I no longer have the words.
Nor the poetry.
It all dissolves into the void of human absurdity.
This is what the final stage of a genocide looks like.
The one we once studied,
in our schoolbooks,
…that we have, it seems, already forgotten.
Living memory,
and those who passed it on, our teachers,
had helped us understand,
to hold, for always,
the meaning behind every commemorative stone,
every monument,
every street name,
every engraved tribute to the dead,
to those who endured the brown plague.
We must understand that the final phase of genocide transcends time,
and slips through the hierarchies of numbers imposed upon memory.
It may last long still,
until Palestine must count its dead,
with the help of historians and journalists from across the world, those who were denied entry.
It could take decades of work, of voices and records,
as it did after the Shoah, before we reach a figure no one can deny or twist. A number that will confirm what we already know today.
Had Charles de Gaulle and the resistance fighters of yesterday required proof in the form of statistics to believe in the horror of Nazism before acting, we would have been counted among the vanquished, and France’s honor could never have been salvaged though it had already been deeply stained.
France now walks against the current of its own history. Because beyond imperialism, colonisation, war and betrayal…
We also achieved greatness,
Of summoning something luminous from the dark. And that light always came from ordinary people who decided to federate themselves to change the course of History.
The French Resistance of birth or of heart.
Some were not French by name,
but loved France so dearly
they didn’t hesitate to fight beside her people,
to fall beside them,
as eternal brothers and sisters.
To the millions of lives lost to the madness of a few…
It is unforgivable that we now stand by
while an unspeakable cruelty unfolds in Palestine.
France could have stood tall.
It could have chosen rightly.
Instead, it remained silent,
or worse, complicit,
as history repeated itself,
this time at the hands of some who once bore its scars.
Though we still have some levers to press,
it is already too late.
The wound is too deep.
It will follow every Palestinian to the end of their days, etched in their bodies and in their blood.
And this breaks my heart forever.
They defiled the memory of those who endured the atrocity of the Shoah as well as those who gave their lives, so that this would never happen again.
And while in Tel Aviv they march and dance,
bathed in summer ease and opulence,
they celebrate on the graves of those they kill with jubilation and no one will forget.
Hope lives in the few Israelis who still resist.
And I hope that few grows.
What meaning does our existence hold
if we let this happen ?
What we are allowing to unfold in Palestine
is the opening of Pandora’s box.
And what escapes from it
will shape what comes next.
If we do nothing,
our future will grow darker still.
25/07/25
Younis M.