Gaza Genocide: Testimonies of Israeli Atrocities and Western Complicity
On 21 January 2024, I was hosted by the Electronic Intifada podcast to report on my family’s latest struggles under the Western backed Israeli genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Gaza. This interview took place at the hardest of times, soon after I learnt that the terrorist Israeli Army has burnt our home, pushed my family survivors into yet another displacement, the arbitrary detention of my two oldest paternal uncles who are child survivors of 1948, and the daily struggles hunt for water and food and other necessities of survival during last winter, and my dad, brother, sister in law and nieces fleeing to Rafah and sheltering in a tent amid relentless bombing. I also exposed my then-MP Harriet Harman for her opposition of calls for ceasefire and recycling of Israeli justifications of the genocide while failing to respond to my pleas upon her to save my family from Israel’s indiscriminate killing machines.
The video above shows my parents enjoying a gathering of family and friends as they always did at our land near the beach in northern Gaza on 3 October 2023. You can see our land that my dad has been nursing for over a decade hosting a special occasion of my childhood friend Mohammed Al-Majdalawi visiting Gaza from Sweden and reconnecting with my parents and mother figures we shared during our childhoods in Jabalia Refugee Camp. Those mother figures include Om El-Amir who is seen on the very left of this sweet choir blessing us with one of the most beautiful songs by Sayed Mekawi. Israel killed Om El-Amir inside her home during the early days of November 2023, leaving her husband surviving with wounds; her son in London couldn’t say goodbye.
The fate of our land remained unknown for months with the area turning into a killing field. We couldn’t but pray that Israel’s machines of destruction spared it. They turned it into a barren land, and made such a gathering impossible to repeat with all the people seen in the video are either killed or displaced. We learnt this through my cousin Khalil, whose wife Rana and three children Jihad, Sham and Leen were massacred in October 2023. Khalil, accompanied by my cousin Mahmoud Abusalama, managed to visit our land in February 2024 but couldn’t find any trace to our land and sent us this picture and video below.
Following the news of the burning and bombardment of our family home in Al-Saftawi Street, this loss was especially devastating to my family and many of my extended family members who used to seek our land as a refuge from the crowdedness of Jabalia Refugee Camp, but it is nothing compared to Khalil’s loss and many others who saw their families wiped of civil registry. Israel dictated a reality where it is a luxury to comfort ourselves with thoughts of returning to rebuild our homes and replant our lands, but the hearts whose beats Israel put to halt can’t be revived. In a just world, none of this would happen.
While my nuclear family had to pay an incredible amount of money to guarantee their lives and secure an exit through Rafah to Egypt in February, my extended family, my dear uncles, aunts, cousins, and their grandchildren most of whom under 15, continue to experience a nightmarish reality that makes them envy our martyrs. Nothing changed between this interview in January and August, except that Israel’s atrocities are rising in scale and intensity and expanding to the Palestinian people wherever they are, and to Lebanon and Yemen. Meanwhile, the US, UK, Germany, Canada and other Western imperial powers continue to unashamedly arm and justify Israel’s crimes against humanity in the hope to cover their own complicity. Simultaneously, the same powers have been engaging in a reductive two-sides narrative, calling for ceasefire to which Israel is the only obstacle, and calling for the so-called two-state “solution” to be implemented in total denial of the longstanding realities of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, and the devastating consequences of the genocide in Gaza. When Israel faces no serious challenge to its relentless atrocities, and instead is rewarded with billions of US dollars in military aid and unconditional support from Western media and diplomacy, Israel’s terrifying culture of impunity can only be reinforced.
Has the slaughtering of our people become a normal part of your everyday life? Please don’t normalise the massacres and destructions broadcasted every day and night from Gaza for nearly 11 months, with military and financial backing from Western governments and tax payers. It is not just Palestine at stake here but humanity is. Israel is spreading evil at all corners of the world in a desperate attempt to escape accountability for their well-documented crimes. Stop Arming Israel. Boycott, organise and keep protesting and disrupting until freedom, equality, justice and accountability in Palestine and the Western invention of Israel is dismantled.
Offending Colonial Sensibilities: | My article on Eurozine
Please read my full essay on Eurozine, published on 24 July 2024. Selected segments are below:
I am the first Palestinian scholar in the UK to have been used as a test-case for the application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This much criticized definition conflates the crime of antisemitism with the legitimate criticism of Israel to protect and maintain the settler-colonial Jewish state and its politics of apartheid. The IHRA definition is inherently racist because it denies Palestinian struggles under Israel’s oppressive practices and structures, which consistently expose Israel as ‘a racist endeavour’ – an objective description that the IHRA definition would regard as antisemitic.
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After nearly a year-long struggle, during which I was repeatedly harassed, then investigated and ultimately exonerated, I was eventually hounded out of SHU. At this moment, the real purpose of the IHRA definition became clear: it is less about protecting Jews and more about protecting Israel by silencing Palestinians and advocates for justice in Palestine.
