Opinion: Who incinerates the innocent?

FILE - Palestinians walk through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on April 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Mohammed Hajjar, File) Mohammed Hajjar
Published: 10-26-2024 6:00 AM |
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.
I wonder when I will write something that’ll make a difference, write something that invites you to bear witness to injustice, where you will come to understand that your silence, even tears shed in silence, affects me deeply. It breaks my heart.
Daily, sometimes hourly, I read a story, or someone WhatsApps me about someone we know, about someone who needs help, and I think to myself; perhaps, if I share that story it will make a difference. It rarely does.
Last week we witnessed the incineration of 19-year-old Palestinian Sha’ban al-Dalou who, while sleeping in a tent in Al-Aqsa Hospital’s courtyard recovering from wounds suffered a week earlier, was burned alive, along with his mother and siblings, by Israeli forces on his last day of being a teenager. He never made it to 20.
Video footage of his dying moments, hand and arm, with IV drip still attached, violently waving through the air as he was engulfed by flames, went viral. It broke my heart.
“Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun,” Ecclesiastes 4:1 reads. “Look, the tears of the oppressed — with no one to comfort them!”
Yet, I write not of Sha’ban today, nor do I write of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023; Sinwar always accepted that his time “was written.”
The true story is neither the false delusion that the war started on Oct. 7 nor is it the persistence of the delusion that the apartheid state of Israel is a democracy.
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No, I write of the vulgar resurgence of the hubris and arrogance of Israeli and Western elites, pundits, ‘intellectuals,’ who today imagine that Sinwar’s death is a transformative moment - that his death is a gift, an opportunity to “settle the war between Israel and Gaza.”
As though Palestinians in Gaza, after enduring over 43,000 acknowledged dead and another over 100,000 missing and presumed dead; after hundreds of thousands injured, thousands of children mutilated, orphaned, entire families erased, would embrace such an “opening.”
As though Palestinians would, after bearing witness to genocide and ethnic cleansing by a settler-colonial state that for decades has attempted to erase, marginalize, and delegitimize their history, culture, cuisine, education, simply embrace such a “gift.”
“You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien,” Exodus 23:9 reads, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
Witness Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, for example, who suggests that Sinwar’s death “creates the possibility not only of ending the Gaza war, returning Israeli hostages and bringing relief to the people of Gaza. It creates the possibility for the biggest step toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo, as well as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.”
It’s not about Gaza.
What people like Friedman, Biden, Blinken, and other self-appointed scribes and Pharisees are refusing to recognize is that Gaza is but one battle in the ongoing generational Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation against the state of Israel; against a settler-colonial apartheid state which for generations has attempted to deny and dehumanize the Palestinian people.
I insist, friends and loved ones, that we recognize their legitimacy, that we recognize that no death, no occupation, no genocide or ethnic cleansing will ever diminish the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation from the River to the Sea.
That we recognize, as I’ve often quoted from Franz Fanon, that “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
Dignity.
In a statement as absurd as Friedman’s, J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote, after Sinwar’s death, “The challenge now - for the U.S., Israel and regional actors - is to turn the battlefield victories of today into strategic opportunities for a better tomorrow. Let today be the day that we turn the page on this horrific war and begin to move toward the long-sought ‘day after’ when we bring the hostages home, surge aid, and end Hamas’ grip on the Palestinian people of Gaza.”
Who is it that believes such rubbish? In what center of comfort and privilege do you dwell? Which regional actors? What battlefield victories? What strategic opportunities?
Let us be clear: It is not Hamas’ grip on Gaza that’s the issue — that is for Palestinians to resolve; it is Israel’s occupation and oppression of the occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza that is the issue.
Since Sha’ban’s murder, hundreds more Palestinians have been killed in bombings across Gaza, many more are missing: the blockage of aid and food deliveries continues, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, mosques where civilians are taking shelter, continues.
American collusion and war crimes continue.
My friends, you stand in silence as you witness transgressions done in your name; you nod at unsupported mythologies; you ignore that Ben-Ami’s “horrific war” is in fact a generations-long conflict that has, systemically, oppressed and denied the humanity of a people who share the land between the River and the Sea.
Today, your silence scares me.
In 1956, Moshe Dayan, in a eulogy for a fallen Israeli soldier delivered at Nahal Oz, the same very kibbutz infiltrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, said:
“Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”
Loved ones, please understand this clearly: you cannot affirm the humanity of dreamers, migrants, refugees and immigrants in America without affirming the rights of all peoples, particularly without affirming the rights of Palestinians because it is you, each of you, who are voting for war criminals and paying the taxes to pay for the bombs that are killing people who look like me.
“And on the last day, because all of us will have one,” Pope Francis asked in 2016, “that day, what shall the Lord ask us? Will he say: ‘What you have said about me?’ No! He shall ask us about the things we did.”
He wasn’t only challenging Catholics that day, he was challenging all humanity. We’ll be asked about the things we did, and in that moment of truth we will reveal what we together failed to do. That breaks my heart.