Israel’s genocide is a war on the very idea of Palestine — but our movement lives on

It has been one year since the start of Israel’s war of annihilation against Gaza, and one year since Gaza transformed the world. The true scale of the devastation is still unknown.

Israel’s targeting of health infrastructure has rendered the collection of data about casualties nearly impossible, though the death toll, based on available evidence, has almost certainly surpassed 100,000 people — approximately 5% of Gaza’s total population.

Journalists, healthcare workers, and civil servants have been targeted and slaughtered en masse, drawing little international outcry.

Essential waste treatment, water, and healthcare infrastructure has been deliberately decimated, creating a vicious cycle of suffering. Lack of hygienic conditions has led to outbreaks of disease in crowded displacement camps. Doctors are forced to look on as their patients die from treatable wounds.

Malnourished and traumatised children face a future pockmarked by incalculable developmental repercussions.

Yet despite noble intentions, efforts to tally the carnage often end up reducing Palestinians to statistics that fail to capture the magnitude of loss.

This genocide has created nearly unimaginable combinations of words: reconstructive surgeons decry the “largest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” emergency workers intake children under the new category of “Wounded Child No Surviving Family,” and Palestinian survivors of Israel’s prison camps recall a torture chamber their captors call the “disco room.”

On the other hand, phrases such as “terrorist stronghold” and “command and control center” are in constant use by Israeli military and government officials.

These propagandistic terms, dutifully regurgitated by Western journalists and White House spokespeople, obtain an almost mythical ability to rationalise and justify Gaza’s transformation into a killing field.

Israel's genocide in Gaza won't erase Palestine

For decades, Palestinians have understood their political condition to be one of an “ongoing Nakba,” or ongoing catastrophe, rooted in the most basic tenet of Zionism — the systemic eradication of Palestinians’ presence on their own land.

The effort to obliterate Palestinians as a national group has taken many forms over the past hundred years, ranging from the ethnic cleansing and ghettoisation of millions of people to the mass incarceration and assassination of leaders in the national liberation struggle.

Yet the scale and speed of destruction in Gaza during these past twelve months is unprecedented in the 21st century.

What accounts for the acceleration of Zionism’s destructive mandate? The answer lies in the political transformations of the Palestinian struggle over the past three decades. 

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s set the stage for the dissolution of the Palestinian national resistance movement and its institutions in exchange for limited state-building initiatives on a fraction of occupied Palestine.

In the subsequent decades, the Israeli government, with the full backing of its American sponsor, sought to endlessly defer Palestinian political aspirations into the horizon of a forever occupation, based on the fragmentation and dispossession of Palestinians living under diverse political and legal regimes.

If Oslo represented an attempt to dissolve the Palestinian cause, then Gaza’s political leadership represented a defiant, alternative compass of struggle, one committed to anti-colonial resistance and the realisation of genuine sovereignty and liberation. 

The Israeli response was to impose a suffocating blockade, isolating Gaza from the rest of Palestine and the wider world. In the Gaza of October 6 2023, the status quo created by Israel was defined by the imposition and management of surveillance and starvation.

In the two decades leading up to 2023, this policy of slow death was punctuated every few years by massively destructive aerial bombardment campaigns — or, in Israeli terms, periods of “mowing the grass” — in an attempt to beat Gaza into complete submission. 

Israel gambled on its ability to carry out this policy indefinitely, banking on its US-backed weapons and surveillance systems.

The events of October 7 upended this equation entirely. The subsequent physical and psychic destabilisation of the 70-year Zionist state-building experiment triggered the paradigm shift that has played out over the past year — a shift from the management of endless occupation to the pursuit of annihilation.

Like all wounded colonial powers, the Zionist project has now hardened around its raison d'être: extermination and terror. The objective of Israel’s ongoing military campaign is to break the spirit of the Palestinian people through brute force, and thereby undermine the base of popular support that sustains and nurtures anti-colonial resistance.

At its core, Israel’s genocide is a war on the very idea of Palestine. Like the mythic Prometheus, Gaza has been chained and mutilated for delivering the flame to the heart of the liberation struggle.

Efforts to evacuate Gaza of its longstanding historical significance, and shunt Palestinians into the category of helpless, aid-dependent victims, only bring us further away from addressing the political contention at the heart of the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist resistance movement. 

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It has become apparent that Israel now intends to generalise its rubric of destruction to the entire region.

The application of the Gaza playbook to Lebanon has already resulted in the deaths of over two thousand people under the rubble of Beirut and the towns of the South.

Israel’s military strategy, as in Gaza, is based almost entirely in the very forms of warfare that international humanitarian law was ostensibly invented to guard against. Yet the key Western powers that back Israel, primed and desensitised by a year of atrocity by rote, have barely mustered a shrug in the face of these violations of Lebanese sovereignty and the devaluation of Lebanese lives.

In doing so, they have normalized Israel’s “Dahiyeh Doctrine” — the practice of intentionally targeting civilians and civic infrastructure to place pressure on resistance movements.

With the very concept of liberal international norms left in tatters, Israel has been granted carte blanche to enforce its brutish dictate: any resistance to Zionist aggression will result in the targeting of entire societies, sparing no one from fighter, to journalist, to healthcare worker, to infant.

The international community’s failure to enforce basic tenets of humanitarian law and intervene in Gaza’s devastation has rendered further military escalation inevitable.

In the past year, only the actions undertaken by a constellation of resistance forces in Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq have introduced a modicum of deterrent pressure to Israel’s blood-soaked rampage across the Levant.

President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the Democratic Party apparatus, for their part, have outflanked even the most hawkish Republican administrations of prior decades in their refusal to draw a red line for Israel.

Presidential hopeful Harris, in her campaigning thus far this election season, has shown no signs of changing course and reigning in Israel’s aggression by promising to halt the flow of U.S. funding and arms. 

October 7, and the subsequent Israeli genocide, has brought Palestine into every corner of every city.

While US-provided bunker-buster bombs destroy lives and land from Gaza to Lebanon, millions of people across the world have sought to shake the earth for Gaza. There is no going back to the world we knew before October of last year.

What lies ahead is a long, protracted struggle, but the global movement in solidarity with Palestine cannot afford to succumb to despair and sink into paralysis. Nor is it sufficient merely to witness, tally, or commemorate the ravages of the last twelve months.

The revival of a global anti-war and internationalist movement has sparked glowing embers of people power that require steadfast nurturing to ignite a force powerful enough to demand — and extract — true political accountability.

This past year underscores the necessity of building a stronger, more multifaceted, more transnational movement that can draw on every conceivable lever of pressure available to us in order to end the genocide in Gaza.

Justice will arrive when Israel’s last F-35 fighter jet crumbles into rust, and Palestine’s children never again face the terror of death from above.

The Palestinian Youth Movement is a transnational, independent grassroots movement of young Palestinians and Arabs dedicated to the liberation of our homeland and people. We currently comprise of 14 chapters across North America and Europe.

Follow them on Twitter: @palyouthmvmt

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.