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It has been a year since Israel used the October 7, 2023 attacks as an excuse to launch its genocidal war against my people. On that day, Palestinian resistance fighters carried out an attack on Israeli settlers in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip. The resistance managed to break through the blockade Israel used to starve the
people of Gaza. Many, if not all, of those resistance fighters had never set foot in those Israeli towns that were established on the ruins of destroyed and ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, and the surrounding lands. These are the very same land that had sustained their grandparents or their great grandparents and the towns and villages they had once called home. For 12 months the entire population of Gaza has been subjected to starvation, thirst, disease and lack of adequate medical care. Israel continues to block necessary aid from entering the strip, while bombing neighborhoods, indiscriminately killing and injuring all in its path, destroying hospitals, factories, power plants, wells and water purification systems, and everything that is necessary to sustain life. Israel has destroyed cultural institutions, schools, universities, mosques, churches, historical and civic archives, libraries and historical sites, trying to erase our culture and sever our connection to our land and our history. During this same period, Israel has been, on a smaller scale, committing these same crimes in the West Bank, with steadily increasing frequency and deadliness. It has also intensified its racist oppression of the “1948 Palestinians”. The “1948 Palestinians” are Palestinians living in what is now the State of Israel and are at best second-class citizens. What Israel is doing now is no more than a new accelerated phase of the Israeli occupation, and an attempt to complete what the Zionist movement, and its armed gangs, set out to do nearly a century and a half ago in all of historic Palestine. Since the late 1800s they have been displacing, by force, the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants and replacing them with a foreign population, mostly European Jews. The armed Zionist gangs, which used terror tactics such as massacres and rape, were later organized to form what is now known as the Israeli Defense Force. We, the Palestinian people, have, long ago, accepted that we will have to pay an extremely high price for our freedom (control over our circumstance and our futures.) We did not ask to be occupied.We did not ask for our ancestral home to be colonized by Western powers, and promised to foreigners, so that those Western powers could rid themselves of the Jews and ease their consciences over centuries of racism and atrocities committed against them. We did not ask for any of this but we will pay the price. But during the last 12 months this price has become unbearable. The depravity and the savagery that Israel subjects the people of Gaza to every hour of every day is beyond what any human can bear, but yet the world allows it to go on. More accurately, the decision makers of the world fuel and enable it while the people of the world, in shock and filled with rage, are ignored. The images of children trapped under piles of concrete and iron; whole families burned to death in the tents that were their only refuge after their homes were destroyed; the sound of little Hind’s voice begging to be rescued from among the corpses of her family members and the sound of the Israeli gunfire that finally ended her short life; these and many other images and sounds have been permanently etched into our collective memory, and have become everyday life in Palestine under the Zionist Israeli occupation. A ceasefire is desperately needed. Only an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire can stop this madness. But a ceasefire is only the first step towards ending the suffering of the people of Palestine. There is only one way to truly bring an end to what Palestinians have been experiencing since the Zionist project started, and guarantee this genocide does not continue in one form or another. It can only be done by rejecting Zionism, – which is racist by definition and inherently violent – and working towards a single state in Palestine. A democratic state in all of Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Red Sea to the Lebanese border, for all its inhabitants, Palestinians and Jews. .
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