On Palestine

My articles on the Gaza genocide.

On August 10, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif wrote:

“To Whom It May Concern: The occupation is now openly threatening a full-scale invasion of Gaza. For 22 months, the city has been bleeding under relentless bombardment from land, sea, and air. Tens of thousands have been killed, and hundreds of thousands wounded. If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop. Please share this message and tag everyone who has the power to help end this massacre. Silence is complicity.”

Within hours, Al-Sharif was assassinated by the Israeli military in a targeted attack.

Al-Sharif was one of 184 Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel since 2023. He was one of tens of thousands of Palestinian fathers murdered by Israel since 2023 — a figure that will rise as forced starvation threatens millions.

Roughly half of the Palestinians killed by Israel were children. The deliberate massacre of children is unprecedented, as is the record number of reporters killed.

This is genocide. The plan was always genocide. The Palestinian victims of the genocide told us the plan in advance, as did the perpetrators: Netanyahu, his administration of Kahanist extremists, and the vicious settlers that support them.

Only now is this obvious truth accepted by world leaders. They tell the truth because Gaza is destroyed: Israel is far enough along in its annihilatory agenda that they can express feigned concern. True concern would entail stopping the flow of money and arms to Israel. Pundits and politicians tell the truth about Israel’s genocide because they think truth no longer matters.

But truth has its own life. That is what Palestinian journalists knew as their own lives were taken. There is no crueler task than to have to document one’s own demise and there is no more selfless act than to leave a record. That is what Palestinian journalists gave as their lives were stolen. Anas Al-Sharif was 28 years old.

When examining Israel’s actions in Gaza, sometimes there is no “why” but sadism: what possible reason is there to slay a starving child? Yet journalists remain a threat beyond Israel’s impunity. As Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer wrote, before the Israeli military murdered him, “If I must die, let it be a tale.” Tales don’t die.

Palestinian journalists record who knew what and when. They document internal conditions that outsiders deny exist. They give comfort to victims being portrayed as oppressors. They provide context to a conflict written off as “too complex” (even though, again, there is nothing “complex” about murdering children.) They show their faces and their pain and their tears.

They are witnesses. That is why Israel kills them.

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I have been writing about Gaza since 2014. I have been writing about Gaza in this newsletter since I launched it in September 2023, oblivious to the horrors ahead. I wrote about Gaza in my first article, “Frost Flowers,” because, as Al-Sharif says, silence is complicity. I wrote as an American, because I do not want my tax money to fund the Israeli military. And I wrote as a mother, because I cannot fathom the pain.

Because many of my Gaza articles were published early, newer readers may have missed them. Therefore, I have put together a list of articles with excerpts and links. My work is free: I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you find it useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber:

The articles are in chronological order. Click on the titles to read them. They are not solely about the genocide, but about history, art, family, and life — in America and in Palestine. I hope you read them in full. But if not, please read the highlights, as they contain information often neglected by the US media.

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The Telegenically Dead, August 14, 2014. This essay was first published in Al Jazeera English and reprinted in my 2018 book, The View from Flyover Country. I include it here because it provides context and highlights how long these war crimes have continued.

“In all documentation of violence, from memoirs to social media, lies a plea to not forget. There is a reason Netanyahu fears the ‘telegenically dead’. They haunt the world like ghosts — a reminder of what we have done, what we are capable of doing, and the lengths gone to justify it.

Those dehumanized in life become humanized in death. With this realization you mourn not only the dead. You mourn the living too.”

Frost Flowers, October 12, 2023.

“Nearly half of Gazans are under eighteen. They have been living in caged conditions since 2007. A Palestinian teenager has no memory of another kind of life. Their parents hold memories of occupation, their grandparents hold memories of wars, their great-grandparents hold memories of the Nakba. The Israeli government holds some of the most advanced weaponry in the world, and memory is a primary target.

They ascribe collective guilt to justify annihilating collective memory.

Gazans saw catastrophe coming. They warned the world, and the world shrugged, or in the case of my country, funded the regime attacking them. Gazans are among the many targets of genocide who plead for aid and document their plight and then are chastised to sit quiet and wait. They are told to believe that the worst cannot happen.

And then, after the worst does happen, they are told that they deserve it. This is how the powerful excuse inaction. This is how they shed their accountability. They rewrite the present to bury the past and justify an irredeemable future.

Powerbrokers pretend time is not a weapon, but a neutral or even positive force: a force that benefits the bereft by giving them hope. They pretend that hope is not a weapon either. But hope is the deadliest weapon when wielded for decades without sincere intent. Hope without deeds is an empty cup that turns, over time, into a poisoned one. It poisons the people who drink it, and it poisons the people who proffer it, as they serve it up again and again.”

At the Junction of F and U, October 23, 2023.

