Israel’s terrorism

The Orwellian language of the Israeli government is not going to prevent us from seeing the barbarism it is organizing in the Gaza Strip. They want us to become blind and deaf, to believe that Gazans — all of them without exception or judgment — are nothing more than a dangerous threat. They seek to justify the unjustifiable: mass murders of women and children, innocent civilian population, attacks on ambulances and hospitals, the use of chemical weapons and violation of all norms of international law. They can try to spread the idea — by land, air and sea — that the Palestinians are all terrorists, but we have eyes and ears, and we are watching their biblical and vengeful criminal attacks in real time.

In my neighborhood, posters have been plastered on walls with the faces of the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. But if we wanted to put up photos of those murdered by Netanyahu, all the streets of Barcelona would not be enough. Netanyahu’s push towards annihilating nothingness — which does not intend to destroy the jihadist organization but rather the inhabitants of Gaza in order to annex it — is clearly an invasion as despicable as the one committed by Russia in Ukraine. But Arabs do not deserve the same compassion and in this case, the executioners present themselves as the victims, indeed the only victims of the conflict, as journalist Gideon Levy said in a video.

Read Minor Detail by Anadia Shibli, the Palestinian writer who was to have awarded a prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair and was shamefully canceled by the organization. Without instructive speeches or the worn-out language of those who show solidarity with the cause frivolously without having any idea of the complexity of the situation, you will find in this short novel a clear picture of what it means to be born without land, without peace, without even humanity because in the eyes of those who have military force, you are not even a person.

You will also be able to understand the tremendous scope of colonization: it blocks access to the words and information needed to construct the story of one’s own history because the victor erases all traces of the elements that could have preserved memory. Now we are witnessing this process of erasing the truth of the victims in real time. The Netanyahu government intends for the entire international community to buy its lies and manipulations, and for us to see the Palestinians as people who deserve to be exterminated. If we allow ourselves to be deceived, we, too, will have become accomplices to their state terrorism.

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