The zionist entity, a.k.a. the racial colony of israel, responded to the October 7 guerrilla act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas – and its partners in the Popular Resistance Committees by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive that caused near total destruction, huge loss of lives, famine and disease throughout the colonized and besieged Gaza Strip. A year since the onset of the genocide, the official number of Gazans murdered by the zionist entity stands at over 43,000, some 40 per cent of whom are women and children (not including people buried under the rubble, nor people who died of hunger and disease); over 100,000 injured people and 1.9 million people displaced – some 90 per cent of the population. Unofficial figures estimate the casualties at anything between 186,000 [i] and 512,000. [ii]
While perpetrating the Gaza genocide, the israeli military also killed over 750 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in the year between October 2023 and October 2024, [iii] and Jewish settlers have continued to harass Palestinian civilians, demolish their homes and expel them under the watch of entity’s security forces, while the construction of illegal Jewish settlements has substantively expanded, [iv] and the situation of Palestinian civilians in occupied Al Quds has been the worst it has been in the past forty years. In recent weeks, the Zionist entity has escalated the war to attack Lebanon, displacing 1.2m people, allegedly fighting the resistance organisation Hizballah, and threatening to retaliate against Iran which has successfully launched ballistic missiles against the entity.
The israeli assault of the Gaza Strip was termed “a textbook case of genocide” [v] by Palestinians and millions of their supporters, and by international bodies, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. [vi] The Gaza genocide, vehemently denied by israel and its Zionist supporters, continues the ongoing zionist settler colonial resolve to eliminate the Palestinian natives, in line with their racialization by the Zionist movement that, since its inception in the late nineteenth century, has construced white European Jews as a superior race and Palestinians as well as non-European and Arab Jews as an inferior race, [vii]and conducted a perpetual war against the Palestinian people.
Israeli historian Dotan Halevi [viii] reminds us that Gaza was once a thriving trade port which lost its importance with the construction of the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip remained in Egyptian hands after the 1948 Nakba, but it is an archetypical product of the Nakba – 200,000Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes settled in the Gaza Strip and today 86 per cent of Gazans are Nakba refugees and their descendants. The Strip was captured by the zionist entity in the 1956 Suez war and again in the 1967 war, and israel attacked it brutally several times, keeping it under a land, sea and air blockade since 2007. In 2008-9 israel invaded Gaza resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and widespread destruction of homes, schools and hospitals. In 2012 another invasion led to more than 100 people being killed, and in 2014, israel conducted a major invasion, its soldiers murdering 2,251 Palestinian people,including 551 children. The 2014 invasion resulted in extensive destruction, damaging 25 per cent of homes in Gaza city and 70 per cent of homes in Beit Hanoun. Another attack, in 2021, saw 256 Palestinians being killed by the israeli military. [ix]According to Halevi, though for most Israeli Jews the Gaza Strip had simply “always been there,” the Gazans, like all colonised Palestinians, have always resisted the Zionist violence and blockade.
The history of Palestinian resistance to colonisation and racialisation dates much earlier than the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist colonists expelled and murdered some 800,000 Palestinians, depopulated more than 500 villages and urban neighbourhoods, and replacing them with Jewish settlements and towns. [x]
Between 1936 and 1939, opposing the arrival of Jewish settlers, Palestinians staged the Great Palestinian Revolt, which, according to Ghassan Kanafani, [xi]had three main demands: an immediate stop to Jewish immigration to Palestine, the prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Palestinian Arab lands to Jewish settlers, and the establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinian Arabs would have the largest share in conformity with their numerical superiority. Considering these demands quote ‘bombastic’, Kanafani writes that the revolt has its real roots in “the fact that the acute conflicts involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Zionist (Western) industrial bourgeois one, had reached their climax.” The revolt consisted of an armed insurgency and of attacks on British and zionist targets, a general strike, and, in the second phase “large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem, fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle.” The revolt was however suppressed by the British forces and by zionist militias armed and trained by the British authorities and was brought to an end by the combined impact of the British diplomatic and military efforts in the summer of 1939. In all, some 5,000 Palestinians were killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership was exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact. [xii] The repression of the Great Revolt did not prevent many Palestinians taking active part in defending their villages and towns against zionist attacks during the 1948 Nakba, and in fact, as many Palestinians say, for them resistance is existence.
Two noteworthy acts of resistance were of course the Palestinian intifadas. The first, largely unarmed uprising, from 1987 to 1993, was characterised by protests, barricading, civil disobedience and boycotts, and the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Israel responded brutally, killing 1,087 Palestinians, including 240 children. The second Intifada (2000-2005) was an armed uprising, including suicide bombings, leading to the killing of over 1,000 israelis and nearly 5,000 Palestinians. Both Intifadas, brutally repressed by the zionist entity, are hailed by Palestinian protestors; as we all chant ‘there is only one solution, intifada, revolution’…
Continue reading “Written on the first anniversary of the Gaza genocide – Long Live the Resistance”
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