Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Palestinians under Israel’s 24/7 aerial bombings and food, fuel, medicine, and water obstructions after the Hamas attacks on settlers of October 7, 2023, are also victims of relentless propaganda. It targets their humanity, portraying them as unworthy victims, via distortion or omission. In contrast, Israelis are worthy victims. Case in point is the mainstream press coverage of released Israeli hostages in the recent ceasefire that hides Palestinian prisoners’ stories. This ideological campaign reflects the American two-party
In Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro (Verso 2025), Palestinian writers deliver a counter narrative. It humanizes their personal and political lives during Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza and military aggression in South Lebanon and the occupied West Bank. Readers will find a corrective to the Israel First ideology and policy that Uncle Sam and ruling classes in Western countries such as Germany facilitate despite growing opposition from the American and global public watching the carnage on their cell phones.
The ideology of Zionism driving Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians comes into sharper focus in the book’s second-longest essay by Mary Turfah. She quotes Frantz Fanon on how Israeli settler-colonial ideology justifies massacres of the natives: “a systemized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity.” The parallels to the American genocide of native peoples are relevant, e.g., depicting the indigenous people as so-called savages to justify Europeans’ murder of them and subsequent land theft.
Mariam Barghouti fleshes out Israel’s annexation campaign in the West Bank, in part a relentless series of attacks from the settler state’s military technology, such as the “quadcopter.” It’s a networked attack device that operates autonomously and in concert with other units in drone swarms. The colonial corporate involvement in Palestinian displacement, dismemberment, and extinguishment is for-profit barbarity, a capital investment in punishment, and a feature of the Israel-U.S. military-industrial complex. Barghouti describes how Palestinians resist in general strikes (labor uprisings that began in the 1930s) and other forms of protest in the occupied West Bank. Never underestimate the importance of the Palestinian labor force to Israel’s economy.
Yara Hawari fleshes out that bloody colonial history in “On Israeli Settler Colonialism.” The British Empire had centuries of practicing barbarity against the dark-skinned people of the Global South before the establishment of Israel. As the American Empire rose from the ashes of World War Two to replace its British predecessor, U.S. involvement grew in the Middle East.
Tareq Baconi reveals crucial elements of resistance in Gaza. We turn to Hamas, whose deadly offensive against Israeli settlers on October 7, 2023, seemingly appeared out of thin air. However, there’s a relevant past, which Baconi reveals in “Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance.” The balance of forces between the occupier and occupied underscores the intractable nature of maintaining an asymmetric governance structure that perpetuates a colonial status quo.
Mosab Abu Toha contributes a harrowing account of the Gaza onslaught and the search for a safe place. Palestinian children like his son, who should be polishing soccer skills instead of learning to avoid Israel’s onslaught. Toha’s son also watches Israeli soldiers humiliate his father and other young Palestinian men in their trek to the Rafah border seeking safety from the Gaza genocide. One need not rear kids to grasp the horror of such mistreatment.
Eman Basher shares her experience teaching English in Gaza. Readers discover Basher’s
students’ remarkable appetite for education amid Israel’s 24/7 attacks that destroy pupils and schools. Basher’s meditation on speaking to students in America, the leading supplier of armaments to Israel’s military, is heartbreaking.
The ecocidal dimension of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is the special focus of Nina Lakhani. She contextualizes the campaign to destroy the farmland and plant life of Gazans. This scorched-earth strategy has parallels to that of the U.S.-backed Guatemalan government against the Ixil Mayans during the 1980s. Separating peasants via force from their land is a time-honored strategy of conquest.
Palestinian novelist, writer, and activist Susan Abulhawa’s essay dovetails with Lakhani’s. Abulhawa opens with Palestine’s role for migratory birds. Israel’s savagery has decimated this major global flyover connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe. Her thoughts on the dignity of animals such as donkeys, a key form of travel in the rubble and ruins of Gaza after two-plus years of Israeli air strikes, are quite thought-provoking.
Noor Alyacoubi fleshes out the excruciating realities of the constant search for sustenance from flour to clean water as Israel imposes forced malnutrition and starvation in Gaza, ongoing since the recent ceasefire. The most vulnerable Palestinians—the infirm, old, and young—suffer the worst. Intentionally starving a population violates international law, but U.S. backing allows the Israeli government to act with lethal impunity against Palestinians.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor. She shares a medical perspective on the injured and killed Palestinian civilians suffering at the hands of a U.S.-Israel liquidation strategy. The parallel to an American military strategy in Vietnam a half-century ago, “drain the swamp to kill the fish,” comes to mind. Small wonder my Vietnamese student called it the American War.
Huda J. Fakhreddine takes up Israel’s assassinations of hundreds of journalists covering the Gaza genocide. One fallen soul is cameraman Samer Abu Daqa, who bled to death when Israeli forces prevented medical responders from attending to his wounds. She wraps up with the concept of Palestinian alone-ness in the poems of Mahmoud Darwish after the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982. More recently the poet Hiba Abu Nada refers to him and Palestinian aloneness. An Israeli airstrike killed Nada, age 32, in her family home on October 20, 2023.
Israel’s ongoing detainment and punishment of Palestinians “risks normalizing violations of human rights in an environment with little accountability,” writes Malaka Shwaikh. She details the experiences of young men from Gaza, a harrowing account of arrest and subsequent torture. Israeli settlers and soldiers are the perpetrators, dripping in sadism. Democratic and Republican politicians approve U.S. taxpayer funding of this carceral system.
Ahmed Alnaouq shares the trauma of losing 21 family members in an Israeli air strike. Survivor’s guilt shadows him. “Life and death had become indistinguishable,” he writes. That sentence speaks volumes.
Survivor’s guilt also torments Lina Mounzer. In her essay “The Bombing of South Lebanon,” she redefines that term as survivor’s shame. It’s in part a result of her absence from Israel’s bombing of South Lebanon and a means, suffused with suffering, of realizing that the trauma of genocide is a collective experience and one that puts to shame global humanity. Mounzer is warning readers of the danger that the Gaza genocide means for the future to the world’s people
Editor Bhutto conducts a far-ranging interview about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to end Israel’s colonialism and, more recently, genocide against Palestinians, with Omar Barghouti. “BDS strategies are the most effective form of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle,” according to him. The pro-Palestinian movements in Italy and Spain, along with the Gaza flotillas trying to bring humanitarian aid to the besieged populace, are proof of the power of collective action against an illegal and immoral order.
Acclaimed cartoonist Joe Sacco’s takes biting looks at the U.S. foreign policy behind Israeli barbarity. The central role that the Biden White House played in the Gaza genocide is vital to save for the historical record. Visuals such as political cartoons in the hands of an artist like Sacco complement the writers’ contributions.
Maryam Iqbal is a journalist suspended from Barnard College in NYC for her involvement with the student uprising there against Israel’s Gaza genocide. She explains how that experience shaped her political consciousness as an active participant in the encampments on campus. The school and NYPD crackdown there spread to other universities where students’ mobilized pro-Palestinian support across the U.S. These are ruling class attempts to strengthen the “new anti-Semitism” that equates criticism of the Gaza genocide with hatred of Jewish people. Iqbal’s essay is the best I’ve read on the student-led pro-Palestine uprisings roiling higher education in the U.S.
Ahmed Masoud’s poem “To Khalid,” a pal of his slain in an Israeli air strike, is a heartfelt tribute. Recalling their time together as lads is a moving memory of childhood in all its innocence. It’s a double loss for this poet.
Yara Eid’s Afterword highlights a four-letter word binding Gazans to each other and their land: love. Theirs is a collective experience. “For me, love is central to our survival as Palestinians,” she writes.
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