One year, the year

A mediumly informed person about the so-called Palestinian-Israeli conflict will accept the idea that what is happening in the Middle East began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Nothing more far from reality. But it didn’t start after the Holocaust, against all who might think so.

It all began in the late 19th century, not in Palestine but in the heart of colonial Europe with Theodor Herzl. This Austro-Hungarian intellectual of Jewish origin was the founder of the Zionist Organization, which promoted the transfer and return of the Jewish diaspora to Palestine when this territory still belonged to the Ottoman Empire. His dream was to create the state of Israel and he died without seeing it.

From the Ottoman Empire to the control of the British Empire, only to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian inhabitants, the state and land would not be for them. Decades of war, occupation, apartheid, so that the Hamas attack on 7 October took almost everyone by surprise, including the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, then immersed in an internal crisis with its own population divided as never before. Also surprising was the supposed confusion within the Israeli secret service, the Mossad. In the months that followed, information and evidence appeared that the Zionist government actually knew more than it seemed about the preparation of this attack and somehow encouraged it…

The responses were as expected: the European Union and the United States claiming Israel’s right to defend itself, so the Gaza Strip is being bombarded without respite for a whole year, with all its inhabitants inside. The official death toll in these 12 months is over 42,000, more than 17,000 children killed, thousands of missing under the rubble… The prestigious American medical journal The Lancet raised these figures to 180,000 people killed in Gaza a few months ago, and genocide continues.

This year we have seen the cruelty of the government of Netayanhu playing with the exhausted population of Gaza, being forced to continuous movements ordered by the Occupation Army and looking for a safe place, something that in the first days of attacks was totally useless, there has been and is no safe place in the entire Strip. We have witnessed, in the face of the inaction of the international community (with honorable exceptions), bombings of schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, of course the vast majority of homes and improvised and precarious tents. Places where people desperately try to take refuge. He has repeated it to the point of exhaustion UNRWA, UNICEF, Doctors without Borders, Save the Children the inhabitants of Gaza: there is no safe place in the whole Strip.

We have seen how Israel blocks the entry of supplies for the population of Gaza, food, water, medicine, fuel, killing by hunger, disease and lack of medical assistance; amputations and surgical operations without any anaesthesia or possible follow-up treatment. We have seen how journalists, medical and health personnel, UN staff, international cooperators are targeted… ; there are hundreds of people killed in these groups.

Do not forget, 17 years of previous blocking

In recent months many people have learned the reality of the blockade by Israel, a blockade that has led to an extreme situation in the Gaza Strip for 17 years and that these attacks have exposed its cruelty. In other “wars” (this is not a war but a genocide) the population usually has some chance of escape, here no, the blockade prevents leaving the Strip.

In 2007, the year in which Hamas won the elections in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a stalemate and inhuman blockade: it closed the passage, by land, sea and air, of people as well as goods, literally isolating the more than two million human beings inhabiting Gaza, a collective punishment contrary to international law and in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since then, the population has been attacked daily, with three massive bombing operations in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014.

In 2012, the UN published a report warning of the humanitarian crisis situation that Gaza was suffering as a result of the blockade and warned that in 2020 this place would be uninhabitable, but the world looked away and the blockade remained.

Before October 2023, this was the reality of a blockaded Gaza: more than half of the population of Gaza were minors, who have been denied their right to a dignified and peaceful future. About 60% lived in poverty, 97% of water was unusable, 80% depended on international aid to survive, unemployment reached 70%… and you can follow up with a long etcetera of inhuman data. Not forgetting that 70% of the population has been refugees or displaced since 1948, including their descendants, to whom the United Nations recognizes their right to return to the lands from which they were expelled by the Israelis and to the return or restitution of their properties.

Farmers and fishermen were attacked daily while they worked. The Gaza Strip was under power cuts. The only power plant was bombed in 2014, so the restrictions were continuous and amounted to only two to four hours of electricity per day. This contributed to the collapse of the hospital and health system affecting neonatal units, operating rooms, dialysis… Hospitals which for years lacked basic medical equipment such as gauze, analgesics or antibiotics. The waste water could not be treated because of the lack of electricity and was discharged directly to the sea without any treatment. To that Mediterranean where fishermen were looking for food in a limited nautical miles, also because of the blockade.

