The luxury of dialogue under the burden of the crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing

Historians will need many years, perhaps longer than it takes for the Palestinians to rebuild the Strip, to document the effects of the war on the lives of the people who survived the ongoing, bottomless genocide. The years of siege that preceded it gave birth to a generation of creative people in literature and technology in an attempt to nourish the soul and mind. Perhaps so that they would be able to leap over the walls of that siege that enveloped the details of people’s lives, to wider spaces that are no less competent than their pioneers.

In a few days, the war of extermination against the people of Gaza will enter its fifteenth month. The number of martyrs has exceeded forty-four thousand, four hundred and forty-two martyrs so far. The death toll continues and is counted by the minute. With them are no less than ten thousand missing, in addition to more than one hundred and five thousand wounded officially registered with the Ministry of Health, not to mention the thousands who may not have been able to reach the hospitals, most of which have been destroyed or the roads to them have been cut off.

All of these are not just numbers, but rather, all of them were filled with hope and passion for a life like the rest of the people in this world that has become an open village in which those deprived of a decent life aspire to live like their peers on this planet.

Yes, perhaps what we should see in this scene full of gloom and cruelty, and full of contradictions of the broader conflict between those who supply war criminals with weapons and provide protection to escape punishment, and those who fill the streets of the world’s capitals and cities, demanding an immediate end to this crime and the punishment of its perpetrators and those who support them. In addition, from the heart of the tragedy, we must redefine the meaning of heroism. Yes, we should see not only this heartbreaking tragedy, but also the human heroism that accompanies it, embodied by a mother who embraced the rest of her children to protect them in the apples of her eyes, after the entire universe failed to protect those she lost, and perhaps remained under the rubble of Jabalia or Beit Lahia camp, as embodied by a young man who threw away all his university degrees, devoting himself to cooking whatever food was available for the people of the neighborhood to which he was displaced. And also a journalist who did not care about the plan to destroy the evidence of the crime, to capture with his tearful eyes and the lens of his camera what documented it even if he paid the price for it with his life, as embodied by a doctor like Hussam Abu Safia, and hundreds of doctors and medical staff, as Hussam buried his own son on the wall of Kamal Adwan Hospital, refusing to abandon his humanitarian message to his patients and the wounded who were able to reach the remains of the hospital despite the death that the tanks of crime and killing and its artillery pursued them with, and before him the humane doctor Adnan Al-Barsh, the most famous surgeon in Gaza, who insisted on moving between its hospitals to save the lives of those he could despite the limited resources, then fell as a martyr due to the brutal torture in the occupation prisons, punished with his life for saving the lives of the innocent. Or the story of a mother and wife who had been blessed with two children after a fertilization transplant, when she went to look for a piece of bread for them and her husband, and returned to find their souls had ascended to the sky as a result of the bombing of an American-made aircraft. These are the real heroes, and with them are those whose creative spirit is unleashed by pain, as embodied today by the young novelist Yasser Al-Ghoul and dozens like him, or who document social phenomena in the shadow of war and the accompanying bumps that require treatment without waiting, as they are no less necessary than the epic steadfastness of the fighters, as is done, for example, by Dr. Talal Abu Rkaba, who was in Tunisia when the war began, and insisted on returning to the Strip, but was unable to reach his home, or to his mother who lost her leg in the northern Strip, because she was unable to reach a hospital that would provide her with treatment and care. Yes, these are the real heroes of civil society leaders like Amjad Shawa, Issa Saba, Fadi Sheikh Yousef, and thousands of other young men and women who accepted the challenge as competent leaders, and did not waste their time watching the pain and painful bumps, but rather engaged in alleviating that pain and hunger, and doing everything they could to generate hope... the real weapon and the target first and last of the apartheid state and ethnic cleansing, and unfortunately also of everyone who lets people down with his factionalism that has no concern other than blaming the victim, or floating the real criminal.

Such stories and thousands of others will be documented by Palestinian literature and novels to bear witness to a generation that did not wait for the claws of a new catastrophe to close, but rather decided to resist it with its nails and teeth, to prevent it, and to create with the people the story of a people who cannot be defeated. I think that these people no longer care much about the luxury of dialogues and the twisting of language, in a marathon that has extended for more than seventeen years, and its price has become blood and destruction in light of this ongoing genocide.

Perhaps what should be said is that "the people of Gaza, and with them all the people of Palestine, will not repeat the saying, 'You ate on the day the white bull was eaten.'" Gaza will remain the lever of Palestinian nationalism and the heart of its national movement, bequeathing the lessons of its living experience, that unity is the path to progress and salvation from injustice and occupation, and it will not be misled by fabricated committees, nor by any attempts to exploit its pain for selfish purposes, for Gaza, drowning in its pain, will not drown in the sea or in the desert maze.