To the undefeated,

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 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 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.

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Join WAWOG for an evening of readings, presentations, and open discussion on decolonization, prison breaks, and fighting imperialism. RSVP here.

Rot in Hell, Joe Biden

"I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” President Biden told “Israeli” Prime Minister Netanyahu days after 10/7 in a Tel Aviv hotel room. “And I am a Zionist.” 

The New York Times described photos of the two men “bear hugging” as proof that “Biden’s embrace of Israel” also “came with a gentle warning” to stay close and act with restraint. Instead, “Israel” has sought to destroy every means of life in Gaza––hospitals, homes, schools––and the US has rewarded them with billions in military “aid.”

In the final days of its reign, the Biden Administration took credit for ending a genocide that they greenlit, funded, and facilitated. Biden could have stopped the genocide at any point by implementing an arms embargo against “Israel.” Instead, Biden chose to perpetuate genocide in Gaza. This is his legacy.

Biden’s prioritization of the “Israeli” war machine over US citizens may be consistent with decades of US policy. (“Israel” has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since 1948.) 

But Biden still stands apart from previous presidents as uniquely monstrous. 

Across nearly four decades, Scranton Joe has taken more money from pro-Israel lobbyists than any other U.S. senator. His 1972 senatorial race was heavily backed by Irving S. Schapiro, the DuPont CEO who also spent significant energy trying to break the Arab League boycott of “Israel.” In 1975, Nathan Barnett, then-executive director of the Jewish Federation of Delaware, noted that Biden would “change his principles to support aid for Israel if necessary.” 

Throughout the seventies, Biden would reiterate his support for the territories “Israel” had seized after the Six Day War, which included Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Throughout the eighties, Biden was more hawkish on Israel than Ronald Reagan, endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 1982 war on Lebanon, even as the then-President pushed to end it.

The policies he enacted and supported in the first six months of genocide reflect a Zionist agenda of ethnic cleansing. On October 18th, 2023, the US vetoed a United Nations Security Council proposal that would have called for a humanitarian pause. On October 25th, he questioned the validity of the escalating Palestinian death toll. On December 9th, the State Department overrode Congress to send thousands of tank shells to Israel on an “emergency” basis. And, on January 11th, 2024, he expanded the scope of US conflict by authorizing military attacks on Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement. 

Opposing a ceasefire; questioning Palestinians’ ability to speak and act “objectively”; sending military aid to Israel; escalating US militarism––these are the selfish, sadistic decisions that Biden repeatedly made. Instead of admitting this, he lied, claiming to be working “tirelessly” working towards an agreement with Netanyahu. 

While the current ceasefire draft hubristically claims that Gaza can be rebuilt in “three to five years,” reconstruction will take decades; the true death toll in the first nine months of genocide, per a recent Lancet report, was likely 40% higher than the official count. 

Instead of lionizing Joe Biden, a “liberal” genocidaire, we leave you with the words of Omar Hamad, a pharmacist and writer from Beit Hanoun: “Glory and immortality to everyone who shed their blood defending even a single grain of sand from the pure soil of Palestine. Freedom to all the prisoners who are still being tortured in Israeli occupation prisons. A speedy recovery to all the injured and wounded. And I pray that God be with the displaced who have lost everything.”

The War on Gaza didn’t start Oct. 7 and hasn’t ended this week

Saturday January 18th of this year marks the 16 year anniversary of the end of the Battle of al-Furqan, a 3 week attack on Gaza during which occupation forces killed more that 1400 Palestinians, which the Zionist entity and Western press refer to as Operation Cast Lead. According to different estimates by the U.S. Department of state and human rights organizations, civilians made up between 70–83% of the total casualties. Following this past weekend’s ceasefire announcement, it is important to understand how Israel’s military and narrative defeat in the Battle of al-Furqan laid the groundwork both for its genocidal assault on Gaza following the Al-Aqsa Flood and its eventual defeat at the hands of the Palestine resistance.

The offensive marked the first major instance of Israel's increased willingness to attack Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and population centers with air power, as including the use of air strikes in densely populated areas. The international community documented and condemned Israeli atrocities in Gaza during the offensive, including the use of Palestinian children as human shields, the deployment of white phosphorus in violation of the UN’s Chemical Weapons Commission in Gaza for the first time, and the use of experimental munitions. Operation Cast Lead was an important instance of Israel testing weapons and tactics on Palestinians in Gaza, which it then exported around the world for use against other civilian populations. . 

Israel’s actions during the Battle of al-Furqan led to a spike in birth defects in Gaza, an increase in blood cancers, thousands of homes destroyed and families displaced, damage to the healthcare system which continued up until the virtual destruction of civilian infrastructure over the last 14 months, and nearly 2 billion dollars of economic damage. Amidst this backdrop, a new generation of resistance fighters grew up and came of age, developing a new generational understanding of the necessity of resistance against Zionism’s campaigns of annihilation in Palestine.  

The Battle of al-Furqan was a chilling preview of Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last 15 months. Those who failed to intervene in the carnage of Operation Cast Lead share some responsibility for the horrors we saw in Gaza since October 2023. And those who refused to condemn Israel’s genocide, or will now look the other way as it continues pursuing ethnic cleansing, will share responsibility for its next atrocities. 

From the archives

This map is titled “Palestine as it was in 1934." It was produced by Arab Studies Society – Jerusalem, in 1984. See the map in greater detail here. 

Watch with us

New York City’s Anthology Film Archive will be screening NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT February 14 - 20. 

NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable. Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.