History did not begin on October 7th
As Israeli leaders prepare to spin yet more tendentious propaganda in defence of their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and their naked attempts to steal more land for their settler colonial state, we must always remember; there is no justification for Israel’s actions.
Dawn rises on yet another October 7th. Not the one that is supposed to have emerged out of nowhere last year, untethered to a historical reality of oppression. Not the one that is supposed to have been a single act disconnected from nearly a century long continuum of resistance against apartheid and colonialism. And not the one that is simultaneously supposed to be justified by nothing yet justifies every single atrocity committed since.
No, this October 7th belongs with its siblings across the last 75 years of Israel’s brutal settler colonial regime and attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people. It belongs to the many reminders that the death cult of Zionism only exists because it is armed, backed, and supported by the West — because there is nothing more quintessentially Western a value than maintaining a colony in the Middle East by slaughtering Brown natives.
And it is a reminder that the Palestinian people have faced a year of genocide. Of sheer terrorism (one of the few things Israel can factually claim to have invented). Of abject cowardice and grotesque hypocrisy from the so called “international” legal system.
Israel, and its wretched allies, will want us to buy into its egregious fetishisation of the Hamas terrorist attack on the kibbutz last year by following its official playbook (despite opposition from the family members of the hostages, despite evidence that Israeli troops fired upon the Israeli civilians last year, despite the Netanyahu regime’s utter disinterest in securing a deal for the hostages).
But if the last year has taught us anything, it is this: it was never about the hostages. Israel’s aggression against Lebanon is further proof if more was needed on that front.
And that the correct response to a war crime, which is undoubtedly what Hamas’ attacks were, cannot be a subsequent series of war crimes, which is undoubtedly what Israel is doing.
Western supporters of Israel, including its shameless media organisations which have been told to support the Zionist genocide in Palestine no matter the cost, glibly try to sanitise Israel’s horrific crimes against humanity by stating that it “has a right to self-defence”. What lies unspoken after that most banal of statements is their assertion that Palestinians, and Lebanese, do not have a right to self-defence.
It is a grotesque echo of history, of colonisers claiming superiority through their ability to slaughter on an industrial scale, that attempts to reframe genocide.
And it must be vociferously opposed.
Israel may have a right to “self-defence”, inasmuch every group or nation-state does. But self-defence involves combatants fighting combatants. It does not involve the holocaust of children that Israel has enacted.
It does not involve the murder of 16,000 children, many of them infants; it does not involve paediatricians holding the brains of a baby; it does not involve 355 bullets fired at Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old, with her killers subsequently waiting for medics to try and rescue her to kill them.
It does not involve the systematic bombing of every single hospital in Gaza. It does not involve the murder of more journalists than the Second World War. It does not involve the utter destruction of 60% of the infrastructure of Gaza.
It does not involve Israeli Occupational Forces gleefully taking social media videos of their crimes — many of which are so egregious that they have been submitted as evidence of Israel’s genocide to the ICJ. It does not involve IOF soldiers gangraping Palestinian prisoners of war; of the country subsequently rioting because the ringleader of said gangrape was going to be arrested (he has since been publicly blessed by an Israeli rabbi). It does not involve Israeli settlers organising genocide tours to witness the bombs raining down upon Gaza.
It does not involve the invectives utilised by all genocidaires like the Israeli government, who call Palestinians “human animals”, who kill, maim, rape, pillage, butcher, and cripple Palestinians even as they gleefully await stealing more of their land.
This is not “self-defence”. This is the indefensible.
Israel has rendered the solemn promise of “never again” meaningless. It has revealed international humanitarian law to be the joke it always has been; a convenient aegis for the West to pontificate about the supposed universality of human rights whilst doing its very best to slaughter said rights and humans wherever they find them.
But people are rising up. Protests, and pressure, is mounting. And despite the best efforts of Genocide Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, as well as the UK and German governments, Zionism is flagging.
The arc of history is long indeed, but it always bends towards justice. Zionism, like every colonial ideology, believes itself to be unique, sacrosanct, unassailable. And like every colonial ideology, it will soon be in the dustbin of history, trampled over by freedom and true justice.
This October 7th is a day of sorrow. Every passing minute heralds another violation against humanity by Israel.
But one day, soon, there will come an October which won’t be accompanied by Israeli airstrikes or the smug gloating of Israeli butchers revelling in killing civilians.
It will instead be permeated with the joy of a free and safe Palestine, secure and thriving from the River to the Sea. And of a Palestinian people finally liberated from their oppressors.