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Throughout the past decades, Palestinian women and men have been treated as people lacking humanity, as people without rights, by European states, the United States, Israel, and a number of other countries. They robbed Palestinians of their land, settled an entire people on the Palestinians’ own property, and deprived them of their right to live, learn, care, work, travel. Then they demanded absolute silence from them. Otherwise, the Israeli killing machine supported by countries abroad would be sure to reach them, silence them, if they were ever to speak up—louder, or at all.
Every day, and this is no exaggeration—every single day, the occupation forces commit bloody massacres against Palestinians. Every day, there are victims and wounded. The occupation detains hundreds of Palestinians and restricts their freedom of expression. It keeps an entire population at its mercy in the West Bank and through its stifling siege on Gaza. But each of these violations goes unnoticed by Western media, which makes claims of objectivity and adherence to professional ethics. Often these platforms don’t even see any need to mention these crimes, let alone analyze or condemn them, or lay responsibility on the perpetrators, whose identities are abundantly clear. Yet these same media platforms decided to shed tears, wail, and sympathize with the occupation forces and settlers after resistance factions in Gaza rose up against the injustice practiced against them.
In other words, when the Palestinian people wanted to break off their shackles and get out of the prison in which they were forcibly thrown, demanding their freedom, resisting the occupier, and defending themselves—just as other peoples do, other peoples who are met with cheers for resisting—they were condemned in the harshest terms, and their resistance was dubbed “a criminal act, terrorism, and extremism.” Resistors were described as “monsters without mercy or humanity,” and their resistance was described as “ugly” (!). The Western media machine denounced them and faked images in an era where combating misinformation is a real issue, thus turning the victim into the executioner. The entire world adopted the Israeli narrative. The media of major Western powers did not pay much attention to the fact that Gaza has been reduced to a pile of rubble and ashes, in what history will later recognize as a clear attempt of genocide and ethnic cleansing through unprecedented indiscriminate aerial bombing and the use of internationally banned weapons.
What else did some Western media platforms do? They asked the leadership of the Palestinian people and their official spokespersons to apologize. Yes, apologize. Apologize publicly and condemn, denounce, decry what happened. Then some heads of major states chimed in to rub salt in the wound with statements focused on condemning the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, which the perpetrators and victims all know is a reaction to daily crimes that no living being could tolerate. Crimes committed against the Palestinian people, their holy sites, their lands, their possessions. Speeches now all promise greater support for the occupier: financial, military, and moral, so that it may better kill and target more and more civilians.
Why does it still consider that killing us is a tool and a means to keep the occupier alive? Why is killing us the occupier’s right and framed as “self-defense”? What self is it defending? What weakness?
The occupier responded directly, as expected, perpetrating the seventh massacre in the Gaza Strip since 2008-2009 and imposing a total, absolute siege this time. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant literally said: “We impose a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, no electricity, no food, no water, no gas… everything is closed,” further affirming that “Gaza will never return to what it was.” Indeed, with over a thousand martyrs and thousands of wounded, homes, mosques, and hospitals demolished, and ambulances, civil defense vehicles, doctors, journalists, residential towers, media headquarters, and commercial interests targeted, it is certain that Gaza will never return to what it was. Where is the Western media in all this? Why does it still consider that killing us is a tool and a means to keep the occupier alive? Why is killing us the occupier’s right and framed as “self-defense”? What self is it defending? What weakness? With all its power, high-handedness, and support that has been unparalleled throughout history? Why are we the ones described as evil when we are under occupation, while they, the invaders, are described as innocent?
As a reminder, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, inhabited by about 2.4 million Palestinians, 70% of whom were originally displaced from their lands in 1948. The Strip has been subjected to a series of Israeli attacks over the years, and the occupation forces withdrew from it in 2005. Ever since that withdrawal, Israel’s military operations have continued, and some have turned into wars that lasted weeks, leaving thousands of civilians martyred and wounded, destroying tens of thousands of homes and structures with residents still inside, and causing widespread destruction to infrastructure facilities.
Israel has made sure to continuously maintain the isolation of the Gaza Strip, controlling its land, sea, and air borders and crossings. This isolation policy is intended to separate the Strip from Palestinian territories and the outside world, and it is also meant as a means for Israel to control the quantity and quality of goods and materials entering Gaza and to ban the entry of hundreds of others. This has caused a total economic recession and a sharp increase in poverty and unemployment rates. According to data issued by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “The Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip has affected the health sector and the availability of medical supplies and beds. Only 1.4 hospital beds are available for every 1,000 people, and five out of ten families are food-insecure. Power outages last from 12 to 16 hours per day.” Where is the Western media in all this?
In the same context, we must remind the world of the daily provocations carried out by settlers, who are protected by Israeli occupation soldiers, against Palestinian civilians and their places of worship. The simplest examples include settlers’ habit of spitting on, beating, and cursing at Muslim and Christian worshipers, their habit of blocking roads, throwing stones at passing cars, attacking those walking between cities and on external roads, burning olive trees, stealing agricultural crops… All of this continues to happen while the occupation continues its settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
After decades of occupation and settlements, we are fed up with statements of condemnation and denunciation and claims to stand by our stolen rights, fed up with Israel never being held accountable, at least for violating international laws that countries and nations are busy promoting day and night. We want Israel to be clearly and unambiguously obligated to stop its crimes and transgressions on the ground by putting an end to the financial and military support it receives, for example, after every blatant attack it commits.
Believe me when I say that today, no Palestinian is capable of more talking, more explaining, in the face of the brutal war against us, the victims, the body parts—the loss of fellow journalists on duty trying to transmit images and news have themselves become the news.
It has become clear that a large part of this world does not want to see or hear what is really happening. They are ready to strip themselves of their humanity to preserve their warped ambitions and narratives. They do not see the double standards. They are clinging with full force to their colonial project that began with the destruction of the Palestinian dream and the settlement of thousands of Jews in the land of our people.
If the October 2023 war accomplished one thing, it’s that it exposed the falsity of the entire world, its staggering ability to perpetuate baseless claims. Claims that justice is the basis of life, that humanity brings us together, that there are international values that must be respected. When it comes to Palestine, though, the fact is that all values are completely forgotten, eroded.
