Never. Again. (and again)

As I write these words there are children screaming outside of my window. And while they and I are safe in rural NJ, and they are screaming in joy as they play in an inflatable bouncy castle, I know there are children in Gaza screaming. They are screaming in terror. Because Israel has brought terror upon them. They are screaming because their sibling has been murdered, or their parent, or their entire family, or their leg has been blown off in the bombing campaign or been crushed as their building has been deliberately bombed into rubble. Or they have been blinded by shrapnel. Or they are screaming from their life experience of terror, bombs, lack of food and intermittent water and electricity.

And they are not the first nor will be the last screaming children, they scream like the Native American and First Nations children displaced and beaten and abused in settler attacks, forced marches, deprivation and boarding school torture and abuse screamed. They scream like the enslaved children in the Americas, stolen from their homeland or born to or descended from those who were. Who were beaten, abused, neglected, separated, raped, and forced to labor for vile people who saw them as property. They scream like the children of Apartheid South Africa, controlled, deprived, and when they dared resist, massacred. They scream like the Jewish and Roma and other marginalized children put into concentration camps, met with all manner of horrors, many ultimately murdered by people who saw them as less than human. And like the German and Japanese children facing the firebombing of cities and nuclear weapons.

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The western news media use specific language to drive a particular narrative when discussing Israel and Palestine. The brutal attacks from Hamas against settlements near Gaza on October 7, 2023 are invariably called unprovoked and are also called unprecedented. It seems only the Israeli side “responds” to aggression, and is never the aggressor. Both of these characterizations are clear and plain lies.

Unprecedented

After the Holocaust during WWII in which several million Jewish people and members of other marginalized groups were systematically murdered, so many pledged “never again” but, as we have seen in Gaza and more broadly in Palestine, have instead supported “never” again and again.

Israel was born from genocide and born in genocide. It took the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from over 500 villages across Palestine to forcibly create the state of Israel against the will of the Arab residents of the land. This is known as the Nakba, which translates to “catastrophe.”

When media promote the narrative that the attacks on civilians by Hamas are unprecedented in Israeli history, they are deliberately erasing the reality of the Nakba and the lived experiences of the Palestinian Arab population. While for the Holocaust the slogan might be “Never Forget”, for the Nakba it is “Never Remember.” In fact, Israel bans the reference to Nakba in Palestinian textbooks and prohibits institutions from holding commemorations of the Nakba.

From the perspective of many, the Nakba was not just a historic period in the creation of Israel, but is an ongoing practice of the settler colonial Israeli state. The refugees created during the Nakba are refugees today, with no state of their own and no right to return to the homes they were driven out of. And, indeed, displacement is ongoing.

Unprovoked

Even more profuse than the promotion of the Oct 7 attacks as unprecedented, the narrative that the bloodshed was unprovoked is ubiquitous in western media.

It was not unprovoked. Hamas explicitly stated its primary reasons for the attacks. And while we do not need to accept their stated reasons as the only reasons, we can at least start there to understand why they took these actions. Calling the action “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas explains the primary reasons as Israeli incursions and violence at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and the ongoing settlement expansion and related violence in the West Bank.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem is managed by Jordan under an international agreement. During Ramadan in 2023, Israeli police began to evict Muslim worshipers from the mosque nightly who had attempted to stay overnight. On April 3, Israeli Police detained a Jewish activist from Temple Mount Administration after reports they were planning to perform a ritual sacrifice at the Temple Mount. On the night of April 4 Israeli Police stormed the mosque, using stun grenades, rubber bullets, and batons, injuring at least 50 people and arresting 400. They stormed the mosque again on April 5.

Palestinians have been dispossessed from their homes and land since before Israel declared its independence in 1948. In the early years this dispossession came at a rapid pace, resulting in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to neighboring nations. In 1967, Israel invaded Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, eventually occupying the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip. After this occupation, Israel began to take more Palestinian land through construction of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. While it ended the settlement project in Gaza in 2005 and dismantled its settlements, Israel continues to expand settlements and dispossess Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinian farmers have fled their villages in the West Bank as recently as August 2023 due to Apartheid laws, settler harassment and violence and, dehumanization by Israeli Defense Forces including severe restriction of movement.

The Israeli town of Sderot is about a half a mile from Gaza at its nearest point. It was founded in 1951 as a development town to house Jewish immigrants and was initially populated by 80 families. After decades of expansion, largely from new immigrant populations, it had a population of 30,000 in 2021. By 2010 the city was 94% Jewish and less than 1% Arab. On October 7 the police station in Sderot was the site of a major battle between the armed Hamas fighters and Israeli Defense Forces.

But, before there was Sderot, there was Najd. Najd was a Palestinian Arab village with an estimated population of 620 in 1945, all Muslim. Najd was destroyed in May 1948 during Operation Barak.

Because of its proximity, and its history, Sderot is a frequent target of rockets from Gaza. Sderot is also home to “Sderot Cinema” or the “hill of shame” where residents sometimes go to watch bombings of Gaza, and sometimes cheer when the bombs fall.

As the bombs fall today, I wonder if anyone is on that hill, and how they are responding.

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It is not contradictory to understand oppressed peoples’ reasons for rebelling, to support their right to rebel against occupation and colonialism, and to still see specific actions against specific targets as gross human rights violations. It is contradictory to describe those actions by Hamas as terrorism while describing the genocide in Gaza by the Israel Military as ‘self defense.’