A year of pain and rage
I sit, today, with the words of Dr. Shahd Abusalama: “The smallest coffins are the heaviest." She recently described this as a common saying in Gaza, now. It has been a year of not knowing what to say. A year of going hoarse screaming to stop the genocide, cut off Israel, end the supply of money and bombs that we know will be dropped on schools, hospitals, and tents. Instead, the flow has gone virtually uninterrupted, a steady stream of weapons of death that have now overflowed the painfully narrow confines of Gaza, and even the confines of Palestine. U.S. bombs are being rained down on Lebanon as we speak, with over 2,000 people killed in a matter of weeks and a staggering one million displaced. Over 50 Paramedics in Lebanon now join the swelling ranks of the dead, six hospitals in the country have been damaged by the IDF, and further escalation in the region appears all but inevitable.
And Gaza, Gaza is suffering more than ever. Israel is now ordering the evacuation of North Gaza, continuing the death marches and extermination that have characterized this past year of atrocities. To search for consolidation in a moment such as this, after a year of genocide whose horror should resonate with particular strength for each of us who knows how our government participates in these massacres, can easily cross from the callous into the depraved. What we should seek is not to be assuaged, but clarity that will lead to action sufficient to halt this genocide. Over the past year I have ruminated on the bleak nature of absorbing horror after horror through our various screens, and our social media culture can lead us to think that the worst crimes of humanity just demand our attention, rather than our collective and decisive action — which is what this moment in fact demands.
There is the reality that without understanding, there will be no action. And an understanding of Israel, of its apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, has spread far and wide over the past year in a way that seemed unfathomable not long ago. Public opinion on Israel, U.S. funding for the IDF, and the Palestinian resistance has shifted dramatically in an incredibly short time span. This is due primarily to the ceaseless advocacy of Palestinians, the brave and incomprehensibly heroic work of journalists in Gaza, and solidarity efforts around the globe.
Just as masses of people across the world have come to understand the reality of the Israeli regime, the ruling class in the West has chosen to double down on their support for this colonial outpost, even as it spreads death and destruction in an increasingly wide radius. Universities have declared “Zionist” a protected class, attempting to shield supporters of Israel's genocide from critique. The United States government has defunded UNRWA, effectively participating in the starvation of over two million Palestinians. Our government has also done nothing to dissuade Israel from bombing and invading Lebanon, and there are reports of the U.S. encouraging regime change in the country. That, combined with the continued sending of arms and dollars makes the U.S. wholly complicit in Israel’s violence. At the same time, Congressional investigations and legislation have consistently targeted anti-Zionist protesters, spreading the idea that protesting genocide is terrorism, while Israel spreads terror in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond.
Even when Israel targets U.S. citizens, in Palestine and now Lebanon, our government issues no consequences to the Netanyahu regime. When the IDF kills Americans, nothing. When the IDF bombs Lebanon, U.S. citizens are not evacuated or assisted in leaving as they are when Israel is threatened. As Lina Mounzer writes, “Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.” Even when Palestinians and Arab Americans are attacked here on U.S. soil, they are sidelined, ignored, dismissed. This of course permits more Islamophobic and hate-fueled violence. A six-year-old Palestinian child has been killed in America, Palestinian students shot at, and countless hateful crimes perpetrated. But as often as not, they are quickly passed over.
That unfortunately brings us to the role of the media this past year. While heroic journalists in Gaza have risked their lives day after day, and while well over 100 have been murdered trying to share the truth of Israel’s genocide, capitalist media has adamantly refused to show the truth consistently. The framing from many corporate media outlets has intentionally omitted the perpetrator (Israel), even when discussing the heinous murders of civilians, and some of these outlets have continued to spread outright lies one year into a genocide.