“In his speech, Biden paid lip service to the fact that Palestinian civilians are not the same as Hamas. But they would be killed the same way, and the US would help. The day before his speech, the US vetoed a UN resolution to pause the war to give Palestinian civilians humanitarian aid. Appalled State Department officials were reported to be considering a mutiny, but only one has quit and condemned war crimes on record. Across industries, public figures who express sympathy for Palestinians have been fired or pressured to resign or forced to undergo reeducation.

‘America is a thing you can move very easily,’ Netanyahu said in a 2001 conversation he allegedly did not know was being recorded. ‘They won't get in the way.’

Netanyahu is a liar, but he was right about that.”

Bearing Witness to the Disappearing World, October 29, 2023.

“US officials have a history of making strange comments about Israel. If I were to include them all, this article would be thousands of pages long. Some are cited in my book They Knew, which describes the apocalyptic ambitions of the Reagan administration through the Biden administration, and how Israel is used as a metaphorical and real site for these aims.

It is hard to find causes Democrats and Republicans both back without hesitation. It is horrific that common ground lies in their mutual willingness to abet genocide.

The reasons for this are multifaceted and not fully clear. It is worth reviewing these officials’ words, which go far beyond affection for Israel or interest in protecting it. In the interest of brevity, I’ll include only people in top positions:”

You should read the whole article, as it gives information about specific US officials and their allegiance to Israel over the United States. Included: Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson, Mike Pompeo, and Hakeem Jeffries.

The Mourning Moon, December 1, 2023.

“The mass killing of children in Gaza is abnormal even for a country at war. Nothing rivals it in modern history. The number of children killed in Gaza in three weeks surpassed the annual number of children killed in the world’s worst conflict zones – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, and Central African Republic — between 2019 and 2023.

The Israeli military has turned Gaza into a graveyard for children. They could stop the killing, but they do not want to.

‘Nothing happens by accident,’ an Israeli military source told the joint Israeli-Palestinian publication +972. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.’

The logic of child murder is beyond comprehension. How can a person look at the Israeli children who Hamas captured or killed and feel rightful grief and rage, yet not feel the same emotions for captured and killed Palestinians?[...]

The Mourning Moon clocks borrowed time. That is why I trust it, because it does not deny danger. When a universal taboo is broken, there is comfort in knowing the whole world is watching the same orbiting object, encircling us with condemnations and condolences, giving us permission to cry.

There is power in grief, even though when you feel it, you feel powerless. There has to be power in it, or people would not try so hard to prohibit its expression.”

Christ of the Ozarks, January 6, 2024.

“It is December 2023, and I am standing inside a bomb shelter to protect me from Hamas. But the shelter is not in Israel. It is in the Christ of the Ozarks complex in Arkansas, across from a concession stand. […]

Gerald Smith’s original vision has come full circle. It is not ironic that Netanyahu’s cohort has partnered with an evangelical organization conceived by an antisemite.

In 2015, Netanyahu defended Hitler, claiming he didn’t mean to exterminate the Jews. In 2007, Netanyahu helped create Breitbart, the right-wing outlet criticized for antisemitism, after inviting journalist Andrew Breitbart to Israel. In 2013, Netanyahu and a multinational Jewish propaganda team created the George Soros demonization myth, the kind of antisemitic propaganda Smith would have loved.

Years later, the propagandists admitted their Soros plan had gotten out of control, with the result that innocent Jewish people worldwide were being targeted with threats of violence. But they did not particularly care. The Zionist agenda trumped all.

Netanyahu routinely works with hard-right evangelicals rooting for the Rapture, an end-times prophecy requiring the return of Jews to Israel. His extremist partners in the Israeli parliament, political heirs to the racist terrorist Meir Kahane, do the same, spouting their own toxic brand of supremacy. The Kahanists are dedicated to what Kahane biographer Shaul Magid calls ‘militant post-Zionist apocalyptism.’

In other words, there are multiple groups tied to Israel hoping to end the world, and they have the money and the means to do it.”

Trails of Tears, January 11, 2024.

“If you lived in the 1820s and 1830s, would you protest indigenous displacement? Would you countenance the destruction of entire family lines? Would you justify children dying as they walked hundreds of miles to Oklahoma, a territory the Choctaw renamed — Oklahoma is Choctaw for ‘land of the courageous’ — in an attempt to maintain their dignity? Would you call them ‘barbarians’ to ease your guilt? Would you buy into the myth of the ‘Vanishing Indian’, and pretend their extinction was preordained? Would you lie and claim the land was empty when the colonizers arrived?

You might know the answers to those questions based on how you respond to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. After obliterating northern Gaza, Israel forced surviving residents to walk south in scenes reminiscent of the Trail of Tears. […]

Israel promised Palestinians that southern Gaza would be safe, then bombed them as they arrived. Palestinians are now being told to go to Egypt, unless they are first deported to the Congo, where they would work in brutal conditions in mines owed by Israeli plutocrats like Dan Gertler. They are told Gaza will be taken over by Israel and turned into settlements under which their murdered countrymen will lie.

