Hey everyone, this is Bisan from Gaza. I'm still alive but Hind is not. Do you remember Hind Rajab? This seven (7) years old child who was missed 12 days ago. Hind was in a car with five (5) family members and they were all killed - except Hind - by an Israeli bomb, and then she called the Ambulance, she asked them to rescue her. Two Ambulance men from the Red Crescent tried to do this but they were also missed. Now; today they were found killed. The body of Hind found killed, found murdered. It's just a new massacre added to the list of endlessly massacres committed by Israel against my people; Palestinians in Gaza right now.
No one holds Israel accountable until now. No one is doing anything. Hind was killed. Who is the next? I don't know, it might be any one of us, but I mean, it's a new, it's a new massacre - she is murdered. You all heard her story, you all heard her voice asking for help saying (Bisan speaks in Arabic first then translates to English the following) "take me with you, take me from here". She was between dead bodies for days, alone and no one could rescue her. We knew where she was, we knew that she was okay, we knew that she could contact the Red Crescent but no one rescued her.
-- Bisan on Instagram, 02.10.2024
There really is nothing left to say.
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A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.
So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.
Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.
When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.
One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"
He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."
And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.
I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.
So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.
Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.
But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?
All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.
I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.
This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.
In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.
One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.
Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.
Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."
In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.
On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.
In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.
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After the hospital bombing, I finally heard back from my grandmother and confirmed that several of my relatives were murdered by Israeli bombing. Seven of them, to be precise. Three are still going, including her. We've been talking constantly ever since.
Asked if it was possible to head south, and was told they did but were also bombed there. So they decided to go back home, in Zeitoun. Their home was bombed and they were pulled out of the rumble, then driven by ambulances to the al-Ahli Arab Hospital. There were people in every corner. Gazans sheltering, sleeping on the floor. Gazans dying on the floor, waiting for beds.
Four were declared dead on arrival, three were in need of surgery and other three were just bandaged. Then, a bomb was dropped in the parking lot that made parts of the ceiling collapse, like Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah reported in that horrific conference/interview. Those in need of surgery died.
By the way, just in case you didn't know: the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third oldest in history, bombed by Israel a few days back, was located near the hospital.
When looking for new shelter, they saw schools with signs hanging outside, "We can't take any more families." They met families, sympathetic but already sheltering too many people. They're now staying in an apartment building they found empty. Sleeping in the corner of the living room. If the family comes back, they'll apologize and leave.
Told me she was saving her phone battery for when the bombing stopped, and she had to ask for help to rebuilt the neighborhood. But she doesn't think it's gonna stop anymore. The ones still with her are mute most of the time, like they're saving energy, but she feels lonely and wanted to talk. There's no internet and to connect to WhatsApp, people are buying "a card from the supermarket, there's a password and username." Not sure what she meant. Still, the internet is inconsistent and won't load neither videos or images nor pages, so she doesn't know what's happening on the outside world.
Told her there were a lot of people protesting to stop the genocide, she replied, "The bombings are getting worse by the day." The bombing yesterday was the worst she ever witnessed. The entire neighborhood is infested with the smell of death, of decomposing bodies. Bodies are piling up in the streets and she's not sure if it's because they ran out of places to store them, but most of them are in bags. The smoke of the bombings hide the blue sky—she hasn't seen the clouds for a while.
Asked if I could share their pictures, names and dreams with people and was told, of which I partly agree, "they're not entertainment." If anyone genuinely cared, they would be alive—I'd argue there are people who do care, but I'm not gonna lecture her pain. And they don't deserve to be used to fulfill someone's sick fantasy. Told me to remember what some Israelis do with pictures of dead Palestinians. And I do.
For those of you who are not familiar, many times before settlers got together to celebrate the murder of Palestinians. For one, in 2015, Israeli settlers set a house in Duma, West Bank on fire. An 18-month old baby, Ali Dawbsheh, was burnt alive. Both parents later died of wounds and only a 5-year-old, Ahmad, survived, although severely injured.
