Rebranding Genocide

When the ceasefire was announced on 9 October there were videos of Palestinian journalists, who had been targeted for months, taking off their helmets. Children chattered about going back to school and I felt their relief. I was captivated by videos of men and women returning joyfully, tearfully to their homes: brick huts or marble-floored apartments, messed up, with the windows blown in, but still standing, intact. I watched the clean-up videos on repeat, mesmerised by timelapse footage of rubble being removed with wheelbarrows, floors being swept, makeshift kitchens cobbled together out of planks, buckets used as sinks. Brilliant.

Something delusional took a grip on me. I wanted to believe it was over. I don’t think I was alone, but I do know that I was entirely wrong. That period, it has transpired, was merely a transition to a new form of torment, another phase of land grabbing. The killing of Palestinians has continued, sometimes surpassing pre-ceasefire levels and accelerating viciously in the West Bank, where armed settlers, backed by the army, strut freely into Palestinian homes and gardens. New ‘seam zones’ are declared, new checkpoints and gates are set up, and there are Israeli raids on villages, universities and religious sites, all while President Trump tells us ‘the war is over.’

By 21 October, Israel had violated the ceasefire more than eighty times, killing a hundred Palestinians. It justified its bombing on 19 October, which killed 44, as a response to an alleged Hamas attack in Rafah – which according to some reports was unexploded Israeli ordnance triggered by an Israeli tank. This was also used as an excuse to further restrict the humanitarian aid that enters sporadically at best, with many crossings still closed and aid kept waiting at the border.

By mid-November, Israel had violated the ceasefire 282 times, destroyed more than 1500 homes, raided areas beyond the Yellow Line twelve times and bombed Gaza 124 times. The C word gave Germany cover to resume its arms exports to Israel; France reauthorised Israeli companies to exhibit at arms fairs.

After two long years during which use of the word ‘ceasefire’ was enough to put you at risk of losing your livelihood or political career, after resolutions calling for a ceasefire were blocked repeatedly by the US at the UN Security Council, ‘ceasefire’ has become something we are expected to be grateful for, now that ‘ceasefire’ means continued genocide. As the journalist Bisan Owda in northern Gaza has pointed out, genocide has just been rebranded. ‘Don’t let them lie to you,’ she says. International journalists are still not able to access the Gaza Strip.

Since 9 October, Owda’s social media videos have shown the depopulated, rubble-strewn streets of Shuja’iyya in Gaza City, which used to be so thick with people coming to the souk that cars couldn’t enter. Up to 90 per cent of Gaza’s housing has been destroyed, which means up to 90 per cent of the population are living in leaky tents.

There is no equipment to remove the rubble – not for the Palestinians, anyway. Any heavy-lifting machinery is being used by the Israelis to move the Yellow Line, which is creeping inwards, cornering the Palestinians in the Strip’s centre and cutting people off from their homes, their agriculture, their land. Nearly 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip is under Israeli control. Drone strikes continue across the entire territory.

On 17 November, the UN Security Council approved Trump’s resolution green-lighting a US colonial presence in Gaza and the use of foreign armed forces there. ‘By endorsing an illegal plan’, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy said, the UN ‘has effectively abandoned its identity as a guardian of international law’.

My friend Atef Alshaer, who teaches at the University of Westminster, described his childhood in Rafah in the anthology Daybreak in Gaza. Speaking of his family (now displaced in Khan Younis) this week he said:

Anybody who crosses what they call the ‘yellow line’, which is very arbitrary and keeps changing from one day to another, is shot at and killed … What is very difficult for people psychologically is that … they can’t visit their land. It’s like another Nakba for them. They have lived with these stories of the Nakba of 1948 and now again it is happening, this land that looks so close, yet it’s so far and so dangerous … You can’t go there. You will be shot … My brother, who’s a teacher, is really sad about not being able to visit his land and his destroyed house … This is very hard.

I asked Atef if anything has improved in terms of food supplies, humanitarian aid. Not in terms of tents, he said, but some items are cheaper. The price of avocados, for example, has plummeted. Earlier this month, Bisan Owda reported that no meat, fish, eggs or fresh fruit and vegetables were entering Gaza. What is being allowed in, Atef said, is not necessarily what people want or need: new smartphone models and sugary processed foods that ‘make the people fat’ – surplus Israeli products and junk food dressed up as humanitarian aid, for what is not a humanitarian crisis but a political one. Most of the agricultural land on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line has been seized, compounding the systematic ecocide by Israel that prevents Palestinians from growing their own produce.

Israeli bombing of Lebanon intensified this month, with strikes on Beirut suburbs and the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, which has a population of 120,000. The pope is scheduled to visit Lebanon next week. My friends in Beirut say everyone is anticipating a further bombardment after he leaves.

Atef’s in-laws in Khan Younis had to conduct a ‘long intensive search’ to find a place to pitch a tent and ended up on a street: ‘All day long it’s busy with cars or lorries and there’s just no sense that they exist somewhere. It’s just constant harassment, whether from natural forces or the social, the logistical.’ Another problem, Atef says, is the rise of Israeli-backed criminal gangs.

As Israel intensified attacks on Gaza City in late September, my friend K., who has been repeatedly displaced, moved to the south with her family. She returned to Gaza City this week. With the heavy rains, most of the tents have been waterlogged. K. sent me videos of women bailing them out. The labour is beyond Sisyphean, as women and girls try to sweep the high, brown (probably stinking) waters from their tents. ‘The situation is bad like this for many people,’ K. said. ‘I will write to you soon.’