It has now been almost a month since I left Palestine, I traveled to Egypt and got lost in Cairo for a few days before heading for Libya to have the unique experience of, at the age of twenty, meeting my family for the first time. Amidst the chaos that resulted from an unannounced visit from the unknown American cousin my mind was submerged in the inevitable realities of my own identity, of the intricacy of every one of my cousins’ lives, of the current state of the Great Libyan Arab Socialist Jamahiriya and of finally reaching that place that I had dreamed of visiting ever since I knew it existed. And then the war on Gaza began. I fully realized that my position in the world could not possibly affect the offensive that was launched on December 26th, and yet the powerlessness commanded my thoughts, ripped through my consciousness and left me wishing only that I was back in Hebron, back organizing, back standing in solidarity with Um’Kamel Al-Kurd who is now widowed and living in a protest camp, back demonstrating against the beginnings of another Holocaust committed by the Israeli occupation forces.
What is so vitally important to understand about this conflict is that despite what the news will tell you, what is occurring in Gaza is not “fighting”, it is a massacre. The ceasefire that Hamas allegedly broke never truly existed, because violence in all definitions encompasses all manner of sins, and the forced starvation of 1.4 million people, the destruction of industry, denial of medical treatment and the occasional execution of fishermen and farmers by warships and border police in the name of security would most commonly be included. It was an essential element of the ceasefire that Israel opened the borders to Gaza that it controls, an event that was rare. The Palestinians of Gaza, living in decades old refugee camps, in an area that is roughly 87 sq miles, were still held hostage in their own homes, without electricity or water, realizing that no gears of democracy, no peace talks, would save them in the near future. It is the absent understanding of this situation that so effectively clouds our collective views on the issue, all we see is the result, of the quassam rockets fired, and we accept that these people really are terrorists, that their anger comes from some illegitimate desire to destroy Israel, instead of a rightfully angry people making an attempt to free themselves. Of course I disagree with the attack of any civilian, though I am left wondering when exactly in our history we decided that those who are oppressed and desperate should sit silently and wait for the world to sort their situation out, when the phrase revolutionary was wiped from our vocabulary and unilaterally replaced with terrorist, when the killing of civilians only became alright when it is carried out by an F-16 that we have produced. The Western world has forgotten that every one of our nations was based on a violent struggle against an occupying force. Even if my logic offends you, what cannot be denied are the facts about Hamas, that no matter how extreme their language may be, they are the democratically elected government of the Gaza Strip, that they were funded and supported by the Israeli government not so long ago when the group they were focusing on demonizing was the PLO and Yassar Arafat, that they also have a duty to defend their people. After accepting all of these realities on the situation what is left to understand is that in 17 days the Israeli government has killed more than 900 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians, hundreds of whom were children, and injured over 4000, and that even when the killing is over the Gaza ghetto is now a place almost beyond repair, a massive graveyard of civilization, so you can either admit that you value some human life over others and you yourself are a racist zealot or you can start demanding that our American made F-16s and our American made proxy stop the mass murder of a people they have already cleansed and oppressed for more than 60 years.
Since my return to our beloved land of the free my helplessness has become anger, disbelief and an overwhelming resolve that going to Palestine is not something that I did, not something that I will ever cleanly sum up with any finality, because what I witnessed was not just any humanitarian crisis, it was a first hand encounter with my own country’s war machine, with the reality of an occupation that we as Americans have everything to do with. I became acquainted with a movement, a people and a whole world of rejection and disobedience that, no matter how hard I try to phrase it in some other less cliché way, has changed me.