Two celebrations of their murder are widely known, one at a wedding and others outside the court in which two were indicted for the terrorist attack. In the wedding, guests stabbed a photo of the toddler, Ali, while others waved guns, knives and Molotov cocktails. Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was present.
That's what happens in an apartheid. Palestinians are so abused by authorities that their "innocent civilians" come to accept the brutality as necessary or are desensitized by our suffering. After all, it's been 75 years—get used to it!
So I won't risk the image of my loved ones, in fear they are used in these kinds of depravity. I will say, though, the world lost a young footballer. Lost a female writer and an aspiring ballerina. Lost a kind father, who was also a great cook, and a loving mother that enjoyed sewing and other types of handicraft art. Lost a math teacher and a child that wanted to become one.
People think Israel is testing new weapons on them. There's civilians arriving at the hospital with severe burns, which they thought was from white phosphorus, but apparently the pattern is different from the one caused by white phosphorus. It's widely believed Israel tests weapons in Palestinians.
Jeff Halper, author of War Against the People, a book on Israel's arms and surveillance technology industries, said: "Israel has kept the occupation because it's a laboratory for weapons."
They've ran out of drinkable water and the "aid" Biden sent was only for the South of Gaza and no fuel, for hospitals, was allowed in. Many shelves in the supermarket are empty. She said many are convinced that if they don't die from the bombing, they'll die from starvation or dehydration, or whatever disease will develop from the dirty water they're drinking.
Told me all people do now is pray, cry and die. Told me she hopes West Bank is spared. Told her Israel bombed a mosque in West Bank and dozens of Palestinians in West Bank are being murdered by settlers, so she bided me goodbye.
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everytime someone, usually white, talks about the IOF using major US cultural events as "distractions" to commit more genocidal operations in Palestine, I want to SCREAM. The assumption that the IOF is hanging on the us's every fart to make their moves is US centrism, narcissism at global proportions. the IOF don't need "distractions" they've been murdering, torturing and displacing Palestinians and other Arabs for almost a century with impunity because they KNOW they can get away with it. Because the IOF knows practically no one who can actually stop them gives a fuck about Palestinians and Arabs. The IOF don't need a presidential assassination scandal, a met gala, or any large event to cover for their atrocities because they've been doing them in broad daylight everyday, all day for decades, AND BRAGGING about it. Claiming the IOF is doing anything because some event is providing a "distraction" is a vapid projection of a personal inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance and guilt of bearing witness and experiencing these events simultaneously. Not to mention, it plays into anti-jewish conspiracies of Jewish world domination by insulating connections between major events that are often unconnected. It's okay that you feel scared and confused and overwhelmed, but stop pretending the IOF even cares about Palestinians and Arabs enough to wait for the world to be distracted to kill us. They don't need to. They never have and it's hugely ignorant of at least a century of history, anti-Arab racism, and Zionism to say otherwise.
EDIT: I was wrong making this post. @el-shab-hussein took the time to correct me in their reblog here. But I will also copy and paste their correction here:
They committed some of the most atrocious massacres since the start of the acceleration during and directly after the debates between Trample and Bitchen, with several hundreds confirmed dead by day. It's crazy how much Palestinians have discussed the phenomenon of Israel using major U.S. events as a distraction before the acceleration and we've posted about it on tumblr and I've seen other Palestinians make threads about it on Twitter to compile various instances where U.S. events and other major world events used as distractions (wow! Look an example to back my point: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). "They don't need distractions" yes they do, that is the very basis of the massive Israeli lobby and hasbara industry. Don't patronize us just because you can't understand how central the U.S. and its apathy is in our genocide. Recognizing the role of American cultural imperialism and its far-reaching consequences is not perpetuating it - what an incredibly lazy way to try to shut us up - it's recognizing who's the lynchpin in the equation here.
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