This week the world marked the one year anniversary of Israel’s genocide on Palestine. To think that we have spent 365 days watching a genocide unfold in the palms of our hands whilst our leaders, those in the West and leaders of so called Muslim states, have done absolutely nothing to stop it. They have proactively funded and supported it. Thinking about the atrocities we have witnessed in this period can, maybe should, lead anyone with a functioning heart into a deep state of contemplation and possibly depression. Are we complicit? Can we do more? Why won’t our leaders listen to us? How did we get here? After all, every year we commemorate the end of the Great War on November the 11th with the phrase “lest we forget” printed all over our newspapers and on poppies sold in every market place in every corner of the country. We teach about the horrors of the World Wars in our schools and still we find the majority of our media and politicians cheerleading this probable genocide and wonder if there is actually a cognitive dissonance or wilful evilness at play.

I’ve been troubling myself with the language of remembrance and eraser. On October the 7th this year almost every politician in the western hemisphere made a comment or statement on their social media about the “attacks” or the “war between Israel and Gaza”. News channels used the same language in their attempts to “inform” us about what had occurred. The BBC led with the audacious documentary “We Will Dance Again” erasing almost 200,000 dead Palestinians, a probable genocide and an illegal occupation from their reporting. To be fair they did release a statement which had embedded into it one small, but significant fact: Israel is not allowing international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza. Our correspondents are not able to verify the facts on the ground, to independently record for history the events unfolding, or the scale of the human suffering.  Recognising the occupation forces do not allow journalists into the “warzone” they still continue to drip-feed the narrative fed to them by the Israeli government, whilst claiming to be fair and impartial. Would any other country in the Middle East, or anywhere in the Global South, be afforded the privilege of denying journalists entry whilst also being trusted as a reliable source?

War is defined as “a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country.” Gaza is not a country. It is a small piece of land that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. When Hamas were elected, in 2007, Israel intensified its siege of Gaza by blockading all the exits points, so nothing can go into or come out of Gaza, from land, air or sea, without the explicit permission of the Israeli state. Its an occupation. In accordance to international law, and recognising that main abuses of civilian human rights take place in occupied territories, the Fourth Geneva Convention states Civilians in areas of armed conflict and occupied territories are protected by the 159 articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Civilians are to be protected from murder, torture or brutality, and from discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, religion or political opinion. Israel is openly telling the world that it wants to obliterate Gaza. On October the 14th 2023, President Isaac Herzog claimed “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible, [sic] We remember, and we are fighting … our soldiers are part of a legacy of Jewish warriors that goes back 3,000 years.” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant threatened genocide against both Palestinians and Lebanese people back in November 2023 by saying: “I am saying here to the citizens of Lebanon, I already see the citizens in Gaza walking with white flags along the coast… If Hezbollah makes mistakes of this kind, the ones who will pay the price are, first of all, the citizens of Lebanon. What we are doing in Gaza, we know how to do in Beirut.” In a documentary produced by Arte, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich says he wants a “Jewish state,” adding that, “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.” He also said that the starvation of millions of Gazans is “Justified and moral” In January 2024, Law for Palestine released a Database with 500+ instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide. This is not a war.

As the above examples highlight, from the mouths of the top tier of government, Israel’s intention is to not only to eliminate Gaza and its indigenous population, but to expand beyond its current occupying borders into Lebanon (they are already occupying the Golan Heights in Syria). This intention was shared by general genocide himself, Netanyahu, when he addressed the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 22, 2023. (note the date, before October 7th) unveiling a map of the ‘new Middle East’ without any Palestinians. Israel has no intention for peace, it wants to expand and solidify its occupation. An occupation it claims is a God-given right. To suggest its antisemitic to call out these self proclaimed Jewish men, committing a genocide in the name of their religion is delulu. Israel is a theocratic (illegal) state and its openly using religious references such as Amalek to justify its ethnic cleansing and desire for expansion in the Middle East. Palestinians did not pick the race, ethnicity or religion of their occupiers, so its disingenuous and duplicitous to accuse them, or those supporting them, of antisemitism, if they highlight the context and the beliefs of those supporting their annihilation. Why is it always ok to highlight that Palestinians (and therefore Hamas) are Muslims (although Palestinians are Christians, Muslims, Jewish and of no faith) but somehow its a problem to highlight that Israelis are Jewish, even as Judaism is a precondition to citizenship in Israel, and this current government is made up of far right Jewish extremists. These tacit acknowledgments of one side, whilst dehumanising the other, is rooted in western imperialism and racism.

When the media and politicians speak about the people (settlers) of Israel, they are referred to as “citizens”. However when speaking about Palestinians they specifically speak about women and children, erasing all Palestinian men from their care and accounts. Why are Palestinian men given less regard than Israeli men? Why is it only Palestinian women and children that need saving? What is the unsaid implication on and about the lives of brown Arab men in these statements? At what age are we accepting Palestinian male lives irrelevant? 12, 15, 18? Or is the suggestion that all Palestinian males are inherently violent and their lives don’t matter. Its always striking how we are constantly told that women and men are equal, that women don’t need saving, that men have feelings too, and yet, whenever the opportunity presents itself to paint an imperial ideology on none white skin, Caucasians leap to it. Again, the racism speaks for itself. If we had a modicum of honesty in our reporting of these blatant facts, if we used the language of Human Rights, the Israelis would be referred to as the occupying forces. Their “citizens” are in fact settlers of this western colonial project called Israel. Palestinians, men, women and children, would be recognised as indigenous to the land and therefore resisting their illegal occupation.