When the Marches of Return, peaceful demonstrations in front of the fence that encloses Gaza from the north, were organized in 2018, Israel deployed elite shooters who fired on defenceless civilians. In the first year of these marches, which were held every Friday, 195 Palestinians were killed, 41 of them minors, and some 29,000 injured. This is the population that now, once again, lives under the terror of bombs in Gaza.

West Bank

In the West Bank, the other part of the divided territory of Palestine, the population lives under an apartheid regime. Daily killings by the Israeli occupation army, especially young people shot in the head. Military incursions and bombing of refugee camps that have left places like Jenin or Nablus filled with horror and death, and destroyed roads, houses and public infrastructure. Arbitrary arrests, hundreds of people in prison, including minors and women. The West Bank is surrounded by a wall of more than 700 kilometers that scars the territory, despite having been declared illegal in 2004 by the Hague Court, forcing it to be dismantled.

Settlements declared illegal by the United Nations, where some 750,000 settlers live, which attack the Palestinian population, their properties, crops and livestock, are growing every day encouraged by the Netanyahu government, which has distributed weapons among these settlers, international inaction. Checkpoints, closure of territory, regular restrictions on the movement of people, incessant destruction of houses. Human rights violations are endless.

After years of hard work by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced in 2021 the opening of an investigation into war crimes committed in Palestine since 2014. It was a halo of hope under the belief that justice would finally begin to be done, but fell into self-interested oblivion. Palestinians in the West Bank have been under occupation since 1967, following the Six-Day War, something that seems not to be in the collective memory of our governments.

Another, perhaps greater, hope that has made us excited to millions of people is the lawsuit against Israel for genocide filed by South Africa before the International Court of Justice in The Hague last December. A demand initially joined by a few countries, with a timid trickle of others, but not backed by those countries with weight on the international scene.

The petition requested the International Court of Justice to order interim measures to compel Israel to a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, allow entry of supplies and an accountability.

To date, Israel has almost ignored the fact that the decisions of this Tribunal are binding on the member states of the United Nations, to which Israel belongs. However, the ICJ lacks the means and police force to actually enforce its sentences, and Israel knows this. In addition, and above all, Israel has the unconditional support of the United States, Canada, Australia, a European Union that maintains the EU-Israel association agreement despite the fact that article 2 of this agreement conditions it to respect for human rights… Support for the sale of arms and the non-imposition of sanctions…

This year we have witnessed the desperate attempts of the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, to impose a ceasefire, facing the wall of veto rights in some countries.

Israel has not only failed to stop the attacks on Gaza and the West Bank as we have seen, but has increased them and extended them to Syria, Yemen and especially this September to Lebanon in an attempt to extend the war to the whole area in the murderous Zionist delirium.

The occupation, blockade and ethnic cleansing that began in 1947, months before the creation of the State of Israel, the Nakba, bring about these sludge. And here are the true roots of the injustice that Palestine suffers.

As long as our governments continue to repeat the mantra of Israel’s right to defend itself, an insult to the dignity of the Palestinian people and gasoline for the occupier, Israel’s daily crimes and human rights violations will continue to be ignored and this genocide will not stop.

As long as our governments continue to grant total impunity to the crimes of Israel, as long as our governments continue to support with their inaction and complicit silence the system of apartheid, Palestine will continue to resist.

Until the terrible injustices committed against the Palestinian people since 1948 are reversed, until the colonial mentality is banished, there will be no peace.

Sandra Barrilaro, photographer, editor and human rights activist for the Palestinian population. Co-author of the book Against Oblivion a photographic memory of Palestine before the Nakba, 1889-1948, and author of several articles about Palestine and of the children’s album Under the Stars, Kokinos, 2001. On this occasion he brings us the following article in the Israel-Hamas conflict and the events surrounding it.

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