BY AHMED THARWAT
Palestine has been the custodian of human suffering and human struggle for the last 100 years, and the world is complicit in this human tragedy, helping and participating in the genocide and the extermination of Palestinians.
This is not Netanyahu’s genocidal war or Hamas’s October 7 attack. The Zionist movement ideology was built on the ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians from early on. Terrorist groups like Hashomer and Haganah raised the slogan “Judea was lost by blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire.” They committed 12 massacres in Palestine during the British occupation of Palestine, and 13 massacres after the British left. Early Israeli leaders Yitzhak Ben Zvi and David Ben-Gurion were heavily involved in these organizations. .
The Palestinian Genocide didn’t begin on October 7, it goes back to the Balfour Declaration, to Europe’s early 20th-century efforts to deal with the Jewish Question on the continent, promising land they didn’t own to people they didn’t want. The Holocaust, where Hitler’s Nazism sought to exterminate Jews and others deemed “unwanted,” led to the “Nakba” of 1948 which marked a turning point. Zionist militias launched an open campaign of ethnic cleansing, destroying over 5000 Palestinian villages and expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes under the pretext of needing a “land without people for a people without land.” They degraded and dehumanized the native Palestinians before killing them, just as the western settlers had done in South Africa and the new America.
All my life, I was fed the narrative of looking at Palestine as an occupied land. After almost two years of the Israelis’ barbaric war against the people of Gaza with the unconditional support of the Americans and the West, the Palestinians still resist and the west is still justifying the Genocide and ethnic cleansing. Now the Palestinian narrative is finally breaking through to the Western mind and heart, and the Zionist narrative is melting away under its weight and lies. People all over the world, in universities, state capitols, parks, streets, and workplaces are calling for a ceasefire to stop the genocide. The Zionist project has been exposed, the “only democracy in the Middle East,” is revealing its true evil nature as an Apartheid regime that is based on religion and racism. The Palestinian resistance and fight are liberating the West from its racist, colonial ideology which brands anyone who resists dominance as a barbaric terrorist, dangerous and deserving to die. The Palestinians have broken the bond between Western imperial ideology and the Zionist colonial project.
From May 22 to June 30, the U.S.-based Veterans For Peace joined other organizations in a 40-day “Fast for Gaza.” 600 people in the U.S. and abroad fasted to demand full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority and to end U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war, blocking food, water, medicines, and any relief from entering Gaza, where over 2 million Palestinians live. I went to cover the Fasting Against Genocide protest in downtown Minneapolis, where a few Veterans gathered with Palestinian flags, signs, and goodwill. I talked to former FBI agent and Times person of the year, Coleen Rowley. I asked her why is she with Fasting for Gaza,
“I saw the Palestinian doctor who lost nine of his children, and who later got killed in an Israeli raid. My god, all these children killed, and our politicians still supporting Israel with money and weapons,” she explained in tears.
Ms. Rowley is working on serving the federal “Taxpayers Against Genocide” lawsuit.
I spoke with the founder of the group, a Vietnam veteran, who was sitting alone with a sign declaring his 9th day of fasting. “I’m doing a Ramadan fast regimen, one meal a day,” he softly explained.
For decades, I was indoctrinated to understand Palestine through the narrative of “occupied people” and “The Occupied Territories,” a narrative that obscured the broader narrative of colonization and resistance. Now, after nearly two years of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza and the unwavering support of the U.S. and Western powers, everyone is exposed, and the Zionist racist veil is falling. Trump and Netanyahu have moved from the two-state solution to “the Two Thugs Solution”, Gaza from the promised land to a potential Riviera resort.
Zygmund Bauman explains in his book “Modernity and The Holocaust” that Germans can shed their guilt about the Holocaust by recognizing that it was not an aberration. It was the same western fascist colonial ideology that exterminated millions of Blacks in Africa and millions of Native Americans before them, and is now aimed directly at Palestine.
The Palestinian resistance is liberating what French philosopher Michel Foucault called “subjugated knowledge,” the silenced voices and experiences of a subjugated people.
Things are turning, and the Palestinian narrative is breaking through. The Palestinian flag is rising in major cities around the globe, and people are rising against their complacent governments. Millions around the globe are chanting in the streets, squares, and schools: “Free Palestine.”
It can set all of us free.
Ahmed Tharwat is the Host and Producer of the Arab American TV show BelAhdan
WWW.ahmediatv.com
