BY Farah Salka
So, here we are. In no time, it’ll be 2 years since the genocide began, the Israeli mass slaughter of the Palestinian people, in Gaza, and beyond. A genocide, that is so livestreamed to us, in real time, to the very detail, daily, through our big and small screens. It is not in history books and documentaries, it is happening right here and now. It almost feels unreal. Today, Gaza is starving, not metaphorically, and Israel is still bombing it. Siege, occupation, starvation, and weapons of war on people in hospitals and tents. What a moment to be alive. I don’t know what to say anymore. Has there been anything that hasn’t been said yet?
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Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the Director of Kamal Adwan hospital in North Gaza, is still abducted. It’s been 9 months. One cannot begin to imagine the absolute horrors he’s going through under their torturous hands. The image of him walking bare-handed in his brave white gown straight into their tank amid the insane amounts of rubble they created in December 2024 haunts me always. Feels like sci-fi, like everything else.
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I am so overwhelmed with everything (and what a small, ridiculously tiny problem to have right now, in comparison to others). My brain capacity for digestion, retention, or plain memory is just not keeping up. You barely have time to focus on one atrocity before another arrives, you don’t even get to sit with rage or grief over a certain moment, and then you’re already at the next horror story, and that is absolutely part of the calculated strategy of terror.
Everything happens so quickly, yet unbearably slowly at the same time. My memory placement of anything time-related, as pre- and post-COVID, didn’t last long, as now I have moved to ‘pre- and post- genocide’. I also have variations, like pre- and post-war, and by that I am referencing the Israeli war on Lebanon of Sep-Dec 2024, not to be conflated with the Israeli war on Lebanon pre- Sep 2024, and the one post-Dec 2024. Hundreds of people have been killed in Lebanon post-ceasefire. The list is long and inevitable. So long as Israel continues to exist, so does the risk to us all. It can’t be the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians only. Have you ever heard of a killer cancer that stops on its own?
I get so irritated when people ask me how I’m doing. Thank you for your care and interest, but how does one answer this? Not only do I not know how to answer this, it sends me down a rabbit hole of various forms and layers of nausea. So I avoid answering it. Sometimes I avoid seeing people altogether. Also, I have to say, it’s draining how friends and loved ones make this about you when it’s the last thing you want and far from the point. And then you have to put all the effort into just ending this weird, supposed ice-breaking situation. It builds more ice and distance if anything. The last thing I want to do right now is small talk, please! Is something wrong? Yeah, you bet. Everything is wrong. Are you not following?
Or when I force the effort and state the obvious and say ‘not great’ or any variable, the automatic response is why, what’s going on, anything happening with you ‘on the personal’? And again, me, confused face, looking at a loving and concerned friend supposedly, who isn’t watching any news, or paying enough attention to the world, or not seeing the most obvious link between that and how we’re supposed to be feeling or where we are going next. I mean I really do not want to slip into judgment here, and I have infinite disappointment at everything, please don’t let me get disappointed at you too, friend. I am incapable of expressing or naming my feelings or even realizing what they are right now. Bafflement, bitterness, despair, dread, grief, wrath, fury, anguish, infinite mourning, heartbreak, disgust. They are so little towards what’s in us. Such deep hollow levels of sadness. Silence thus far, is the best companion and easiest response.
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It’s fair to say I’ve consumed news in the past 2 years more than I have all my life. And news feels like a forever replay. Still, what is more mad and unsettling? Not watching news at all and pretending like it’s no longer happening if you don’t see it, or watching the minute you wake up or arrive back home, while having a meal or a cigarette, and watching people in bare flesh and bones, dying from malnutrition and trauma as you swallow your food and choke on it?
