A Year of Horror: Palestine’s Cry for Humanity

Reflecting on Netanyahu’s expanding colonial terrorism since October 7th.

I was watching MSNBC this weekend—another round of commentators sitting in their cushioned chairs, reflecting on the anniversary of October 7th. What struck me, though, was not what was said but what wasn’t. They spoke about Hamas with such fervor, with such clear disdain. To them, Hamas was not just a militant group but something almost biblical—something that needed to be wiped from the earth as if this alone would bring peace. But there was no mention, not a whisper, of the horrors Netanyahu has inflicted. No mention of the Palestinian dead, whose bodies have piled up for decades as the world averted its eyes.

It’s sickening. Not once did they acknowledge how Netanyahu, a right-wing authoritarian, has used October 7th as a pretext, an excuse to not just bomb Gaza into oblivion but to cleanse it, to erase it. And now it’s Lebanon. And soon, perhaps, Iran. They say this is about defense, about safety, but there is nothing safe about ethnic cleansing, nothing defensive about a massacre. What I watched wasn’t journalism; it was propaganda, dressed up in the veneer of concern, soaked in hypocrisy.

I wonder how many people in those boardrooms, on those sets, truly believe what they’re saying. I wonder if they look into the faces of the dead, if they understand that their silence, their refusal to speak on Netanyahu’s crimes, only allows this cycle of violence to continue. They paint Hamas as the evil to be eradicated, but what about the evil of occupation? What about the evil of apartheid, of the siege that has turned Gaza into a cage, a death trap?

And yet, Netanyahu is treated like some flawed leader who’s just trying to protect his people. It’s astonishing to me how we can ignore the atrocities committed in the name of “defense,” how easy it is to ignore the dead when they’re Palestinian, when their faces aren’t deemed worthy of air time.

As of July 2024, over 10% of the Gaza Strip’s population is presumed dead or missing. Sit with that.

I have no interest in debating who is right or wrong. The sheer scale of death—Palestinian death—renders such arguments meaningless. What argument can be made in the face of entire families reduced to dust, homes turned to rubble, lives buried beneath a history of oppression that refuses to loosen its grip?

I will not sit here and pretend that the devastation wrought by Netanyahu’s government, or by Israel as a state, is anything but a continuation of a colonial project—a project that has long disregarded Palestinian existence as if it were incidental, as if it could be erased and rewritten. The world may try to distort it, to make it palatable, to wrap it in the language of defense, but we know what it is. And what it has always been.

Palestinian children stand amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Al-Bureij camp, Gaza following Israeli airstrikes. © 2023 Mohammed Talatene/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

This is not a war. Wars require equals. There is no parity between an occupying force with a fully-armed, Western-backed military and a people confined to open-air prisons, their homes blockaded, their every movement surveilled. For years, Palestinians have lived under siege, stripped of their dignity, their agency, their land. The oppression has not been subtle, and it has not been brief. It has spanned generations, leaving a trail of suffering so long that it is almost beyond comprehension.

I will not argue with anyone about justifications. The justification was never there to begin with. You do not bomb civilians into submission and call it defense. You do not destroy hospitals and homes and declare victory. You do not hold an entire people hostage and call it security. The death and suffering imposed on Palestinians over decades—long before that day in October—speaks for itself.

And yet, year after year, Israel is given carte blanche to continue. Backed by the world’s superpowers, by money and might, they stand unchallenged. Meanwhile, Palestinians are asked to justify their very existence. Their resistance is framed as aggression. Their cries for freedom are silenced with more violence. They are expected to endure, endlessly, with no reprieve.

A Palestinian child was carried to al-Nasser Hospital, pulled out from rubble. At the hospital his aunt recognized him and started screaming his name. BELAL KHALED @BELALKH

On the anniversary of October 7th, all I can think about is how disgusted and horrified I am at a world that would let it get this bad. After all the atrocities we've seen committed by Israel, the open brutality, the displacement of a people with a history as long as memory itself, and the hypocrisy that drenches every act of political theater in the West, how could there still be any debate? I have watched as this nation that dares to wave the banners of freedom and democracy clamps its jaw tight when it comes to Palestine.

The United States sends Israel its weapons, its aid, its supposed diplomacy—but it sends no truth. No morality. No decency.

This nation has always had an astonishing capacity for cruelty and an even greater capacity for forgetting its own sins. This is the same nation that, not so long ago, carved up this continent and sold bodies like they were wheat. The same nation that tells me I should be grateful for whatever scraps of dignity and freedom I’ve managed to cling to, as if freedom were not my birthright but something to be negotiated.

I suppose what I have come to understand, with a clarity that shakes me to my core, is that the United States, with all its claims of progress, simply wants Black and Brown people to die. It’s the hatred of other. The fear of losing power. This is what holds the nation, and so many others, in thrall to the idea that Israel’s actions are defensible. Israel is a proxy for what the U.S. has decided is necessary.

My heart aches for Gaza, it trembles for Lebanon, it bleeds for the whole Middle East. My heart stumbles over the weight of this fractured world. It breaks for those of us still clinging to decency, trapped in the belly of this beast we call a world, where evil sits at the dinner table and we are forced to swallow it whole.

I struggle to find the words to comprehend what the U.S. and Israel have done, they slip through my teeth like smoke. All that’s left is this scream stuck in my throat, raw and waiting for some god, any god, to raise a hand and strike down the ones who carved this sorrow into the world. There is no safety in a world where an entire people can be erased, where their pain is not only ignored but justified. The point is not who is right, but who is human. And until we start treating Palestinians as fully human, no solution, no peace, no justice will ever be found.

A poem I wrote reflecting on Netanyahu’s terror: