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From the Womb of Suffering, Gazans Speak Out

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Intro

Once upon a time, a beautiful, prosperous nation lived in harmony. The land the nation lived on was small in expanse, but its placement was tremendously convenient for its people. It connected three continents and was on the coast as well. Besides these major advantages, the land was blessed by God, it’s safe to say it was also the land of spirituality and holiness. With such conspicuous features, it was only natural that the land fell victim to attacks and attempts of colonization repeatedly. Till one wicked made-up state succeeded in stealing the homes of hundreds of thousands of residents, and in stealing many more lives.

Read Also: Visiting Jerusalem: Would It Be A Mere Dream For Gazans Living Under The Israeli Military Siege?

Alas, this is no fairytale, this is the reality of Palestine. And today, I will lay in front of you the bitter reality of perhaps the most oppressed area in Palestine: the Gaza Strip.

After Gaza managed to bring failure to “Israel”’s attempts of occupying it, the colonial state opted to control entry and exit from Gaza by land, air and sea. 

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2006. The blockade has devastated Gazans, affecting every aspect of their daily life as they have spent 15 years living under occasional –and vicious– attacks and a constant economic crisis. that set up barriers between their dreams, and the means to achieve them.

Writer’s Input

I write this from Gaza, and allow me a personal input; life in Gaza is depressing. After all, how can happiness carve a space for itself amongst 15 years of siege, restrictions of all kinds, aggressions, assaults, murdered dreams, and false hopes?

Many adolescents have dreams of becoming footballers, singers, musicians, etc. However, with little to no means to support said dreams, very few Gazans are able to indulge enough in their hobbies to turn them into careers. And the older youths feel lost and drained. Most young people with a higher education can’t find work due to the low job opportunities that is ultimately caused by the blockade.

Lost Childhood 

This blockade on Gaza has been punctuated by devastating wars carried out by Israeli missiles that have impeded Gazans from obtaining access to their dreams, as thousands of Palestinians were bombed. One of the most brutal wars is Israel’s offensive war in 2021, in which children orphaned, mothers widowed, and several families were wiped off the civil registry.

So many Gazan children were buried under the rubble with their aspirations due to Israel’s war. So many of them are supposed to graduate from their universities and build a new life. Alas, Israel’s blockade along with wars have crushed all the dreams.

“I Dream”, Gazans’ Dreams Under Israel’s Siege

Here, I met three citizens of Gaza; a talented mini-Messi, a poetic Jane Austen, and a motivated Jon Snow. Despite knowing first-hand how it is like to live in Gaza and bear the loss of your grand dreams, I still posed questions to these individuals about their experiences of life under Israel’s blockade. The questions are as follows: What does the word blockade mean to you? What impact had the blockade had on adolescents and youth such as yourself in Gaza? How do Israel’s war crimes, especially the recent attacks in May 2021, widen the barriers between Gazans and their dreams? Can you envision a free Gaza?

The Messi

I sat with the 14-year-old Sami Amara, a youth with a powerful strike that rivals that of Messi’s. He navigated rationally through my questions and defined the blockade as a large prison imposed by ‘Israel’.

“The Israeli occupation’s blockade hasn’t affected us as youth but our activities too, trying not to raise our voices and convey our message to the whole world,” Amara further expressed the impact of the blockade.

On a mental level, my interviewee was brave in his recalling of the wars and their impacts. He expressed that he is still traumatized by Israel’s attacks, his melancholic words were, “All of us lived the horror of war, fear, and the feeling of loss”. The war not only separated us from our dreams, but also left us in fear of not knowing whether we’ll live to convey our message as Palestinians, to the world.” 

As for his answer to the last question, Amara was a little bit optimistic about the blockade coming to an end. “It’s more than a dream and we’ll achieve it one day. We will be able to participate in international forums. We will be able to convey our message and talk about our suffering. One day, we’ll lead normal lives. We will be happy and feel safe.” He ended.

The Jane Austen

My second interviewee is a rather timid, and soft-spoken one. She was feeling too shy and I opted not to take a picture of her in order not to make her uncomfortable. She is the 13-year-old Gazan girl Mays Saed. She loves drawing and reading. Success in Tawjihi –last year of high school in Palestine– and having a small bookshop are her ambitions. “The blockade is a suffocating siege, like a monster that sticks its claws into people’s chests, tearing them and their dreams apart.” She eloquently defined the blockade.

When asked about the impact of Israel’s blockade, she listed numerous things, such as the increasing unemployment among Gazans, and the deprivation of youth of their dreams. My interviewee thinks that the latter made adolescents such as her “age way before their time.” She also added, “For how the blockade and Israel’s attacks on Gaza affect us, many of us wait our whole lives to achieve even a fragment of our dreams, but alas, even our efforts turn to dust.”

As for her thoughts on a “free Gaza”, she said, “We all –common people, traders, children, will be over the moon. So many elderly people will finally achieve their dream of praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque before passing away. The economy will be reignited. The unemployment rate will be reduced. And I? I will finally spread my wings to fly high in the vast sky of freedom.”

The Jon Snow

Jon Snow is one of the most supportive foreign journalists of Palestine. His courageous coverage of the brutal 2014 attack on Gaza made many Palestinians love him, and my third interviewee is one of them. 

The blockade doesn’t only affect those who were born when it happened, its affects extends to those who were born before it. This is Enas, 24, a graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza. She works as a news writer. She’s a dear colleague of mine, and we were having a lovely conversation until I asked her what “blockade” meant to her. With a look of sorrow accompanied by a sigh, she answered, “Israel’s blockade of Gaza has turned Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison. We are like caged birds, creatures that have the illusion of flying freely, but still are restricted in reality.” 

When asked about the impact of the blockade, she confirmed that the conditions in Gaza are restricted, telling me that if we lived in an unrestricted area, she would “feel connected to the world. I’d be free to go wherever I want and do whatever I want. I would get a master’s degree in Literature. This is what I really want to do in my life, but I can’t do it here in Gaza. We don’t have such a program.”

Dejectedly, she told me that no one comprehends what war means unless they experience it. Enas wants to travel, but she is afraid that Israel may launch an attack again on Gaza, and her tripedition stops her every time, opting to stay with her family instead. “If the Israeli occupation’s blockade ends, I will, no doubt, visit Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem.” she concluded.

Till When?

I was lucky to interview optimistic Gazans with a rearing soul, but so many have had their souls broken, so many think that we’re going to stay trapped like wingless birds forever, never to fly; not even in our suffocating cage. And how could they not be pessimistic, when the world continues to turn a blind eye to Gaza and its suffering?

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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