lyd, Ramla, Yafa, or Birsabeh. We were deported to the Gaza Strip and supplanted by hundreds of thousands of settlers. Now we wait for the UN to help us with basic necessities, which only reach us when Israel “allows” them to go through. Israel denies us the right to go home because we’re not Jewish, while it welcomes Jews who are living peacefully elsewhere. These settlers live comfortably on our lands, while the natives are segregated, dispossessed, and killed. This is the reality imposed by Israel and its supporters, especially the United States and United Kingdom. Which side did you ask if we should blame? How could this even be a question?
AA: So what are you proposing?
MZ: We want a solution that guarantees that Palestinians in Gaza will not be bombed in the “safety” of our homes; Palestinians in the West Bank will not be deported to Jordan as part of the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing; Palestinians in Haifa will not be expelled for holding a Palestinian flag; Palestinians in the Naqab [the Negev] or Jerusalem will not fear eviction from their own houses. The settler colony is the cause of all this, so the solution is to dismantle it and establish its fundamental antithesis: an inclusive, secular, democratic Palestinian state that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or any other identity, and that protects its society from racist ideologies and movements like Zionism.
AA: What would your message to Israelis be?
MZ: Unlike what they’ve been told, we’ve never had a problem with Jews. Jews have been part of the fabric of our society way before the establishment of Israel. In fact, Jews escaping European persecution found refuge in Palestine. Gaza had a Jewish quarter. They were living peacefully, not with Arabs but as Arabs, right up until 1948. The establishment of Israel didn’t protect Jews; it caused the divide and danger. The solution is to roll back and dismantle the colony. My message to the colonizers who left their home countries to occupy our lands is simply to go back home. As for those who were born here, my message is: You are secondary victims of this colonial project. You are being used to occupy other people’s lands, and your Jewishness is being politicized for colonial means. Meditate carefully on the examples of South Africa, Angola, Algeria—they may not apply wholesale to the settler colonization of Palestine, but they hold lessons for you. Today you must make a choice: Either support this deadly colonial project, or side against it by supporting the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a democratic state that liberates Palestinians, as well as Jews, from Zionism. A state that will honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return and compensation and that will welcome and protect its Jews as citizens of Palestine. This transition from Zionism to democracy will not cost anyone’s life; it will cost you your colonial privileges, and will free you—and us, its primary victims—from colonialism.
AA: What is your message to other Palestinians, and to their allies globally?
MZ: Refuse any proposal that legitimizes Zionism’s basic foundations such as the politicization of identity and the partition of Palestine. That includes the two-state proposal and calls for a binational or confederate state. I encourage all those reading this to take part in our efforts to work for a transition from Zionism to a single democratic state, the only way to peace.
— October 9th
Maya Rosen: How are you doing? What are you seeing and experiencing around you?
Khalil: I’m physically fine, but I’ve lost a lot of family, friends, and neighbors. My surviving family members are disconnected from each other. Some of us are in the north of Gaza, others are in the south. My sister was injured last night in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a civilian building. People are being killed every minute, thousands of people are injured, tens of thousands are mourning. For many, there is no water, no electricity, no access to food, no access to medicine—a shortage of everything. It seems like things can’t get worse—but when we reach the bottom, it turns out there is another bottom. It’s an abyss.
We are experiencing genocide. Systematic, appalling. An apocalypse.
MR: Does this moment feel different from other Israeli attacks on Gaza?
K: This is the first war I’ve experienced where a vast majority of people are searching for water, bread, medicine. We are being treated like animals. But in other ways, it feels no different: In previous wars, we have lost beloved friends, neighbors, relatives. We’ve been deprived of our rights, blamed for our own suffering, failed by the international community.
MR: As a student of postcolonial studies, how has your study of other colonial contexts influenced your thinking about the future of Gaza?
K: It helps me to better see the tools at our disposal. We can say to the world: “You divested from apartheid South Africa. Why are you not boycotting Israel?” The context of other colonial experiences teaches us that liberation is possible—not only for the colonized people, but also for the oppressor, who is controlled by this ideology they wield to control us.
MR: Are there particular writers you find yourself turning to?
K: Writers writing under colonialism: Ghassan Kanafani, Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve Biko . . . They all contribute to my understanding of my own experience.
MR: What was October 7th like for you?
K: When I heard that the fence had been breached, I felt hope. It felt like a first step toward liberating Palestine. Contrary to Israeli propaganda and Western media narratives, it’s not impossible. When you have resistance, colonialism can be defeated.
