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The Aftershock of Trauma: Reflections from Gaza in August, 2022

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It’s pretty much the same news, the same incidents, the same feelings of helplessness and weakness. Everything is familiar. From the children mercilessly killed to the melancholy over youths whose lives have been stripped away due to trauma, to the women leaving their children behind . I feel drained writing repeatedly about the situation in Gaza. Nothing has changed. The most recent aggression on Gaza finished just yesterday, but the pain is ongoing. I’m sure the ones who physically survived,  lost something inside, or maybe died in spirit. We try to resist all that, the traumas, the overwhelming losses of our loved ones. We’re people, after all. We need to ask for the aggressions to stop. In fact, we need to ask Israel to stop what it is doing, which seems to feel impossible to admit for so many Westerners. Israel wasn’t provoked at all, yet they massacred us shamelessly this time.

Read more:The Dark Face Of The Occupation, What Lies Behind It In Gaza ?

Soad Hassona was pulled out from among the rubble after her house was hit in an Israeli airstrike.

Just few days ago, I woke up to the news that Gaza was under attack. The first thing I thought of was: there’s nobody to help us. And sadly, it’s true. I’m thankful this intense aggression lasted only three days, but who will bring the children who died back to life? Who will return Khalil Abu Hamada, an only child delivered after15 years and six cycles of in vitro fertilization to his parents? Imagine that after 13 years of marriage and many attempts of pregnancy you will have a baby. Then Imagin that after 19 years from his birth you will lose him! Who will heal Soad Hassouna, who graduated with a high GPA and was recently recorded talking about her aspiration to become a dentist, from the traumas she’s now enduring because her house was hit in an airstrike? She was actually found in the rubble. She was pulled out, but whether she will survive is unknown. She also lost her brother.

Just yesterday, a mother from Gaza missed her only son after 13 years of marriage.

Gaza children are familiar with war Calamities

“My little daughters vividly recall the previous aggression”, says Deema Aydieh. “They opened the windows before I even told them to. They knew that this way, our home would be safer; the glass wouldn’t break and shatter around us.

“They prepared their prayer clothes, and asked me to pack our important files and things, so we wouldn’t forget them if we had to leave out of sudden.

“For a moment, it felt as if my little daughters had gained, too rapidly years of wisdom, although their dreams and wishes were very simple. They just wanted to be safe. All they wanted to protect were their favorite clothes and toys, and the money they had saved from the previous Eid, which they planned to use to purchase school supplies. Their childhood is mixed with both innocence and wisdom, things that don’t often come together. But, it’s Gaza, the land of paradoxes, she added”.

Gaza kids
6 sisters lost their mother and father in a missile strike.

It’s crystal clear that such aggressions, in other words, become painful traumas very familiar to children in the Gaza Strip. I, myself, am a five-years-old survivor and can recall the time I stood before classroom window and saw the flesh of human beings flying in the air during an airstrike by our Israeli occupiers. I remember the shock and the cold that wrapped my body. In that moment, everything turned white in my mind, everything stopped, and there was only emptiness. Life didn’t really matter after that, because I realized how cheap we are to the rest of the world. That was during the second aggression on Gaza. I remember it happened when I was at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school. It’s ironic to me that they’re considered shelters, while Israel targets children, civilians, mosques, and even schools. In an aggression, there’s no safe place in Gaza, and Gazans know this very well.

Israeli aggressions against Gazans leave them traumatized

Palestinian children in Gaza live in trauma without an end!

Once, when I was talking to a therapist, Cheryl Qamar, I asked if it’s true that all Gazans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. She replied that any human who experiences these types of incidents will probably suffer from PTSD, so there’s a strong likelihood that all Gazans do. She added that we might be suffering from CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) as well, as a result of experiencing prolonged or repeated traumas.

I remember when my friend Raja visited Gaza, and asked me what it was with Gazan girls and boys, because we were all afraid of cats. I’m not sure, but I think it’s because trauma manifests itself in us through fears and phobias. I also noticed it, as I used to be afraid of cats and many other things too, but thanks to God, I’ve overcome many of my fears and I am trying to overcome the rest.

Gazan youths question their reality and fate, living under the Israeli occupation

I wonder whether killing civilians in times of aggression is allowed, even if for self-defense purposes, and I wonder how it was okay to kill five-year-old Alaa Qadoum. Alaa was only a small child, and was never a threat to anyone. She was supposed to register for kindergarten this year.

I wonder how killing Daniana Alamour, a 22-year-old student at Al-Aqsa University, is in any way beneficial to Israel. Daniana was the same age as me and lived in my neighborhood, studied where I study. We both loved art, yet she was smarter and more talented, and made a collection of beautiful portraits before she died and hung them in our neighborhood’s gallery. If killing her is okay in the eyes of Israel, then killing me can be highly expected in future aggressions.

I wonder who should be called a terrorist—Ashraf Al Qesi, who didn’t hesitate to allow the Palestinian Civil Defense to demolish part of his house in order to rescue his neighbors, after nearby buildings were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, or the one who is shooting at civilians from the sky.

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

The pain Israel causes Gaza is not only during aggressions; it goes beyond that. Israel has imposed a lockdown on us since 2007. People here aren’t allowed to travel except for specific purposes like illness and education, and even though this should be the case, I have met many Palestinians who met the required conditions and who have not been allowed by Israel to leave Gaza. Some of them tried in vain many times to get Israel’s permission.

Read more: Best Prescription For Wooing Voters In Israel: Spill More Palestinian Blood

It hurt me quite deeply when my friend Hossam Abu Shammala said that he wanted to travel abroad, because that way he’d be living a dignified life. He meant that living in Gaza is a form of humiliation, and it’s hard to admit, but it’s true. It takes unbelievable strength, courage, spirit, and resilience to be able to live in such a place. Our fate as youths isn’t even known. When we look at the future, all that we see is utter chaos. It’s not that we’re inherently messed up or lost, it’s that the situation here makes us miserable. Yet, we try to resist it and make the best out of it. We try to live happily in the world’s largest open-air prison, not knowing what crime we have committed. We try to find hope every day, and we manage to do that. Sometimes it’s really hard, but we are survivors.

 

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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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