“We Are the Only Free People in the World”

On hopelessness.

Beit Lahia, a city in Gaza’s north, in November 2023.

For the past two months now, I feel like I have oscillated between different levels of insanity.

My feeling is by no means unique. In fact, it is how widespread and common this feeling is that makes it so enraging and fruitless. Talking to others, in many instances, has been an exercise in desperately finding good news among the scraps, commiserating about how crazy everyone else has seemingly become, and trying to avoid spiraling into discussing horrors that defy description in the English language. Though in truth, there are not many others that could either.

As this ruination has gone on, the ways in which I have been able to understand and process these events have slipped further and further from where I was cemented before. Describing this as a war between Israel and Hamas is inaccurate. Besides military strikes not just hitting forces fighting with Hamas in Gaza but Fatah in the West Bank as well, forces diametrically opposed to each other, the proportion of civilian-to-combatant casualties, and the level of destruction visited upon civilian infrastructure, makes this not a war against Hamas or even a war against Palestinian administrations, but a war against Palestine itself.

Describing this as a war fought by Israel feels inaccurate as well, or at least insufficient. The unbridled support given by President Biden and his administration, whose pressure to ease civilian deaths extends to the briefest of words, who is willing to go so far as to go around Congress to get the IDF the weapons it needs, is its primary enabler, and its partner in this war.

Describing this as a war alone feels like at best misleading, at worst an obfuscation. The phrase “attempted genocide” quickly entered and left my lips as soon as it had come, now firmly replaced by simply “genocide”. The genocide of the Yazidis by the forces of the Islamic State numbered the dead at 5,000. In Srebrenica alone, over 8,000 Bosniaks were killed by the forces of Republika Srpska, forces who were supported and defended by the State of Israel, and who the Mossad trained.

As of the time of this writing, over 18,000 Gazans have met their death at the hands of Israeli bullets, fire, and shrapnel. It is believed thousands more remain uncounted, either having gone missing in the chaos, or buried under the rubble, perhaps never to be found. Even by Israel’s own estimates, only 1,000-2,000 Hamas fighters have been killed out of those untold scores.

For decades, the displacement and the killings of 1948, the thousands of deaths that enabled the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian land, has been called the Nakba, the catastrophe. In 1967, the failure of the Arab states to achieve victory against Israel, instead leading toward such immense failure that the Sinai peninsula would be occupied for 15 years and the West Bank and Gaza until this moment, would be called the Naksa, the setback. It is believed 15,000 Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 were displaced during the Nakba, amidst the destruction of villages whose ruins still remain, and massacres whose perpetrators still live. After the Six-Day War, more than 400,000 more Palestinians would be displaced from their homes.

As of December, 1,900,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. 3,000 more Palestinians have been killed than during the Nakba, whose wounds still reverberate almost a century later. A word to describe this in the Arabic language fails to manifest.

There may be no singular word to describe any of what has happened, ever. Those academics and poets to come who seek to find one will have to trudge through the ashes in search. Since October, I and many others have been inundated with photograph after photograph, video after video, writing after writing, detailing horrors beyond my comprehension, even to those who have observed the wars that have struck Gaza in the past, even to those who have lived through them.

There is an earth-shattering revelation that you inevitably come to eventually. You are not seeing the same images over and over again, amplifying isolated cases on the ground into something that is worse than it is. Each image is its own individual terror.

A girl who has lost her limbs, lamenting that she no longer has a future. A 4-year-old whose leg had to be amputated without anesthesia, crying that they are no longer like the others. A boy carries the dead body of another child through the flooded ruins of a destroyed refugee camp. A neighborhood, eviscerated by bulldozers and tank fire until it resembles the surface of Mars. Corpses found lying on the road from the north to the south, murdered by the Israeli military, left to decompose until an entire universe became nothing more than slime.

Amidst the onslaught, singular and heinous acts of murder and destruction by the IDF still manage to cut through the arrows that have covered the heart, though they still are too countless to detail, and sooner still do they feel lost to history. An airstrike on a refugee camp. A besieging of a hospital. The demolition of a parliament. These phrases, in a pre-2023 world, would have been the defining moments of any conflict. In Israel’s waves of annihilation, they have almost become like days of the week, unceasing.

There is no more accursed reminder of this unending death than the murder of the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. I was blessed to know Refaat, though only for a short time. I was not granted the honor that many others had of knowing Refaat in better times, before this terror began. The humor that he kept with him, his indomitable spirit, and his sincerity, were like anchors in the Earth that held myself and many others to sanity. When he was unable to communicate for days, I worried. When I saw that he was still alive during the ceasefire, I was elated. Only a few days before his death, he had written on Instagram that he still believed victory was ahead.

