Our Wednesday News Analysis | How Palestinians see their future and their past

Displaced Palestinians sit with their belongings amid the rubble of houses destroyed by Israeli bombardment in Khan Yunis in Southern Gaza. Image Credit: AFP

"Palestinians are the perfect example of history
being shaped by ideas, not guns; memories, not politics;
collective hope, not international relations.

They will eventually win their freedom,
because they have invested in a long-term trajectory
of ideas, memories, and communal aspirations,
which often translates to spirituality or, instead,
a deep, immovable faith that grows stronger, even during horrific wars."

"Ultimately, it should be clear to any astute reader that while fighter jets and bunker-buster bombs may impact short-term historical events, valor, faith, and communal love determine long-term history.

This is why Palestinians are winning the legitimacy war, and
this is why freedom for the Palestinian people is only a matter of time.

Oddly, it was Israeli historian Benny Morris who got it right, when he offered a candid prediction of the future of his country and its war with the Palestinians.

               “The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz five years ago.

               “They see that, at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may.”

Morris is right. He is correct in the sense that Palestinians will not give up, that there can never be a situation where societies indefinitely survive and thrive within a permanent matrix of racial segregation, violence and exclusion — exclusion of the other, the Palestinians and the isolation of the self.

The very history of Palestine is a testament to such a truth. If the oppressed, the natives of the land, are not fully vanquished or decimated, they are likely to rise, fight and win back their freedom.

It must be utterly frustrating for Israel that all the killings and destruction underway in Gaza has not been enough to affect the overall outcomes of the war: the ‘total victory’ of which Netanyahu continues to speak...

Read more: How Palestinians see their future and their past

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ISRAEL WANTS TO CLOSE THE CIRCLE OF HISTORY IN GAZA

Source: Al-Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/10/28/israel-wants-to-close-the-circle-of-history-in-gaza

By Lorenzo Kamel
Published October 28, 2024

In 1948, Gaza became a haven for refugees. Now it may face the same fate as other depopulated Palestinian lands.

A mother and her children are seen at a tent city in the Gaza area of Egyptian-occupied Palestine on July 23, 1949 [File: AP/S Swinton]

"Equally keen to remain is also the Israelis, and this is a further reason why anyone caring about this land and its inhabitants must try to find a way to help these two people live side by side.”

Over the past year, Gaza has become synonymous with epochal catastrophe. But in ancient times, this was a place of prosperity, a strategic crossroads known as “the way of the Philistines”, which connected ancient Egypt with the land of Canaan.

Gaza is mentioned in the inscriptions of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III (1481–1425 BCE) in relation to his first military campaign in Asia. About 2,700 years later, the famous Tangier traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-1368 CE) visited Gaza and wrote that “it is a place of large dimensions … it has no wall around it”.

In the 19th century, Gaza – under Egyptian and Ottoman rule – was not only an important trade hub, but also famous for its agriculture. Historian Nabil Badran wrote that in the 1870s there were around 468 hectares (1,156 acres) of irrigated citrus groves in the Gaza area. In an 1867 memoir, James Finn, a former British consul in Jerusalem, recalled: “Another hour brought us to Asdood [Ashdod] of the Philistines, with Atna and Bait Daras on our left. I do not know where in all the Holy Land I have seen such excellent agriculture of grain, olive-trees, and orchards of fruits, as here at Ashdod.”

During the British Mandate, Gaza was one of the 16 districts of Palestine and it also encompassed Isdood (Ashdod) – which, in 1945, had a population of 4,620 Palestinians and 290 Jews – Asqalan (Ashkelon), and some parts of the western Naqab (Negev) desert...

Read more: Israel wants to close the circle of history in Gaza

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PALESTINE LETTER: THE STRUGGLE NEVER ENDS

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/palestine-letter-the-struggle-never-ends/

By Tareq S. Hajjaj
Published October 23, 2024

I used to write about the world as I saw it and the world that I wanted to see. Now as I bear witness to the extermination of northern Gaza, I can only write about the unfolding horror.

Palestinians mourn relatives killed by Israeli attacks at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza on October 11, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

“Those who force us to rejoice at the funerals of our martyrs are their killers. We rejoice aloud so as not to give them, even for a moment, the illusion that they defeated us.

I will remind you that if we live to see it, we will cry long after liberated!

We will mourn those at whose funerals we were forced to rejoice…
We are not heroes.
No, I’ve thought about it at length.

I’ve told myself we are not heroes,
but heroes we have been forced to become.”

I have been writing ever since I was a child in school. I wrote short plays on national occasions like Land Day and Independence Day about the suffering of Palestinians. When I was 13, I wrote a play about a martyr. In one act, his family is saying goodbye to him as he is wrapped in a Palestinian flag and a black-and-white keffiyeh covers his head. His mother cries shortly after he is buried in her home, screaming that her son was murdered by Israeli soldiers in cold blood.

The funeral procession turns into a march as they make their way to the cemetery, and the crowds chant in fervent unison, repeating phrases of heroism and martyrdom.

               “Rest, rest, our martyr. We will continue the struggle.”

               يا شهيد ارتاح ارتاح واحنا نواصل الكفاح

The scene was not the product of my imagination, but of what I’ve seen my entire life, the dozens of martyrs who parted with their loved ones and were sent off to their final resting place from their homes.

The mothers and sisters who sent off their martyred loved ones with ululations that typically accompany weddings and joyous occasions surprised me when I was young. I couldn’t understand why one would rejoice at the death of their beloved. But one time, my mother went to offer her condolences to our neighbor whose son was martyred. I was young, and she took me with her. My mother sat next to Umm Shadi, the martyr’s mother, and told her about how her son Fadi was a sweet boy and that he had always brought my mother the best pigeons to raise on the roof of our house. At that moment, Umm Shadi burst into tears which did not stop the entire visit...

Read more: Palestine Letter: The struggle never ends