A year ago today, the eyes of the world were drawn to where it seldom wants to look. In occupied Palestine, a group of Hamas militants opened fire in an attempt to break through the Israeli blockade of the besieged enclave of Gaza. Gaza is a part of Palestinian territory where millions of its people have been entrapped and caged in by Israel under the most extreme conditions of colonial military occupation with the whole world watching mutely and normalizing relations with Israel while paying lip service to the ‘Palestine cause’.
Unending brutalities, end of civilization
Israel has presented itself as a rogue state on the world stage, no less deserving of the tag of “terrorist” that it throws around (with lethal consequences), backed up as it is by the U.S. Empire in its litany of crimes. There is no repugnance against humanity that Israel has not indulged in. Through its actions and rhetoric, it has completely undone the ad nauseum refrain that it has a “right to exist”.
Apartheid and colonialism have no right to exist. Armed resistance should never have to exist.
What started as ‘defending itself’ or ‘saving hostages’ in Gaza has now expanded to Lebanon on the pretext of Hezbollah and extreme provocations against Iran.
In the Zionist Israeli mind, the Arab is expendable and any harm to their lives and bodies is celebrated with extreme contempt for their humanity. Before being released for shooting a teenage Palestinian girl in the face, an Israeli soldier said that even if she were three and not thirteen years old, he would still have shot her. Israel views Arabs and Palestinians as ‘human beasts’ and there have been enough spectacles of Palestinian suffering to open an entire chasm of philosophical and poetic despair at the human condition.
Thousands of children live with multiple amputations. Children starved, dehydrated, shot, burned, beheaded, crushed… every form of disrespect that can be meted out to the human body has already been perpetrated with extreme violence on these innocent souls.
Where the civilized rules of war would balk at professional soldiers beheading each other, we have had scores of Palestinian children, including infants and toddlers, beheaded by bombs or otherwise dismembered. What is happening to them is also happening to all of us. There is no institutional protection against this playing out with other peoples in the world save for military deterrence. The impunity is in the open for all to see. Our blood-soaked footsteps walk back on a hundred years of progress in international relations. We have all been reduced to the status of the most vulnerable among us. As someone said on social media, it is all a matter of watching one disaster and massacre unfold after the other through our screens, getting closer and closer until it happens to you.
The U.S.-led group of countries has shown that the ‘rules-based order’ means ‘our rules, our orders’. It has vetoed resolutions on ceasefire and continues to arm and fund Israel, having spent $17.9 billion on arming Israel since the October 7th resistance began. This comes as its own people are hit with the two hurricanes Helene and Milton, leaving many stranded and homeless.
There have been so many reported cases of violence, harassment, loss of livelihoods, and censorship in American campuses and streets aimed at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech. The overwhelming majority of decent people of the world, including the citizens of these countries, have come out to voice their dissent. We have found common ground as human beings in opposing what we are witnessing.
Most of the world has expressed its opposition to Israeli actions in the UNGA. International institutions like the ICJ and the UN, civil society groups, medical and aid organizations, and all other sources of credible opinion have long since lambasted Israeli inhumanities, but it has all been ineffective in stopping it, backed as it is by the U.S. This portends a dangerously immediate danger to all peoples of the world. This is what the world looks like a mere seventy years after the horrors of World War 2 with death camps and killing machines. We are back to facing an ever-escalating ‘regional’ conflict being provoked by Israel in its sickly, delusional pursuit of Arab lands and Arab destruction.
Meanwhile, it is shameful that my country India is a full-throated supporter and junior partner of Israel even as it continues its diplomatic lip-service to Palestinian statehood. There are several reasons behind this, among which are New Delhi’s militarism and settler-colonialist rhetoric on Kashmir and the overlaps between Zionism and the ruling Hindutva ideology based on Islamophobia and Muslim hate. However, any more on the parallels between Hindutva and Zionism’s relationship needs its own article.
Resistance can never be condemned!
‘But do you condemn Hamas?’ was overused in Zionist hasbara (propaganda) to the point that it became a meme, bitter in its satire against the cynical spirit in which every Israeli atrocity was put down to ‘release the hostages’ or ‘condemn Hamas’. Every use of the word “terrorist” punched another hole in the fig leaf until it was completely obliterated like the homes of Gaza, revealing it as a slur used for rebellious populations.
The imperialist system does not want to allow any exemptions to its guilt. It wants everyone to bear it. Anyone who dissents or tries to have no part in it will not be tolerated. By continuing to act as though it is not happening, we are only making ourselves guilty of what is being done to the bravest but most defenceless people in the world.
Resistance to occupation is an internationally recognized right. The Palestinians have resisted with every non-violent means available with patience, dignity, and courage seen nowhere else in the world. Israel is the cause of this violence. Its apartheid, racism, land theft, humiliations, and the depraved brutalities of its entire society are to be condemned. The shameful complicity of the whole world is to be condemned. Righteous resistance can never be condemned or defeated. The intifada is everywhere. Inquilab zindabad! May the enemies of humanity be destroyed forever.
From river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
