“Mohammed Salama, Mariam Abou Daqa, Moaz Abou Taha and Hossam Al-Masri.
I do not know how to write the eulogy of each of them, we are exhausted by obituaries and condolences. We can only say: We belong to God, and to Him we shall return.” Wadih Abou Al-Saoud
I write in homage to all those journalists, among them Anas Al-Sharif, who chose to remain in Gaza when he could have left with his family, to continue covering and unveiling those terrifying images whose price is to be hunted down so that the terror of genocide may merge into the silence of oblivion.
In homage to all those artists, poets, writers, thinkers, and workers who were assassinated in the bombing of Café El-Baqa, the last bastion where one could still find internet access and resist in their own way.
They all played a key role in the awakening of global awareness. We moved from the apprehension of merely evoking the premeditated genocide of Israel (cf. their speeches) and its consequences on our circles, our profession, to assuming our position no matter the cost, and turning shame back upon those who look away and justify this ignominy.
Our gaze has changed, it is true, and still it is not enough. But we now know that the complicity that allowed these crimes is part of a system, sophisticated, lucrative, and far more vast than we might think. Their sacrifice gives us a fragment of an answer, though we wish it had not come at the expense of the very existence of an entire people.
A punishment worse than death,
Unimaginable cruelty,
Indignity triumphant,
Greed that begets death,
Wanting more, always more,
Even if it means selling one’s soul to the devil,
Though it would seem that some men have surpassed even his legendary monstrosity,
To hound a people,
To starve them,
To rob them of hope,
To make them feel abandoned by the world,
To drive them to surrender to oblivion and despair.
To survive in humiliation,
Where they are forced to film their most intimate moments, such as the death of a loved one, so that we, in the West, may or may not choose to believe them, to let ourselves be indignant, to awaken…
And then, a little girl, in the midst of desolation, innocent, a survivor, only seeking water, vanished forever.
Suddenly disintegrated by a bombing, one that seems never to have culprits.
…This is the face of impunity.
I wonder what the killer felt at that moment. Do they exult when they kill?
Will they be haunted by nightmares until the end of their miserable lives? In 20, 30, or 40 years, will they be hunted wherever they go, like the Nazi hunters who devoted their existence to finding them and piecing history back together so that justice might prevail ? To reassemble the forgotten fragments of a memory stolen from the world…
I wonder how a parent, a child, a friend, or a lover manages to survive the systematic and premeditated death of all the people they so deeply loved, knew, and with whom they shared so many memories…
Even the places that embodied them are erased, the landscapes disfigured, the trees uprooted, the animals that ennobled those fleeting moments also wiped out ; the memory of a land rich with several millennia of history, that witnessed the birth of myths, is being deleted, as one would erase an inconvenient file on a computer.
And yet, how unbearable it is for us, in our havens of peace, to see the horrors unfolding across the world, as if they were falling upon us from the sky.
Our responsibility is great, and I fear we shall suffer the consequences later.
It is the continuity of the history of imperialisms that stir, or fail to stir, emotion when a little girl is brutally murdered. For depending on where she was born, her death will have a name, a memorial stone, a mourning, a space in which to be grieved…
Sadly, Palestinian children are no longer allowed to be innocent. They are guilty before even becoming aware of the vastness of the world, the same world where we dwell and gaze at the same stars.
I often watch Jupiter shining in the distance, never wavering; is there a child there who looks upon her with the same fascination as I ? They die in succession, forgotten, leaving no trace, no memory, no written mark… Is it too cruel, too depressing for us to face the truth, and to see what our money engenders in this society of overconsumption that now finances wars, genocides, and ecocides here and beyond our borders ?
A people denied even the right to be mourned. They are stripped of name, of memory, of feelings; it is the machinery of dehumanization that crushed the Jews during the Shoah. I will say it again and again: history is different, but the mechanisms are the same.
We should all be outside, marching for them, because what we allow Netanyahu to do surpasses even the ambition of conquering Palestine by reducing it to ashes, it is the whole region at stake. Tomorrow it may be Egypt or Jordan, just as yesterday it was Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq… And then, will people finally understand the truth? That from the moment one arrogates to oneself a divine right over others, it always ends in disaster.
Younis M.