By Susan Abulhawa
March 27, 2024

The following article first appeared in the Electronic Intifada, March 18, 2024. 

A literal holocaust is being perpetrated against Palestinians.

Israel is burying people alive en masse in their homes, terrorizing them beyond imagination, bombing indiscriminately, denigrating, demeaning, humiliating, starving, torturing, raping and robbing Palestinians.

Israel is forcing Palestinians from their homes into abject filth and fear, their whole lives, their histories, memories and hopes for a future blown up and filmed for Israeli public entertainment. Soldiers and civilians alike cheer and set music to the ineffable suffering of Palestinians, then post them on TikTok for fun.

Israeli media air snuff videos featuring the torture of Palestinian hostages. It is a human abattoir on a massive scale inside a ghetto of degradation, filth and fear, live streamed and sponsored by the [Joe] Biden administration with U.S. tax dollars.

Air drops of ‘aid bombs’ 

Simultaneously, the Israeli and American architects of this horror pay lip service to “humanitarian aid” and perform acts of absurd political theater and deceit designed to assuage mounting public outcry while steering their genocidal project to its profitable colonial conclusion — vast gas fields and prime coastal real estate devoid of her native people. (tinyurl.com/6fvbss7m)

Demeaning and incompetent “humanitarian airdrops” of meager food, often falling into the ocean, were little more than publicity stunts. The most recent attempts deployed aid boxes with failed parachutes that fell like missiles onto hungry Palestinians, killing them instantly, effectively becoming “aid bombs.”

Now this unholy genocidal alliance wants to build a “temporary aid pier,” ostensibly to open a maritime corridor for U.S. aid deliveries. Construction is expected to take approximately two months.

They’ve not commented on what Gaza’s already starving population is meant to do during those two months. Nor have they responded to the obvious question: Why not send aid through existing land corridors?

All the U.S. has to do is drive its aid trucks through the Rafah crossing. It’s actually that simple.

Other aid trucks aren’t getting in because Israel bombs them. Are we to believe the U.S. is afraid its own aid trucks would suffer the same fate?

The absurdity, hypocrisy and frank dishonesty is not lost on most of us. Whatever the reason for this pier, it has nothing to do with getting aid to Palestinians.

If the U.S. wanted to prevent Israel’s engineered starvation campaign in Gaza, it could do so in the proverbial heartbeat.

It must be said that our public rage is what underpins the change in political rhetoric and political sleights of hand. It is the collective force we display in the streets and on the ballots.

The ruling elite feels our growing unity and power in every speech we disrupt, every banner drop, every direct action and every instance where we confront the miserable status quo that a small group has created for the majority of humanity. In fact, it is our moral duty to inconvenience, disrupt and expose Zionists and their supporters everywhere.

The information gatekeepers have deployed all the usual mechanisms to control public discourse. Mainstream media fell in line with every Zionist lie, even after they were exposed as lies.

They’ve failed to challenge Israeli propaganda, no matter how mythical or incoherent. Their headlines and opinion pieces continue to paint Israel as a victim by manipulating language or printing outright fabrications.

‘White-man flavors of oppression’

The so-called “free press” speaks and writes the same verbiage, as if they all share a singular colonial brain.
Social media giants have tweaked their algorithms to censor Palestinian content and ban popular accounts.

Congress is bearing down on free speech under the guise of confronting antisemitism, effectively joining forces with ruthless Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federations of North America to doxx, harass and destroy the lives of activists who dare to speak up against Israeli apartheid and genocide.

At this moment in history when we bear witness to a new holocaust, our politicians are holding hearings against a Palestinian literature festival and university campuses across the country that do not actively engage in the Zionist agenda of silencing popular dissent.

At a moment when the president of the United States is circumventing Congress to send billions of our tax dollars in weaponry, cash and other gifts to Israel while it commits genocide, Congress is concentrating on banning TikTok, because young people know and share too much truth.

The ruling class believes it can quell the global public’s moral impulse with these usual mechanisms of suppression and gatekeeping. The Democratic Party is counting on its base to fall in line with the threat of another Trump era.

Ultimately, we have the power to free our imprisoned minds from their propaganda; from the shackles of a two-party system; from a most undemocratic government that answers to a wealthy minority, not the masses, the overwhelming majority of whom want a ceasefire; and from the convenient divisions they impose upon us.

We have the power to create the world we want, one where our government serves the welfare of the nation, not the greedy ambitions of the few.

We have the power to choose morality instead of allowing ourselves once again to be cornered into the binary of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two white-man flavors of oppression, with the former being outright genocide.

Allowing Biden to serve another term will signal the moral destitution and tragic helplessness of the American people to register a minimal objection to an ongoing holocaust. A second term for Biden will make it clear that the ruling class can do anything it wants to us and to the world, no matter how vile or destructive, and we will remain slaves to the choices it engineers for us each election.

This is our world, and we can take back the reigns of our collective destiny. We can choose life.

We can choose to tread gently on our tortured planet; to reject their endless wars; to divert our public dollars away from the top 1% into our collective wellbeing and quality of life; to empower our young people, create community and have faith in each other; to dismantle the infrastructures that keep us ignorant and divided.

The world we want is possible, and it begins by acting now for the long-term future, even if it means short-term pain for the next four years. Ensuring that moral dissent prevails means a definitive loss for the Democratic Party, no matter the alternative.

Bolstering of third-party alternatives would be the most welcome side effect in electoral politics.

Susan Abulhawa is a writer and activist. She is a founder and director of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.