As Israel’s genocide in Gaza entered the starvation phase and photos of emaciated children began to go viral, Arundhati Roy illuminated an essential fact that jarred with the heartbreaking sight:
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war. They, their journalists, their doctors, their rescue teams, their poets, academics, spokespeople, and even their children have conducted themselves with a courage and dignity that has inspired the rest of the world.
The paradox of victory in death was thus eloquently set. Because by every yardstick the world likes to use, the Palestinians of Gaza are facing decimation of a magnitude truly threatening to their meaningful presence on this earth. In Gaza, they are massacred, orphaned, maimed, hungry, thirsty, sick, defenseless, without shelter, hospitals, schools… In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they are besieged, oppressed, thieved, evicted from their land and property, and violate. And yet, they triumph even as they succumb.
It seems obscene that, in the Palestinians’ most desperate hour, their story should finally resound across continents in all its painful details, and their century-long quest for justice should finally become the centerpiece of the struggle over Palestine.
But such have been the disorienting trends unleashed by Israel’s choice to openly commit genocide and the way Gazans have collectively endured it in real time. In this last heinous demonstration of hate and vengeance, Israelis have acted out, as if on a stage before a spectating world, the entire history of Palestinian dispossession. They, their politicians, their soldiers, their newspapers, their universities, their police, their liberals and conservatives, their settlers, men and women, and even their children, have conducted themselves with a boastful malice appalling in its racism and mercilessness. In every Israeli act of cruelty, in every method of dehumanization, people everywhere get to see what we, in this region, have been witness to from the very beginnings of this wretched tale.
And so, Israel falls as it conquers unopposed. In its victory, it lies dying. It lies dying under the rubble of the myths and fables and delusions and indulgences that electrified its supporters, hog-tied its adversaries, and allowed it to tear into another people with such license. The tragedy in all this is that Zionism’s trajectory was not foreordained but it was foretold.
