Roqayah Chamsiddine
At the height of the US-backed 2006 July War, the Bush administration was embroiled in its mendacious fable of democracy-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military project had engulfed the region, and with it came a triad of parasitic influence: economic, political, and cultural.
As for Lebanon, the July War would further unmask the United States’ “Greater Middle East” project, with “Israel” acting as geostrategic enforcer and watchdog of the predatory American order. It is then, amidst the unimaginable ruin and desecration, that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would declare that “What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East.”
In collusion with the United States, “Israel” would sow death in Lebanon; invoking a policy of open impunity, then-Minister of Interior Eli Yishai demanded the South be “turned into a sandbox”—and that is where a 2,000 lb, US-made MK-84 guided munition would turn the southern village of Qana – where Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine at the wedding feast of Qana (John 2:1-11) – into a scene of bombing and blood. Gaza is now the stage of a thousand Qanas, sanctified by American weaponry.
Dutifully urged on by the Biden administration, “Israel” tightened its noose around the Gazan “ghetto” after the events of October 7— depriving its inhabitants of food and water, even extending its violence into the West Bank where thousands of men, women, and children have been kidnapped and disappeared behind Israeli prison doors.
Maha Hussaini, the director of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, described death as being “closer than water” in Gaza. Palestinians in besieged Gaza have endured their pain for over one month, where they sift through the rubble, bare-handed, in search of their children, their fathers, their mothers; those who are intact, those who are fragments, and those who cling on, miraculously, beneath cement blocks.
In Jabalia, Gaza’s largest, and most densely populated refugee camp, “Israel’s” bombing campaigns pursued every sign of life in order to inflict the most pain: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” Israeli Occupation Forces official Daniel Hagari said. In the aftermath, children’s corpses were raised to the sky, the fruits of “Israel’s” cowardly barbarism and the Biden administration’s unwavering support. And so, Palestinians in Gaza now face the Israeli entity like Hussain in Karbala. “After 13 heavy days, God blessed us,” wrote Huda, “[we] found the bodies of my father, mother, sister-in-law, and nephew.” On one street, a father carries the remains of his children in separate bags, on another a mother cries out that her children died hungry, and among the ruins that surround their Merkava tanks, Israeli soldiers dance on their graves.
In Gaza, the propaganda that has long guarded the shared extermination, neocolonial doctrine of both “Israel” and the United States has come apart, thread by thread. Habituated to the contemptible Western mélange of credulity and media indulgence, “Israel” can no longer control the narrative over their initial blitzkrieg, nor the wider occupation—not even with the craven intervention of the Biden administration. In glaring contrast, as a feeble looking Biden delivered his rare address to the nation, declaring that the United States “holds the world together”, Palestinians wrapped their children in white shrouds and presented them to the world in fields of mud, debris, and blood with resolution in their eyes. Not even “Israel’s” campaign of targeted assassinations of Gaza’s journalists and their families could prevent the nakedness of its savagery from being made manifest. Here, before the world, the Israelis are abiding by ritual and “mowing the grass” in Gaza, but Palestinians will not kneel.
In spite of their confidence, the Biden administration and “Israel” have miscalculated the impenetrability of their public relations campaign, which clothes itself in doublespeak and chilling euphemisms for mass slaughter. The invocation of the meekness of “Israel” and its “right to self-defense” had all but stifled any reference to Palestinian self-determination—but now, Gaza has become a siren call for the global rank and file, who continue to disrupt and bring cities to a standstill. And on their lips is not just Gaza but “Palestine”. The administrative pomp and circumstance masking “Israel’s” obscene occupation is crumbling.
Palestinians are agents of history in “Israel’s” war of attrition, and they are refusing to abide by their occupier’s terms; instead, they are consciously aware that history will absolve them and their Resistance. The United States’ colonial outpost cannot hold, nor can it continue the slow genocide of the Palestinians without a price. Editorial sympathy for the Israeli worldview is being challenged by a new generation which will not abide by the Zionist adage that “the old will die and the young will forget”. For every Qana, there is a Bint Jbeil; for every Jabalia, there is a Beit Hanoun. For every death, new life will emerge, more resolute than the last. Despite what has unfolded, Gaza still stands. The “Middle East” of the American imagination—of domination, fealty, and Arab humiliation—has fallen, and a new, more defiant region has risen in its place. Long live the new world.
C-Al Mayadeen