For the Palestinians, every day is Nakba Day

By John Wight

Into its second shocking week, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza leaves no doubt that the so-called international community is a brake on, not the driver of, human progress in our time, they have the impertinence to believe. Like spectators at the Roman Colosseum, these machine men with machine hearts are happy to spectate at the slaughter of the innocents. 

Consider, for example, current US President Joe Biden.

“Israel has the right to defend itself,” has been his mantra throughout. The clear implication is that the Palestinians do not have the same right and should allow themselves to be trampled into the dust like so much human dust, accepting the same fate of the Native American Indians and Australian Aborigines before them — peoples decimated in the name of God and white supremacy, of which Zionism is a species.

A man who wears his Catholicism and Irish heritage on his sleeve, Biden must have obviously missed the fact that Jesus was a Palestinian and that, if alive today, he would be in Gaza standing with the oppressed, not outside Gaza with their oppressor. He is also selective when it comes to his support for victims of colonialism. Just take himself down to the Falls Road in Belfast and he will be left in no doubt, based on the plethora of wall murals paying homage to the Palestinians and their struggle, whose side the Irish people are on today.

“And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time,” Jesus said according to the New Testament bible.

Based on the outpouring of pro-Palestinian protests that have taken place in every corner of the world since Israel’s latest round of slaughter began, the peoples of the world have never stood more firmly with the Palestinians. This is no surprise when we consider the timeless sentiments of French thinker Albert Camus: “It is the job of thinking people not to side with the executioners.”

At the time this is being written, the death toll in Gaza stands at 197, including 58 children, 34 women, with 1,235 injured. According to the Israeli authorities, 10 of their civilians have been killed, among them two children. The difference is staggering, reflective of the desperate attempt by a poor but unbowed people to fight off a veritable juggernaut, one funded and backed to the hilt by Washington and its allies.

Regardless of the difference in casualties on either side, however, our common humanity dictates that the unity of the dead is absolute. The living, though, is another matter. Here we are obliged to take sides on the question of justice versus injustice, oppression versus resistance. This is especially the case when it comes to the injustice that has been the lived experience of generations of Palestinians in service to the brutal and merciless settler-colonial project that is Israel.

Nakba Day is a poignant occasion every year, but this year, for obvious reasons, it is particularly so. The point that should never be lost is that for the Palestinians, the Nakba never ended, it merely changed form. The occupation of the West Bank, the settlements, home evictions, the prisoners, refugees, the expropriation of more and more Palestinian land, economic sanctions, the siege and regular murderous assaults on Gaza — all of it together amounts to one never-ending Nakba for a people whose only crime is that they dare exist.

That the Palestinians have yet to receive one day of justice from those who claim the mantle of leadership in our world — based on nothing more substantive than the false claim they represent a higher culture, civilization, and values — accords this particular people the status of an inconvenient truth.

It is a truth that exposes the rank hypocrisy that exists within the diseased heart of Western liberal democracy. When its mask of civility and probity is removed, what lies beneath is a savage beast whose hunger for blood can never be satiated.

As to its well-fed, perfumed, and tailor-suited apologists, their unending attempt to convince us that this is the best of all possible worlds is met by an emphatic "No!" in the shape of the suffering and resistance of the Palestinian people. Moreover, it reminds us that history is the story of the roads not taken.

In this vein, imagine a world in which Hannibal had taken and destroyed Rome instead of being defeated and Rome going on to destroy Carthage in 146 BC. Imagine a world in which Spain's attempt to defeat the Aztecs between 1519-21 had ended in defeat rather than victory. Imagine if Europe's attempt to colonize and enslave Africa had failed, culminating in the former's ruination rather than that of the latter. Imagine if Napoleon had defeated Wellington at Waterloo in 1815 instead of vice versa. 

The point is that history hinges on key events, seminal moments which those involved don’t even realize are seminal at the time.

Today is just such a seminal moment. With neoliberalism and its political form, Western liberal democracy, in a crisis that has shattered the myth of its indomitability and hegemony, the world has entered an interregnum between the old and the new.

The Palestinian people and their allies represent the world to come. It is a world rooted in justice, dignity, and the rejection of the entirety of imperialism and colonialism, and racial, religious, and cultural supremacy and all its conceits.

Though they did not choose to be in the vanguard of those struggling to bring this new world into being, in the vanguard the Palestinian people most definitely are. Their struggle therefore demands the unflinching and unrelenting solidarity of those who would associate themselves with Rosa Luxemburg, when she declared: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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