I scroll and scroll, pictures of precious, heavenly children all through my feed, all dead or dying. Every day, in plural. Yet, I do not care or feel more for the women or children of Gaza than I do for the men, the animals, and the trees there. I care and break for them all. I cannot understand people who make that cruel distinction in the middle of an active genocide. Maybe I have a bit of a bigger heartbreak for the elderly, men and women, the people who have lived decades of colonial monstrosity, and who still had to endure a genocide or get killed through one in their last days on this rotten planet. Yes, maybe these people squeeze my heart even more. And the babies, too. And the adults. And the women. And the men.
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Israeli drones keep roaming freely and very unbothered over the skies of Lebanon, buzzing like the sound of a psychotic serial killer who is still on the loose, in our ears, in our neighbourhood, in all of our neighbourhoods.
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It gives me a little heartburn and a lot of sadness that I can not partake in any of the freedom flotilla attempts to break the siege on Gaza because I am holding a Lebanese passport. Otherwise, there is no question about this for me. Alas.
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A few weeks back, a miserable NYT columnist wrote an article titled “No, Israel Is not committing genocide in Gaza”. Here is a quote: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”
So, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered in the most brutal, unimaginable, inconceivable, inhumane, and barbaric ways of the 21st century. Hundreds of people have already starved to death. Tens of thousands more are facing imminent, fatal starvation. 9 out of 10 hospitals have been razed to the ground. The violence and dehumanization repeat endlessly, 24/7. The list is so long to summarize: the assaulted, the humiliated, the displaced, the amputees, the decapitated, the orphaned, the burned, the blinded, the shot, the broken, the dead, the mutilated, the slaughtered, and pages and pages of categories and examples. Unspeakable magnitude of trauma from top to bottom. And you still have wretched people and horrendous media outlets attempting to wash away the genocide, and failing miserably because the evidence is bigger than all of them. These people are abhorrent creatures
I mean, look at this recent headline from Haaretz. “For Israelis travelling this summer, a big question: Do we say where we’re from?” We have one group besieged, being bombed and starved and everything in between, hundreds of thousands of unique horror stories, while the other ‘group’ is busy pondering, with utmost anxiety, how they can continue to travel and sun tan and vacation around the world (with a passport that doesn’t require them visas to most places) without the headache of locals questioning them on the genocide and the mass murder they’re committing. What’s more to say?
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Anas Al Shareef’s assassination, as unsurprising as it was, has shattered what is left of my heart into small little pieces. It felt like glass breaking inside of me when I heard the news. What an incredible hero, what a marvelous smile, what a glorious legacy. But he is dead now, and his death could have been stopped, but we failed to do it in time. Now there are new journalist names on the waiting list of next targets by Israel. And they announce them with confidence, pride, and full impunity, which is what led us here in the first place.
Only a few days later, four journalists, including a freelancer who worked with Associated Press (AP), were among the eight killed by an Israeli strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital. That’s how disgraceful AP skips naming Maryam Abu Daqqa, may she rest in eternal peace and glory. Google her name if you haven’t seen how she was murdered.
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We can go on forever but truly, those of us who have died have died- sincere good luck to the rest of us who are still here, and have to continue living in this new world order, unless we’re planning to dismantle and start over because nothing less will do. It is truly unconscionable and beyond belief that there is an ocean of footage, expanding by the day, of murdered and beheaded babies for all of us to access and witness, and still, no end has been put to this madness, nor even are these stories front pages everywhere, every day, all the time.
The truth of the matter is, we can not be ok with a settler colonial project amongst us in this region, or anywhere on this planet. It will take years and decades to study, analyze, and attempt healing from this monstrosity unleashed on the Palestinians in front of everyone’s unmoving eyes. In such moments, James Baldwin’s words, my all-time favorite, come to mind a lot, particularly this poem he wrote in his final days in the 80s:
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
The fact remains, the world will not, can not, should not rest until the arrogance of settler colonialism, and all the ugliness it represents and manifests, is totally nullified. As with everything else, it can only be a matter of time, and it can only be up to the free people of the world to make that a reality, as fast as they can, before all light goes out.