On social media countless people attempt to fight media bias and spread the truth, but these platforms often censor anti-Zionist content while allowing lies to spread like wildfire. There is at least one systemic and uplifting response that I want to highlight; Media Against Apartheid is a coalition of a dozen or so indie media outlets that have deliberately been working together to spread accurate and deep-diving journalism about Palestine, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza specifically. This is the type of organizing work, the type of power-building and networking that can lend us a glimmer of genuine hope in the darkness of this past year.
I am not particularly inclined to bask in glimmers of hope to the exclusion of the surrounding darkness, but we do need to examine any and all flickers of light, feed them, and help them grow. Media Against Apartheid is so compelling because journalists saw the lies, the coverups, the fundamentally twisted nature of corporate media more clearly than ever in this moment, and chose to respond by building something greater than the sum of its parts. They built a coalition where each member can amplify and strengthen the others; that coalition has now grown into the nascent Media Movement Alliance, a more formalized and long-term institution of outlets determined to use their platforms to promote and further the cause of justice.
This is a model for others of us to follow. Multiple unions took a similar approach when they formed the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, and I know that organizations in fields from sociology to librarians to artists have launched parallel efforts. We need more, of that there is no doubt. We need unions and workers of all stripes to shut down the war machine. We need to replicate the brave work of Palestine Action in the UK, which has disrupted multiple Israeli weapons factories, halted production, and shows no signs of slowing down. But every coming together of people to oppose the Israeli apartheid regime and the genocidal IDF war machine builds liberatory power that works to free us just as it works to Free Palestine.
Namely, the ruling class works ceaselessly to oppress us, and the military-industrial complex is one of its most powerful industries. The U.S. spends nearly $1 trillion on various facets of the war machine. As Stephen Semler details, spending on the military has reached $954 billion this year. A massive portion of that money is effectively siphoned from the working class to the ruling class via the military-industrial complex. That money also fuels the imperial machine that oppresses and kills people around the globe, protecting a world order where a few rule and the rest are exploited. Every step taken to end that system is a step towards freeing all of us.
Today, and tomorrow, and for far too long you’re going to hear rhetoric about terrorism that is fundamentally out of context. The simple truth is that occupation and oppression breeds resistance. Under international law, the people of occupied Palestine have the right to resist. But, more importantly, human beings seek freedom and will never be content or complacent while kept in a cage, even if the cage is 139 square miles, as is Gaza. People will yearn and fight for freedom, will reject an oppressor controlling what comes in and out, will reject being cut off from the world. So while Israel tries to dismiss the entirety of Gaza, and now the entirety of Lebanon, as Hamas and Hezbollah, we must continue to push back. The purpose of over-applying these labels is to write off whole peoples, to legitimize bombing schools, hospitals, and more.
We must reject the Israeli narrative, and we must build transformative power. In unions, in media, in political organizations that fight to overturn the war-mongering status quo. This past year has been a long, unbearable road. But we must remember that our struggles here are a fraction, a fraction of a fraction of what people in Palestine and Lebanon are experiencing. We must work and sacrifice to oppose a world where the mass murder of civilians is rendered normal. That means sands in the gears of the war machine, recruiting thousands and millions of people to build new levels of people power, strengthening every institution that actually fights for the working class, creative actions, bold interventions, and organizing, always organizing to strengthen the anti-war and anti-genocide and anti-apartheid movement, and getting more militant.
And, in the place of these systems of death, oppression, and exploitation we must create a world where life is sacred, where our children’s children never know bombs raining down on babies and families and homes. In the short term that takes mass organizing, massive disruption of the arteries that produce and carry weapons of death across the world. In the long term it will take the abolition of systems of imperialism and capitalism, and the creation of new ways of doing economics and politics. In short, we must fight to free Palestine, and we must know that in working to free Palestine we move one step closer to freeing us all.
Some links:
Movement Media Alliance: https://movement-media.org/
Labor for Palestine: https://laborforpalestine.net/
Palestine Action: https://palestineaction.org/
Palestinian Youth Movement: https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/
Dissenters (young people organizing against the war machine):
Thank you so much for providing links to these brilliant organizations.
Thank you for this.