When the story of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is told, it will tell the story of how it cut electricity, food and water from the “human animals” and how Israelis mocked the starving thirsty children with videos of running water taps and lit lightbulbs 🧵
It will tell the story of how Israel used unreliable technology and massive collateral damage - bombs “focused on destruction, not accuracy” - to bomb sleeping children next to their sleeping parents, accused by some algorithm of being Hamas
It will tell how families were forced to flee their refuges once, twice, three even four times, fleeing due to evacuation orders that made no arrangements for them and pushed them into areas that were then bombed by the IDF in a perverse theatricality of insincere “humanity”
It will show how doctors, ambulances, humanitarians, journalists, civil defence, were killed, sometimes executed, kidnapped or disappeared with impunity. It will talk of Hind Rajab. It will tell all the stories.
It will show the stories of soldiers justifying the murder of children, claiming today’s enemies are the children they did not kill a decade prior. It will show them looting and mockingly wearing the underwear of the women they killed or displaced
It will show how vast areas of Gaza, universities, hospitals, mosques, houses - the lifelines of civilian life - were systematically destroyed in controlled explosions to create a “buffer zone” and push people inward, closer and closer together, so they could be controlled
It will show the videos of Palestinians fleeing through invisible death zones where anyone is marked as a target. Palestinians with white flags, elderly women, even Israeli hostages, all killed because they crossed an invisible line in the sand
It will tell how once enough people where crammed in a tiny portion of the Strip, and against the express order of the ICJ, Israel launched a brutal assault in these overcrowded streets, inevitably leading to mass casualties
It will tell how people where then told to return north, and how Palestinians marched proudly back to their destroyed homes, seeking to rebuild, only to then be trapped there by yet another blockade of food and water
It will then tell the story of how Israel sabotage aid delivery and replaced it with a system of mass displacement and extermination masked as aid delivery. How Palestinians were told if they wanted food they’d need to walk the death zones once more and go south or starve
It will tell how starving Palestinians were not given baby formula or blankets. How they were given uncooked food and no means to cook it. And how the efforts to break the blockade to deliver this formula were met with force and mockery
It will tell the story of how Israel concentrated a starving population among 4 distribution sites and then when starving people rushed the sites, they were shot for acting “aggressively”
It will tell the story of how Israel propped up gangs to repress this starving population and then used their actions as justification for opening fire. It will show how the people who got food were then displaced again, forced into ever-shrinking concentration areas
It will tell all these stories and many more that are still yet to pass. It will talk of the apartheid and occupation. It will tell the story of how it got to this. And those who enabled or supported it will never be forgiven
The story *will* be told. The depravity is simply too great. It will be told in the blood and the charred skin and muscles of dead Palestinians. It will be told in the unforgiving fury of those who survive this. The story *will* be told. And no lie will ever be good enough
And once the story is told, then you will have to run. Because you will be hunted. Because the crime is too great and accountability will chase you.
The story will be told and you will not be forgiven.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet and how it perverts decolonial epistemology in service of coloniality. It argues that there is a parallel “non-Eurocentric” history of indigeneity where Jews worldwide are the colonised “natives” of (somehow) 8th C BCE Arab “colonisers”
But this is a manipulation. The very concept of indigeneity and nativeness emerged because of notions that can’t be simply transposed to every single defeated / expelled people in history. The Gauls were not “indigenous” to the Roman “colonisers”
Indigeneity emerges from oppressive racist discourses proper to European modernity, not as vindications by the colonised. The Inca and the Haudenosaunee did not want to be “Indians”. The Herero and the Zulu did not want to be “Natives”
This works only if you draw an artificial line between Iron Age Israelites and 20th century Zionist Jews and not between those who lived in what is today Palestine in ancient times and those who live there today.
“Name 3 ancient Israelis” is just as much a “gotcha” if you don’t
We get that when we say Ancient Egyptians there’s been a lot of changes since the Pharaohs. Hellenisation, Arabization, etc. We are able to recognise these differences and changes over time. It’s the same with the original inhabitants of what is today Israel-Palestine
You could tell the history of the Canaanite people, how some Canaanite tribes became the Israelites, and how over time, just like the Ancient Egyptians, they Hellenized and Arabized until they got to be modern-day Muslim and Christian Palestinians and the Old Yishuv
This kinds of argument is why it is important to understand Israel as a colonial endeavour. There is a reason why the demographics of the area look like this and it is not because of any kind of “Palestinian apartheid” 🧵
Gaza’s current form is the direct result of the Zionist plan to “cleanse” the land of Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcefully expelled to Gaza from other parts of Palestine. After Egypt’s intervention, an armistice line separated Gaza from Israel
But these hundreds of thousands of refugees were living sometimes a couple of kilometres away from their old homes and the area was sparsely populated and not under clear Zionist control, so often they could simply walk into Israel and tend their crops or recover lost property
Genocide is not and has never been defined as “killing everyone in sight”. Since 1948 genocide is a crime that can be committed without a single person dying. This popular notion comes rather from exceptionalising the Holocaust’s Final Solution as the only “real” type of genocide
But the extermination camp is unique to The Holocaust not to all genocides. It’s just that popular imagination is so tied up to the image of The Holocaust (and the Holocaust Movie) that we feel anything “less” than The Holocaust can’t be genocide bc it “cheapens” the term
The reality is that it is the other way around. Holding all genocides to the Holocaust’s blueprint (or to any other genocidal blueprint) is a disservice to victims of genocide. Genocide is not a Nazi trademarked process, it’s to the nation-state what cancer is to humans
To give you an idea how the IDF lies, a year ago, The Guardian published a piece quoting an IDF Spokesman that the IDF saw “no difference” between Hamas’ TV network and its military wing. The IDF quickly issued a “clarification” denying this. But now they want to normalise it so: