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Over the weekend, the Israeli military set fire to Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last medical facility in northern Gaza. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyya, a pediatrician who documented the occupation’s crimes and whose son was martyred in a drone strike at the hospital gates last month, was last seen climbing into an armored tank flanked by mounds of wreckage. He is now reportedly being held in Sde Teiman base, a black site in the Naqab desert that is notorious for ruthless torture.
The year ends like this, between flashes of images that have become bitterly familiar — another hospital obliterated, another death march south — and the numbing awareness that the Israeli occupation has rendered the inconceivable a matter of policy. The year ends, and Gaza remains ensnared in the death grips of Zionism, a fascist ideology that assaults not only a people and a land, but time itself.
In Gaza, life cannot go on, yet every hour is devoted to the grueling pursuit of survival: to securing a bag of flour; to patching a hole in a tent; to finding a sip of water. The material of existence has been stretched thin and shredded by more than a year of genocidal war. With no end game, “Israel” is forcing Palestinians in Gaza to endure a suspended present. Nothing can be planned for except the looming possibility of death. As we look ahead, what must our solidarity look like? Today, the Zionist entity wears the veneer of impunity — violating the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, stealing more Syrian land, colluding with the Palestinian Authority to murder the resistors of Jenin Camp, and escalating its campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza. Our greatest mistake would be to believe this veneer. As the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled wrote in her autobiography, quoting a comrade: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act ‘violently’ in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution.
There is no future without Gaza. The past year has revealed the depths of Zionist depravity, yes, and also the unbending determination of Western institutions — sentries of so-called liberal ideals like justice and freedom — to pardon, to cover up, to whitewash, to lie on behalf of the Israeli ethnostate. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Museum of Modern Art, PEN America: these are the reactionary forces that make up the counter-revolution of which Khaled spoke. They are the superstructure, the formations that inevitably follow from an economic system of inexhaustible accumulation, land theft, forced labor, mass incarceration, and forever war. They will fight us until their dying breaths.
And we will fight back. If we have learned anything over the past year, let it be this: It’s either Gaza or fascism, Palestine or the end of the free world. As sure as the armed resistance refuses to die, its mantle taken up by successive generations of fighters, so too does our role on the cultural front endure, laying bare the contradictions in the discursive theaters of the imperial core. The road to liberation is long and hard, but it is necessary. So do not tire. Resolve to continue fighting for a free Palestine within our lifetimes. Because our cause is just and we will win.
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