His murder, and the murder of his family members in his sister’s apartment in Gaza, is believed to have been a deliberately targeted one. Alareer has been a thorn in the side of many pro-Israel pundits, having drawn the ire of figures of Bari Weiss, whose organization The Free Press had had its content amplified by the Israeli government in the past. Like many other scholars, doctors, scientists, and journalists who have been killed in this war, Israel’s campaign of death is a campaign of destroying Palestine’s culture and achievements, just as much as it is a destruction of its cities and its land. Alareer, as a celebrated writer, would obviously be on Israel’s hitlist.

Alareer had to suffer and receive word that many of his students, beloved and with great futures ahead of them, were killed in Israeli strikes. Colleagues of his at the Islamic University of Gaza also would be killed during his time on this Earth. The entire university itself would be destroyed by airstrikes, along with almost every other academic institution in the Gaza Strip. And then they eventually came for him.

In a just world, Alareer would have died a natural death, in old age, in peace. He would have been given a national funeral in the Palestinian capital. Palestinian soldiers would march alongside his casket. A sovereign Palestinian president would have read his eulogy. His dignity would be a given, not fought for.

Instead, his body remains under the rubble, unable to be retrieved because there is no more machinery to do so. The BBC derides him in the announcement of his death as being a “controversial” writer. Supporters of Israel imply he deserved to be killed because of jokes he wrote about IDF propaganda. His own alma mater refuses to publicly acknowledge his death, as they have for other alumni. He is not even granted the dignity to rest in a grave after he was murdered.

And yet what are the discussions that are being had now in the pages of the Western press? In the halls of American academia? In the legislatures?

I spent much of October back in the United States, and the distance I felt from Beirut and from Palestine drove me almost to madness. I felt as though I was living in an alternate reality, one entirely disconnected from what I was seeing every day, filtered through television and computer screens. Linguistic passive voice tricks by journalists to avoid attributing intent to the Israeli killings of Palestinians became immediately recognizable and instantly maddening. I watched in real-time the argument shift under my feet from “Israel would never target hospitals” to “Israel is targeting this one hospital because it is a Hamas HQ” to Israel targeting every hospital militarily and without even an attempt at justification. Nazism itself was unmoored from its once firmly-planted position as the worst thing to ever befall modern humanity, as opinion writers tore it out of the earth like diseased teeth being ripped out of their gums, nerves and all.

If you read certain Western newspapers or watched certain Western channels, you’d perhaps come to the conclusion that somehow, the Nazis weren’t all bad, at least not anymore. Hamas is in fact now worse than the Nazis, worse than ISIS, perhaps both combined. Historical revisionism and Holocaust denial were now in vogue, if only to be applied to Palestinian factions. The Nazi apologia necessary to whitewash Ukrainian groups like the Azov Battalion had given Western writers all the fodder they needed to grant even the SS some degree of humanity, at least when compared to the fiendish Qassam Brigades. German figures were as well more than happy to use this to offload their national guilt onto another nation, one that had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Through all of this, we are still led to believe that this is a battle to take down terrorists, to corner the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and of course, to free the hostages. Questioning this narrative, even as the death toll nears 20,000, is still taboo, almost akin to throwing out a wild and audacious conspiracy theory. Israel’s intents must never be questioned. Their status as the only democracy in the region, steadfast. Their nobility in warfare? Unmatched. It feels as though nothing can shift this narrative from the editorial teams of Western newspapers and television channels, not the news of entire families being wiped off the face of the Earth from airstrikes, not videos of IDF soldiers destroying shops filled with children’s toys or stealing lingerie from women’s bedrooms.

Coming back to Beirut has eased this disconnect from reality, but it has brought with it new distraught feelings. I live 175 miles from Gaza City. Palestinian refugee camps lie only 2 miles away. Israel has been hitting towns and villages on the border almost every day since the attacks on October 7th, trading fire with Hezbollah as well as Hamas’ forces within Lebanon. Israeli officials have been threatening Beirut for weeks now, threatening to turn it into another Gaza if Hezbollah does not acquiesce and allow Israel’s invasion of the Strip to continue unabated. The murderous rampage going on in Palestine is immediate and present. I cannot feel happy when it rains in Beirut anymore; it floods in Gaza.