Genocide

Since October 7, Palestinians have been trapped in an Israeli-made circle of hell. No one seems able to stop the destruction of their society in Gaza. Palestinians have endured way beyond normal human tolerance, have been displaced multiple times with nowhere safe to go, and now live among rubble and mass graves in brutal conditions unfit for human existence.

The numbers are staggering. At least fifty thousand Palestinians (mostly civilians) have already been killed directly by Israel’s war — over 2 percent of the Gazan population — at a rate and scale unprecedented in the twenty-first century, in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, where half of the population are children.

Two million Palestinians have no regular access to clean water or food and face high levels of acute food insecurity. Those who survive spend most of their waking hours trying to ensure basic necessities of life, as they live in tents and makeshift humanitarian camps that are regularly bombed by Israel. Every day is a struggle to stay alive.

Ninety-two percent of housing units in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Whole cities and refugee camps wiped off the map. Most school-aged children have no access to formal education, with 2,308 educational facilities destroyed. The education system has ceased to exist, and all universities have been destroyed. Very few hospitals are fully functional, with many totally destroyed. One million children need mental health support and are permanently scarred by the war.

Through relentless and indiscriminate bombardment, Israel has deliberately destroyed Palestinian society in Gaza and made it uninhabitable. That was the plan: the main war aim of creating conditions for mass Palestinian flight and expulsion and permanent Israeli occupation.

Genocide is the intended consequence of Israel’s war. It is Israel’s vengeance for October 7. You can see that in the behavior of Israeli soldiers and hear it in Israeli songs about burning villages and wiping out Palestinians: everyone, not just Hamas. No amount of censorship, denial, and silencing by Israel and its allies (like the BBC) can erase the fact of genocide.

This is the main reason Palestinians are protesting. They are beyond fed up with mass death and being a disposable people and pawns in the colonial schemes and imperial fantasies of others.

Hamas Militarism

Demonstrators in Gaza have also identified Hamas as a problem and demand that it leaves the Strip. For those outside of Gaza who have not lived through this genocide, this demand might sound strange: How could Palestinians be so openly critical and mistrusting of the main resistance group in Gaza? A Hamas departure is, after all, what Israel wants as punishment for October 7, repeating the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s withdrawal from Beirut in 1982.

This demand, too, is an effect of the war (though a similar slogan was chanted by demonstrators in Gaza in August 2023). October 7 has left Palestinians totally exposed to Israel’s genocidal wrath, without any protection for civilians in Gaza. As Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s destruction, Hamas forces have taken refuge in the tunnels they built under Gaza. This practice of protecting fighters but not people is a clear source of popular resentment against Hamas.

Another dramatic example of mass slaughter came last week when Benjamin Netanyahu broke the cease-fire agreement with Hamas and the Israeli army killed over four hundred Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the biggest massacre of children in one day since the beginning of the war. Demonstrators last week held up signs saying: “The blood of our children is not cheap.”

Here Hamas’s ineffective response to yet another Israeli massacre was again evident. It shot two primitive rockets at Tel-Aviv that were intercepted by the Iron Dome. What angers Palestinians is that such military tactics have zero chance of stopping the war on Gaza. They also raise many questions about the nature of Hamas’s military resistance and its effectiveness. Demonstrators have spoken openly about the failure and futility of such resistance tactics, exposing Palestinians to retributory harm rather than deterring Israel.

Another issue for the demonstrators is the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. In light of past experience with the Gilad Shalit deal, Hamas’s calculation was that hostage-taking would compel Israel to negotiate, lift the siege on Gaza, and free all Palestinian political prisoners. But that gamble failed. Netanyahu has neutralized any potential political leverage the hostages could have had in affecting the course of the war.

In fact, the opposite transpired: Netanyahu has used the hostages to prolong the war. They now function as Netanyahu’s main pretext to kill more Palestinians in Gaza, to go for “total victory” against Hamas, and to ensure that Gaza is pacified for generations to come. To neutralize any political leverage the hostages might have on his war conduct, Netanyahu has faced down Israeli public opinion and elite pressure to go for a deal and end the war. But he has succeeded in that, and his government is now more secure than ever.

It is obvious that neither Hamas rockets nor Hamas hostages have acted as a mechanism for alleviating the occupation or improving conditions in Gaza. No amount of theatrics during Hamas’s profoundly damaging hostage release ceremonies can hide the fact that the war has been a complete disaster for the Palestinians. Those ceremonies, which Hamas exploited as a crude show of force, became another pretext for Israel to resume the destruction of Gaza.

By arresting thousands of Palestinians since October 7 (ten thousand languish in Israeli prisons today), Israel has also preemptively gutted any real value that a hostage-prisoner exchange might have. To bring this point home, after every exchange, Israel arrests even more Palestinians than it releases.

As their chants show, Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza understand all this and have made their own rational determinations about the effectiveness of indiscriminate military resistance against Israel. In the rubble of their cities and homes, what they see is not Hamas’s touted victories but the senseless destruction of social existence in Gaza that will take decades to repair. What they demand is for any emerging politics in Gaza to center their own needs and interests as a matter of national urgency.

The Right to Live in Gaza

Finally, the protests affirm something basic: the everyday rootedness of ordinary people in Gaza, their clear wish to remain there and rebuild their decimated homeland. Palestinians want the war to end so that they can have the chance to put their broken lives back together, however difficult.

On the cusp of annihilation and expulsion, only collective action and solidarity can heal Palestinian society and overcome Gaza’s new nakba. To repress or distort that is to box Palestinians back into failed political formulas — and risk Gaza’s future.

Though their challenges seem insurmountable, many Palestinians are now searching for new anti-colonial strategies of emancipation that would safeguard their future in Palestine — away from the spent politics and factionalism of their current leaderships, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.