Gaza, Undefeated

January 19, 2025

A boy emerges from the rubble after an Israeli airstrike on his home in December 2023 and addresses the camera. “My mother and sisters were martyred, may God have mercy on them!” His face is bloodied, his hair grey with dust. As he speaks, his voice rises. “May Allah protect you Gaza,” he says, pinching his thumb and index fingers together to create a circle. “It’s this small, but the entire world can’t defeat it!” 

After 471 days of live-streamed genocide, Hamas and the Israeli occupation have reached a ceasefire agreement. This news is, first and foremost, a cause for celebration. Every Palestinian in Gaza is a survivor, not only of the past 15 months of genocidal aggression, but of successive massacres, incursions, and sieges extending back to 1948. For 76 long years, the Zionist occupation has mangled and obliterated Palestinian family trees, land, and memory. Yet the struggle for liberation continues, with Gaza at its beating center. 

The ceasefire agreement is a victory. Despite the vast destruction and mass death wrought by the Zionist entity and its American conspirators on the Strip, the Palestinians of Gaza remain rooted to their land. Israel failed to achieve a single military goal over the past year, while the Islamic Resistance has reportedly replaced every martyred fighter with a fresh recruit. Al-Aqsa Flood succeeded in its goals of liberating Palestinian hostages from Zionist dungeons and putting the Palestinian cause back on the global stage. Per the terms of the ceasefire agreement, over 3,000 Palestinians will be released from prison over the coming months, 250 of whom had life sentences. The dream of Palestinian statehood, once crushed by the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, is alive in the heart of every child in Gaza flashing the victory sign at a camera. 

Israel’s defeat is not merely a military blunder, but a narrative one. The idea that the Zionist entity is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it is a legitimate and rational actor committed to upholding the values enshrined in international law, rings hollower now than it has at any other point in the ethnostate’s sordid history. The brave journalists of Gaza should be credited with the final undoing of this myth. For more than a year, they have documented the genocide of their people while they themselves experienced displacement, targeted airstrikes, and incalculable grief. In particular, the reporters who remained in northern Gaza to report on the Zionist-engineered famine and the occupation army’s repeated sieges on hospitals demonstrated before the world that the advancement of liberatory justice is the true function of any meaningful cultural work. 

The end of the Zionists’ latest genocidal onslaught is only the beginning of a new phase in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and on the cultural front, we must recommit ourselves to the fight. In the coming months and years, we are sure to see lengthy reports from imperial tabloids like The New York Times highlighting the destruction in Gaza. We are sure to see colonial establishments like the Museum of Modern Art, which enjoy funding from Zionist arms manufacturers, hanging up photos of Palestinian children. We are sure to see so-called advocacy groups like PEN America, who remained silent on the Zionist genocide, celebrate of the freedom of expression of Palestinian writers. These institutions will try to profit from the very death that they helped whitewash, excuse, and diminish. We cannot allow this violent revisionism. 

Indeed, the past 15 months have laid bare the lie of American liberalism, of institutions that claim to prize free speech and justice but fail to speak out against genocide. Our project of exposing these contradictions will only grow hereafter, as the ceasefire will merely slow, not end, the genocide. The Zionist entity has destroyed every hospital in Gaza, reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble, bombed every mosque and university, and manufactured a famine — technologies of violence that will continue to kill long after the bombs stop dropping. Meanwhile, American universities and cultural institutions have only ramped up their efforts to repress our movement.

We must not tire. There is a world where Gaza is rebuilt, where its orchards once again bear fruit. There is a world where the siege is lifted, where Zionist gunboats are absent from the Gaza sea, a world where all Palestinians are able to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem unimpeded. We owe it to the people of Gaza to continue building toward this world, toward a free Palestine within our lifetimes.