I attended my graduation ceremony with a heavy heart on 17 November 2022, the week after the Jewish Chronicle had published an article citing derogatory assertions made about me by SHU. Instead of defending its own processes that had vindicated me, SHU participated in defaming me, violating both confidentiality and a settlement agreement we had recently reached. I continue to fight a legal battle against my former employer, hoping to hold it accountable for the reputational, psychological, and professional damage it caused me, and to ensure no one else is silenced on the basis of their identity or for daring to protest injustice.
Media complicity in the Gaza genocide
I was by no means the only scholar who has faced increasing smears and silencing during the genocide in Gaza. On 11 October, I woke up to find my picture published by The Times, in a defamatory and misleading article headlined ‘Revealed: the British academics defending Hamas’. While the non-Palestinian academics targeted in the piece received press requests, the paper ignored basic journalistic ethics and skipped over my right to reply. The subtitle stated that ‘Jewish students report feeling unsafe on campus’, reinforcing a dangerous and polarising narrative that misleadingly paints all Jews as Zionists and all Palestinians as terrorists, or ‘human animals’ – to use the dehumanising references made by Israeli leaders enabling the genocide in Gaza.
The complicity of western media in the Gaza genocide cannot be understated. A military superpower with nuclear weapons like Israel that is supported by even mightier armies like the USA, UK and Germany could hardly be threatened by a besieged enclave like Gaza. While constantly invoking the memory of the Holocaust and repeating Israel’s framing of Hamas as ‘terrorist’ and ‘genocidal’, western media omit any reference to the foundational principle of the state of Israel: that of the consistent and gradual elimination of the Palestinian natives. This elision intentionally conceals and undermines the genocidal intent of Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, despite its increasingly indisputable nature, which has prompted South Africa to take Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
By omitting this longstanding history of relentless and well-documented collective punishment campaigns against besieged Gaza, western mainstream media enabled Israel to claim 7 October as the starting point of history. ‘There was a ceasefire on 6 October’ is one of the most repeated Zionist myths, which couldn’t be more reflective of the denial of the Palestinians’ longstanding struggles under military occupation and settler-colonialism. Such discourse, which frames opposition to Israeli crimes as a question of ethno-religious identity rather than a question of politics, attempts to demonise and silence academics who speak up for Palestine and refuse to ignore the historical context that precedes 7 October.
Zionist media has shown no sympathy for my background as a survivor of the Israeli Occupation’s collective punishment policies, nor for my experience of a decade of exile, during which I watched my family and other Palestinian communities be repeatedly dehumanised, terrorised, displaced, killed and maimed. None of the well-reported offences and internationally-recognised war crimes and crimes against humanity openly committed by Israel offended their colonial sensibilities. Yet my defence of a placard reading ‘Stop the Palestinian Holocaust’ was offensive and allegedly made ‘Jewish students feel unsafe on campus’!
Looking back, as Gaza, my city of birth, burns and loved ones endure a genocide through bombs, starvation and the destruction of all means of survival from North to South, the viciousness of the Zionist smears couldn’t be more blatant. This incident and the subsequent struggle I endured has often been triggered in recent months. The word ‘Holocaust’ is often used by Palestinian survivors to describe the terror inflicted on their families, homes and livelihoods. This included Israel setting fire to homes, farmlands, bakeries, and even tents, most infamously in Rafah on 26 May 2024.
My own family home was bombed three times before it was finally set on fire around the turn of the year, devastating news my family still finds hard to process. The maddening part is that a segment of this unliveable home had been appropriated as a shelter for desperate family members left with nowhere to go after the re-invasion of Jabalia Refugee Camp in May 2024.
Would you blame a Palestinian for using the word ‘Holocaust’ to bring attention to the ongoing genocide that rages on with more intensity and brutality, even after nine months of constant bloodbath, mass devastation and displacement?
#CeasefireNOW: Israel committed multiple massacre at my birthplace Jabalia Refugee Camp killing more than 40 of my relatives
“What other disasters need to happen before a ceasefire is enforced with steps towards accountability for all the genocide cheerleaders?” My article on Declassified UK on 6 November 2023.
What is happening in Gaza is not a war. It is a genocide, accompanied by an ethnic cleansing campaign against the mostly refugee population in that besieged enclave.
The process is targeting other Palestinian communities surviving under Israeli settler-colonial and military domination between the river and the sea.
No one is spared from Israel’s killing machines: children, women, elderly people, journalists, doctors, paramedics, fire fighters. Nowhere in Gaza is safe: residential buildings have been levelled, UNRWA schools sheltering the displaced have been hit.
Hospitals, churches, mosques, bakeries, universities, ambulances, too. My parents and extended family are amongst over a million people who have been forcibly displaced – nearly half of Gaza’s entire population.
They have fled to Al-Nusairat refugee camp, which is “south of Gaza river” according to Israel’s criminal military order, but they are at close encounters with death every day amid relentless Israeli bombardment.