MR: What do you fear?
K: I fear that I will die without achieving my dreams. I want to complete my PhD. I want to rebuild my family’s house, which has been destroyed. And I want—and this, for me, is the biggest dream—to meet my friends in person, to shake hands, to hug them. It sounds very simple, but colonialism disconnects a people from the rest of the world. I dream of a future where people are treated equally, where there is no occupation, no colonialism, no genocide, no ethnic cleansing.
MR: What is your message for the world?
K: Don’t leave us alone. We are making history now. What would you like your children to read about you? That you justified this oppression? Or that you stood on the side of the oppressed people?
Every single action counts. Don’t forget us. We are human beings who are losing our family members and our neighbors and our friends. If you believe in the equality and freedom of the Palestinian people, exert the maximum effort to ensure that your government stops supporting the colonial government. When every government boycotts this colonial system, it will be isolated. And that’s how it will end.
— October 16th
●●●
Julia: What is happening right now in Gaza?
Rania Hussein: Today is the 11th day of the siege, and it’s a very, very bloody day. There are a lot of attacks and bombings around us. A family only a few meters from me was hit inside their home. People are screaming in the streets. From my friends and relatives, I’ve heard of a lot of similar events in Deir al-Belah and Khan Younis. These are in the southern areas where it is supposedly safe. So I don’t know what we should do in order to not get killed. Where should we go? What are they planning to do to us? Are they intending to push us out?
Last night, my husband’s cousin was killed. There was shelling next to his house and he went to assist the injured. And then they shelled a second time, striking the people who gathered to help. In these times, I thank God for not having children. The only thing I can do right now is to tell the world what’s happening in Gaza.
J: I know you have had to move twice already within Gaza since this attack began. Tell me about that.
RH: We first left our house and moved to a relative’s house in Gaza City because they were bombing all around us. Every house around our area has since been razed to the ground. My house is probably destroyed, but I cannot go to check because it’s too dangerous. And then in the early hours of Friday morning, we started to hear about the Israeli forces telling people to move out of Gaza City to go south. That is where we are now—in a house in southern Gaza with nearly 30 relatives.
I didn’t know if leaving was the right decision. I watched other people leave and it looked like we were reliving the Nakba: the same scenes, the same crowds walking and not knowing where to go. We were already refugees. We fled from Isdud [Ashdod] in 1948. My father-in-law, who is an elderly man, was about 14 when that happened. He still remembers it, he still lives it. And now he is re living it. And he believes that he’s not going to survive it. He says he prefers to die than to live this again.
J: What is the solution you hope to see to this long cycle of displacement?
RH: First, we need a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and to secure international protection for the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. Then, we need a political solution that assures self-determination—an independent state that assures the political and national rights of the Palestinian people.
J: At this point, what are the conditions in Gaza in terms of access to food, water, and electricity?
RH: The siege and the aggression by the Israeli occupying forces has blocked food from entering Gaza. It has also made it impossible for farmers to collect the crops from their fields, which were always in dangerous areas, and which are now completely restricted. And of course, the northern part of Gaza is now cut off as a source of food. The shops are still open, but I don’t know for how long. Plus, the prices are almost four times higher than usual. Even if people can find what they need, they aren’t able to afford it. Soon there will be no food left in the markets.
Also, because of the decision by the Israeli government to cut fuel to Gaza, there is no power at all, which then affects the water [which usually has to be pumped into tanks with electric motors]. We are already struggling to get water for drinking or for daily use. This particularly affects the ability to pump sewage, which could turn into an environmental crisis very soon.
J: Will you cross into Egypt if you’re given the chance?
RH: If we cross, it will only be out of necessity—a temporary solution to preserve our lives. It won’t be forever. We refuse this. The plan is going to be to return.
— October 16th
(Alain Alameddine is the Lebanon coordinator for the One Democratic State Initiative. Maya Rosen is a graduate student studying history at the Hebrew University. She lives in Jerusalem and is active in anti-occupation work. Julia, who is using a pseudonym, works for an international human rights organization.
Mohammed Zraiy is the Gaza coordinator for the One Democratic State Initiative, a Palestinian group that advocates for a secular democratic state in Israel/Palestine. Khalil is a Gaza-based student, teacher, and activist for the Palestinian right of return. Rania Hussein is a 51-year-old human rights worker in Gaza City. Courtesy: Jewish Currents. Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture on the Jewish left and the left more broadly. It was founded in 1946.)