On resistance. Who qualifies as a hostage? According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, at the end of June 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 9,440 Palestinians in detention or in prison on what it defined “security” grounds, including 226 minors, the youngest of whom is a 12 year old girl. We have all seen the horrific images coming out of Gaza, Palestinian men and women stripped down to their underwear, blindfolded and crammed together in the back of trucks. We have even witnessed male hostages (or as you might be accustomed to referring to them, prisoners) being raped with metal rods by men in the Israeli Occupation uniform. Every Human Rights organisation has condemned this violence, has confirmed the systemic abuse in Israeli prisons, including of children, and have urged Israel to end incommunicado detention and torture, but you wouldn’t know that listening or reading the majority of western media outlets or our government representatives. The only “hostages” spoken about in our media are the Israeli ones. How have we normalised those who are living on occupied land, who have stolen the homes of Palestinians, and who are having parties over-looking the worlds largest open air prison, as the victims? Israel is a settler colony. It was formed after the Nakba in 1948, with the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and land. To populate it, Jews arrived from Europe and America. I won’t go into the history of Israel’s formation here, but feel free to check out this post.

I’m tired of always having to centre, and even consider, the feelings of those who consistently oppress and dehumanize us in all my conversations. I’m tired of even hearing the prefixes of condemnation and apologists about hostages before feeling safe enough to speak about the atrocities that are happening daily in Gaza, the West bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. To me it’s audacious to even say “Israeli victims” when speaking about the genocide the illegal state is carrying out. Israel is a settler colonial, apartheid state. It’s indecent to expect me to have sympathy for the people who are oppressing my people. Every single adult living in Israel knows that they are living on occupied land. Almost all of them have served in the Israeli Occupation Forces and the majority of them support the ongoing genocide in Gaza, including the mass starvation of a besieged civilian population. Settlers, by definition, are living on land and in homes they have stolen, or have been stolen. If you’re over the age of 16 (I’m being generous because even my five year old can tell you stealing is wrong) you are complicit in the occupation. Referring to Brown indigenous people as prisoners whilst referring to the white colonisers as hostages is a misappropriation of language rooted in white supremacy.

I’ve mentioned before how much I hate the term “Islamist” it makes no sense other than to demean and subvert Muslims and Islam. Similarly, words like “jihadi” are common in our lexicon but what do they really mean? Jihad is a beautiful concept in Islam which refers to an inner conflict, why do English speaking lawmakers get to decide what an Arabic word means, simply to corrupt it and shift its meaning to suit their agenda. The distortion of language is one of the well documented steps in the slippery slide of dehumanising a population. As a British Muslim, this makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe. It forces me to be secretive or worse, ashamed, about aspects of my identity, in case its misunderstood to a hostile public. Contaminating language in this way is deliberate as is proscribing groups who challenge our notion of freedom. Is it democratic to suggest that only some (read white) people really understand the principles of democracy. If Israel ( or Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic) can vote for a far right party, which openly promotes genocide and ethnic cleansing, then they why can’t Palestinians vote for Hamas, a political resistance group, given that people living under occupation have a right to resist? It is worth noting that most countries across the globe recognise Hamas, its only Australia, The European Union, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States that consider it a terrorist group. Why is the Taliban (who fyi were not voted in by the majority of people in Afghanistan!) described as extremist Muslims but Likud isn’t an extremist Jewish government. The 2018 Nation State Law which affirms that: “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” and it establishes “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labour to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” is clearly, as most critics describe it, racist and an Apartheid law..

Our governments attempts to curtail critical thinking and debate are also obstructing our rights to free speech. Trying to ban protests, criminalise placards, banning TikTok, censoring our language (think shadowbans on social media) and most recently Meta, trying to ban the red triangle as it might suggest support for Hamas. The red triangle is part of the Palestinian flag and conflating the two is a desperate attempt to continue to create an association between Palestine and terrorism. Why is the same treatment not afforded to the Star of David, which has literally terrorised Palestinian bodies by being branded onto them. Israel will never defeat Hamas. Hamas, as much as anything else is an idea, an idea of freedom and of liberty. You can’t bomb that out of the people you oppress. It is always worth remembering that Nelson Mandela was once considered a terrorist, in fact his name remained on the US terror watch list until 2008! If we believe in democracy, then surly we believe in its principle for all people. We can’t allow our governments to use our taxes to delegitimise, overthrow or proscribe certain groups because they challenge our deeply rooted ideas of white supremacy. To expect a native, ingenious, brown population to simply give up their land, without any resistance, to a European settler community, is the definition of racism and white supremacy. We see through the performances of decency, the corruption of language, the politics of both-sides, and recognise the fact that some believe people of colour should always make space for white colonisers.