There is no time to process all the horrors of the past four weeks, but my family survivors keep stressing that “time passing means more bloodshed”.
On 23 October, my cousins and their little angels were amongst 23 relatives killed while asleep at their own homes in Jabalia refugee camp.
My family’s survivors couldn’t give a goodbye or a proper funeral as Israel’s killing machines have haunted them. My auntie’s son Khalil is the only survivor of his family.
The lifeless bodies of his wife Heba (35) and children Leen (12), Jihad (10) and Sham (5) were pulled from under the rubble after six hours.
Heba, a skilled nurse at the Indonesian hospital, and her children had left their home and sought refuge at the home of another cousin Rana, who is married to Heba’s brother Jawad.
Jawad survived but Rana (40) was killed, alongside two of her five children, the little ones, Mohammed (5) and Naama (7), while the twin girls Jana and Jinan (12) and Husni (10), survived with wounds.
On 1 November, my dear cousin Yousef Marwan Abusalama succumbed to his wounds at the Indonesian hospital. Four days before, on 27 October, Israel bombed nearby, destroying homes and killing over 22 of our neighbours and injuring many including him.
Yousef’s only fault is his Palestinian refugee identity. He was sitting outside his home in Jabalia refugee camp, originally my grandparents’ where my older siblings Majed and Majd and I were born.
Israel bombed nearby, destroying homes and killing over 22 of our neighbours. Yousef joined them in heaven after the shrapnel in his spine had caused infection and unbearable pain. The doctors took him for an operation at 1am. He left the surgery room at 6am and cried to death.
This caring, handsome, young and strong man clung to life for four days fearing he’d break our hearts. He truly did.
Jabalia refugee camp is where my grandparents who are Nakba survivors from Beit Jirja and Ashdod waited to return. Israel banned their internationally-recognised right of return, sentenced them to a life of oppression in Gaza, then bombed their grandchildren to death.
I spent many hours of calls with Yousef during this genocidal war, bringing us closer than ever. He kept me informed about my uncle Marwan’s family whom I love so much, and our home at Al-Saftawi which hosted Yousef during his final years.
I was sitting with my cousin Yousef on the messenger app the night before his injury, collecting pictures and making a list of the names and ages of 23 relatives who were killed on 23 October. He didn’t want our martyrs to be forgotten and reduced to numbers.
I called my family a thousand times desperate to cry with them but failed miserably amid the blackout. I am grateful, however, I managed to speak to my dear uncle Marwan and auntie Haniyya, Yousef’s parents, whom I love dearly as well as all his siblings.
It was heartbreaking hearing them comfort themselves, in tears, that Yousef is better than us, a martyr. They are convinced that he could have lived if Israel didn’t push hospitals in Gaza to a breaking, catastrophic point.
While Yousef had a bed, his parents saw doctors treating the wounded on the floor, and were shy about calling for medical attention as they saw them overwhelmed, racing against time to save lives.
In grave violation of international law, Israel has placed Gaza under a total siege, cutting off electricity, fuel, water, internet and food. My family survivors reported that they’re hungry, and they’re alive but dead inside.
They’re mostly hungry for the world to finally recognise their humanity and their rights to freedom, justice and equality, denied for 106 years of successive British and Israeli colonial domination.
Britain is aware of our grievances as they hold the historic responsibility for facilitating the culmination of the Zionist enterprise into the Jewish state of Israel on the ethnic cleansing of our grandparents.
We cannot forget the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 that initiated three decades of British colonial rule in Palestine during which apartheid between native Arabs and Jewish settlers was established.
This only ended the day before the new-born settler nation of Israel set off to dominate the Palestinians to this day, indefinitely.
A Reunion Story in Barcelona Amidst Gaza Genocide | Al-Jazeera Interview
Watch: On day 77 of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza, I joined Al-Jazeera English TV on a live interview to report on my family’s struggles. On 20 December 2023, I arrived in Barcelona to meet my mother Halima, a nurse who spent nearly 4 decades nursing refugees’ wounds in Gaza. She had just survived Israeli and American killing machines in Gaza after many close encounters with death. A video recording our reunion outside a bus stop in Barcelona city centre had gone viral. This prompted this interview. This reunion was bittersweet as the genocidal siege and dehumanisation of Gaza continued.
Much happened since then, including the bombing and burning of our family home and the killing of more family members, friends, neighbours and teachers. While my father, brother and his family crossed Rafah Border in February, the rest of extended family continue to face bombs, arbitrary detention, constant displacement and starvation, with nowhere safe to run to.
I apologise for my followers for not updating my blog for a while. I have been consumed responding to issues of life and death and supporting displaced family members. I have also been trying to keep sane amidst these barbaric times. The least we can do is boycott, protest and amplify Palestinian calls for ceasefire, freedom and justice. Keep watching this space for more interventions I have done online.
For now, if you can support my family through their recent displacement, donate here.
PALESTINE FROM MY EYES 