Mehvash Amin
The Aleph Review strongly condemns the ongoing genocide led by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the settler colonialism and decades of oppression of the Palestinian people. We call for an immediate ceasefire and a free Palestine. This month on our website will be dedicated to the Palestinian cause; to begin, our editor-in-chief shares her musings on various slogans, quotes and comments that stood out to her on social media during the last few weeks. We would like to continue highlighting voices of oppressed people around the world after this month as well, therefore, if you are an under-represented voice (from a conflict zone or otherwise) and would like to contribute a piece, please send it to thealephreview@gmail.com
“Bochurim (unmarried men) who use Nivul Peh cause death and leave widows and orphans.”
Nivul Peh means foul language; but what does one make of the foul laughter of the Zionists when they see pictures of dead babies in Gaza, babies shivering in fright, babies bereft of their mothers?
“Olive trees are not just plants. They are family. And if someone uproots a family member that has been there for 600 years, well, they obviously never belonged to that family.”
The apartheid state of Israel is trying to denude the Palestinian scarf, the Kuffiyeh, made of broad stripes and depictions of olive leaves and the fishing net, of its symbolism: uprooting ancient olive trees, burning boats to stop Palestinians from fishing. The broad stripes of the Kuffiyeh symbolised the ancient trade routes that traversed Palestine: they are doing their best to destroy the possibilities within those stripes with their bombs.
“The irony of becoming what you once hated.”
The Israelis are forging contradictions that they are unaware of, or have blocked out. In religious mythology, the story of David of the Jews felling the giant Goliath of the Philistines with a stone has been reversed. David has become Goliath, and the new Davids literally take on the colossal might of the new Goliath with stones. The Zionists (many perhaps descendants of victims of the Nazi holocaust*) have become the new Nazis of the 21st century and the Palestinians have become the new Jews.
“They want to expel Palestine from the territory of discussion as much as they want to expel them from their geographic territory.”
The people who wandered 40 years in the desert because they ceaselessly defied the God that allowed them to escape the cruelty of the Pharaoh are now trying to push the Palestinians into the Sinai, so they can retake the “promised” land. In History, the Philistines, the original inhabitants of Canaan, of this land, were displaced in the same way by the ancestors the Jews, shouting out their ownership with the clarion call of their religion.
The first taking of Canaan is shrouded in the mists of time, but who promised them Palestine this time around?
Apparently, not God. Many Jews around the world refuse to accept the legitimacy of Israel, saying that all Jewish peoples were put under a Decree of Exile by God and not permitted to establish a sovereign state after the first Israel came to an end in 720 BCE.
“Give them a part of your land thenn (With a map of the US)”
Laughably, it was Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian who certainly did not hail from the holy lands, who conceived of the new Zionist state in 1857. It was a political move stemming from the racial bigotry he had experienced. He was an atheist by most accounts.
In 1948, Israel was brought into existence by colonial Britain, under the machinations of Lord Balfour, who was by all accounts an anti-Semite. Perhaps he wanted as much distance as was possible between Britain and the Jews.
So in a land where Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived in peace, a new, artificial state came to squat on centuries of organically evolving history. Families living in this land for hundreds of years were ripped out in a 75-year-long Nakba to make way for brash settlers from the Ukraine, Ethiopia, the US, other parts of the world— a transplanted population.
“The Global South is for the Palestinians. The only ones who are not are the US, the UK, France and a few others that will be soon be a pimple on the back side of humanity.”
These small men—so-called world leaders— also stick their heads into the maws of contradiction by calling Israel a ‘secular democracy’, when it is land snatched from another people on the basis of a religious, therefore non-secular, premise.
Let us also not forget the role of Evangelism.
“One main strand of evangelism theory holds that the return of the Jews to the regions starts the clock ticking on a seven-year Armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return” (The Guardian).
Evangelists brook the massacre that is occurring today, even sending funds to Israel. They ignore that if Jesus, born in Bethlehem in the Palestine side of the divide, had been around today, he would have condemned the genocide. He would have condemned it by virtue of the goodness imbued in his very persona by their own religion. Evangelists forget that their Messiah was also betrayed by the Jews of the Temple. They pretend not to know that the Palestinians comprise Christians as well as Muslims, that Israel has bombed churches as well as mosques.
“Israel: promised land for Jews… as long as they are not black.”
How many know how racist and cruel this apartheid state is to its own people? In this Jewish ‘Utopia’, in 2013, for example, Ethiopian Jewish women were given contraceptive shots so that they would not reproduce people of the wrong colour—brown, black, anything but the pale colour of the hordes from European countries, from America.
“But do you condemn Hamas?”
Of course, apologists of the Artificial State, when defending the Genocide, always talk about Hamas and its invasion on October 7.
There is no Hamas in the West Bank, yet Israel has killed 7,000 Palestinians there in the last eight to ten years.
The Artificial State has been designed to bully, to silence, to supplant. And it would have continued to do so even if the victim in the school courtyard had not hit back. As they say, one people’s terrorist is another people’s freedom fighter.
“When you need to have hundreds of protests just to tell the world that bombing children is not ok, that is when you know Humanity has failed.”
This is the dystopia of the mind: when everything you believed was moral is turned on its head. It is also perhaps the first time in History when people are witnessing so many terrors in real time—an endless barrage of posts from an unceasing, brutal genocide. However, this onslaught of photographs, posts and videos has infiltrated the minds of all those who have humane values—perhaps in bigger numbers in the West than ever before—and driven them out in huge protests in favour of Palestine.
“It seems they are not real men, otherwise they would have come to the battlefield and fought like real men.”
But real men belong in the real world, not behind towering walls and domes of steel in an Artificial State.
*Did you know that the word holocaust has been copyrighted and can only be used to refer to the genocide by the Nazis? It is time to strip it of its Jewish ownership.