Those are Israel’s plans. They are of a nature so horrific they sound like something out of another century — the 1830s, perhaps.”

There’s a Sniper on the Roof of the School Where I Studied Authoritarianism, April 29, 2024.

“The biggest dividing line in this struggle is not age or ethnic background. It’s whether when you see a Palestinian child in pain, you feel like you are looking at your own child, or any child you’ve loved and protected. And your heart breaks.

Or whether you see Palestinian children in pain and feel nothing, or excuse their murder as ‘collateral damage,’ or even label them potential terrorists.

If you cannot recognize the humanity of a child, you have lost your own. If you cannot respect the fundamental innocence of a child, then you are the guilty one.”

Red Lines, May 16, 2024.

“It’s one thing to live in a rising autocracy. It’s another to live in an increasingly autocratic proxy state beholden to a foreign country’s genocidal invasion.

In this backward ‘democracy’, Jewish Americans are admonished for not having dual loyalty, and Israelis of conscience are punished by America for criticizing Israel.

In the last 24 hours, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was detained by the FBI at the airport for criticizing Israel’s war crimes. In a humane and courageous letter, Jewish-American presidential appointee Lily Greenberg Call quit in protest, condemning the Biden administration for both abetting the massacre of Palestinians and for ‘making Jews the face of the American war machine.’

Biden had claimed that Israel invading Rafah — the southern city to which the remaining population of Gaza had fled — was a ‘red line’ that would end his unconditional support of Israel. A ‘red line’ is supposed to be a line that one does not cross, one that brings meaningful consequences for those who dare to do so. But when Israel invaded Rafah, Biden sent them another billion dollars.

On Twitter a new photo of Palestinian toddler with its head blown off by an Israeli soldier is circulating. I won’t look at it. It would make me cry with pain and horror and shame.

The red line is blood, and all of them — Netanyahu, Biden, Trump, and their operatives — let it run.”

Note: This article also covers Antony Blinken’s family ties to Ghislaine Maxwell.

Hanging By a Thread, October 3, 2024.

“I am doing tatreez: Palestinian traditional embroidery. An ancient craft of an ancient people that Americans are told, by their media and their politicians, do not — or should not — exist.

Tatreez is similar to cross-stitch but rich in motifs particular to Palestine: stars, cypress trees, the key of return (the key to the homes Israelis have stolen). Tatreez preserves Palestinian personal and political histories. On garments, it often conveys village traditions and milestones in the life of the owner. On wall hangings, symbols relay Palestine’s history: its triumphs and tragedies and refusal to bow down.

In 2021, UNESCO recognized tatreez as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. I wonder where UNESCO is as Israel destroys ancient monuments in Gaza and Lebanon, to say nothing of tatreez. Is artistry of as little value to them as it is to Israel?”

Totem and Taboo, October 22, 2024.

“Then there is the country we are not supposed to name: Israel, even though it is the most egregious offender. Israel, which has long served as a point of entry and passageway for transnational organized crime, including the Russian mafia to whom Trump is linked as well as the warmongers backing Harris.

Israel, whose parliament once banned the far-right Kahanists as terrorists, but now lets them determine their country’s course.

In 2022, Joe Biden removed the Kahanists from the US terrorism blacklist. Their extremism didn’t bother him then or now.

Israel has annihilated Gaza. The Israeli military has murdered at least 20,000 Palestinian kids, breaking a universal taboo against deliberately killing children. The Israeli military has no limit to its immorality, illegality, or, in their view, territory.

They invaded Lebanon and proclaimed it part of “Greater Israel.” Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel will also conquer Jordan and parts of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, in echoes of Israel’s controversial 1982 Yinon Plan, once dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

As they plan annexation and annihilation, Israel funds US seditionists. AIPAC supports the members of Congress who want the United States of America to collapse.

They also fund members of Congress who could curtail collapse but have chosen to let seditionists serve by their side. Very few members of Congress refuse AIPAC money. When they do, AIPAC spends millions to fund an opponent and remove that representative from office.

This is not democracy. This is a hostile takeover: one where bribery, blackmail, nukes, espionage, and religious fanaticism intersect. Israel’s far-right leaders regard the US with open contempt and US officials abet them anyway.”

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I hope you find these articles helpful. This is not a topic about which I want to write, for the simple reason that I do not want a genocide to be happening. But one way to help stop it is to document it. There are more articles in the archives.

To support my work — and to ensure that all articles stay open to everyone, regardless of whether they can pay — please consider subscribing. Thank you very much.

A tatreez I made with a pattern from Rahaalshop.