The war brought a very harsh genocide to our people in Gaza.
But it is also a war revealing all the meanings of the concept of the struggle against colonialism. Gray positions no longer work after the war of genocide. Either you stand with your people who are being annihilated, or you side with the other party. Simply, calmly. There is no in-between. We can engage in philosophical distillations and distance ourselves as academics from what is happening — but let me, before I speak about academia, engage with the valuable interventions made today by my colleagues and Fida.
What I want to say is that the genocide has been ongoing since the establishment of this entity. When we go deep — and Kamil pointed to this at the beginning — into everything said by Zionist leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Sharon, throughout the long list of Zionist leaderships, we will find in their statements about waging war on the Palestinians something as clear as the sun: the matter of annihilating them, and especially of annihilating their women and children. Why annihilate their women and children? Because we want to cut their lineage. Because the battle is a fight for existence between the coloniser and us. And this is not unique to Palestine. Anywhere in the world, the colonizer wants simply to erase the colonized people.
Targeting the Palestinian body as a Palestinian body, targeting the Palestinian womb as a Palestinian womb, was present in the actual practice of the Zionist gangs from their inception, from 1900, and in 1948, when this entity arose on the ruins of our people and the displacement of the Palestinian people. The killing of our people and the rape of women — these were part of the process of psychological and moral terror, intended to push the Palestinian to migration, to displacement.
The matter is a conflict between two wills: the will of death and the will of life. Our will of life is not simply reproduction — it is the continuation of a story of killing and genocide that has gone on since the beginning. Execution exists with law and without law. In April 1984, four young men from the Gaza Strip hijacked Bus 300 heading to Beersheba in the south of Palestine. The bus was surrounded. The young men were humane — they let a pregnant woman off the bus, and she was the one who reported them. The bus had been on its way to the Egyptian border. The goal, of course, was to release the prisoners.
During the clashes to free the bus passengers, the occupation claimed the resistance fighters had been killed. But later, a picture emerged of one of them, Abu Jamea, who had been captured. Eventually, the occupying army had to admit that it had killed him with a stone, smashing his head with a stone while he was alive. This is execution, simply, calmly. In the seventies, they would take a prisoner and tell him to run along the Gaza shore so they could shoot him. Many prisoners saved themselves from such executions by calling out to their families and to people nearby.
The essential point is that this is a struggle for existence, and the occupation realizes that it is either them or us on this land.
What happened on October 7th was a process of accumulation and intensification of this struggle of existence, which exploded all at once and produced a huge escalation in the process of genocide proportionate to the scale of the resistance. But the genocide existed all along. The prisoners, all this time, have also been subjected to slow execution. The will to death was always there, with or without an explicit law. The occupation's will to death is its desire to keep killing us all the time. We used to say in the prisons: they try to squeeze the prisoner and turn him into a dead person while still alive. Today, we have dozens of martyred prisoners in the refrigerators or in the numbered cemeteries. What is all that, if not execution?
Execution through medical neglect, through the denial of treatment, through subjecting their bodies to scientific experiments, through the harsh life inside detention, leading diseases to gnaw at them until they were martyred. All this is execution. All this is genocide. We are in an ongoing genocide, all the time.
A great deal has been written about this in academia. Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, for example, has always written about the question of death — how death constitutes a challenge for the Palestinian, the death the occupation wants and the Palestinian rejects through the will of life.
Today, in Haaretz — which is, of course, an entirely Zionist newspaper — one of its editors wrote a comment saying that anyone who watches the pictures of the funeral of the martyr al-Haddad, the Qassam commander assassinated two days ago, and sees the children running in the funeral, knows for certain that the occupation has been defeated, that Netanyahu has been defeated. Because there is, simply, a will of life. These children haven't seen anything of life and know nothing about the leadership. All they have experienced is war, specifically the war of genocide of the last three years. And yet they run toward life through resistance. This is also a very important matter: they run toward life through resistance.
My colleague Fida spoke at length about the law, and that is good and important. But the occupation does not need law. The occupation works on erasing us, annihilating us, and replacing us from the foundation. It doesn't see us. But as a result of the developments after October 7th — the unleashing of the very extreme right that seized this historic moment — they are not only legislating the death penalty law, today they are trying to enact dozens of laws related to confiscating land, building settlements, killing the Palestinian in the West Bank, preventing them from freedom of expression, and expelling them from the country. In the Knesset right now, this right is pushing through laws that are part of the genocide. If not genocide of the body, then genocide of Palestinian life as a whole.
The academic today is required to expose this policy. There is no gray — it is black or white. Either you side with the narrative of your people, for freedom, or you side with the other. Academia was never neutral. The "neutral and objective" academic that Western academia taught us, that it promotes to us, is a big lie. The role of the academic is to side with the issues of his people, whoever those people may be. Their people, who may be living under corrupt rule. The poor of their people, the marginalized, women. The mission of the academic is to side with the just causes of his people, of his community, of his family. And today this is a mission set before the Palestinian academic — unfortunately, not all of them side with it. This is important in the war, because if we want to build the Palestinian narrative first, to build and continue the struggle to sweep out the occupation, we must give weight to all the pain that has happened, all the wounds, all the tragedy our people have lived through these last three years, in the sense of siding with the blood that has been shed. This becomes one of our fundamental missions in life. It was very easy for the academic to engage in research and discourse three years ago. Today, the academic is in an exam, like everyone else — and there is no possibility, in this exam, of saying "I'll be content with 50, a passing grade." This is a battle, a struggle with the occupation. This is the role of the academic.
Regarding the female prisoners specifically, we bring them as a model, not in order to elaborate on their conditions, because their conditions don't differ from what happens in all the prisons. We say their conditions are bad as they are in all the prisons because this occupation, this colonizer, does not differentiate between a Palestinian man and a Palestinian woman. This too is important. In the end, the Zionist does not want our existence, and he does not want the Palestinian woman's existence even more, because she carries the Palestinian future in her womb. He does not want the Palestinian woman.
Therefore, it is self-evident that the conditions of the female prisoners would be the same as the conditions of the male prisoners. Starvation. Continuous repression, sometimes doubled, and harsh conditions. And added to that, he exploits the fact that we come from communities that are somewhat conservative, somewhat religious, somewhat patriarchal — using this to add more repression and pressure. The report given by the released prisoner Layan Nasser two days ago said that today they enter the cells of the female prisoners — specifically the veiled prisoners — male jailers, not female jailers, without consideration of whether they have put on their headscarves, whether they are dressed in a manner consistent with their veil. There is also an attempt at subjugation and psychological annihilation. The annihilation is not only physical — it also seeks to turn the Palestinian into someone stripped of will. This is very important. "I couldn't kill you in body, so I want to kill you in spirit, in morale, in will. I want to end your existence — to liquidate you, so that you do not exist." This is what the occupation aims at through its repressive and humiliating practices, of which Mohammed described an important part. I salute him for his readiness to speak, because not many people were ready to speak about the magnitude of the repression they were subjected to in the prisons, specifically related to sexual harassment and rape.
Two weeks ago, the Al-Dameer institution documented thirty-four cases of harassment and rape and put them in a report available on the institution's website. There is also a deeply moving testimony — precise, painful, and full of hurt for those who hear it — given by the journalist Sami al-Saadi from the city of Tulkarm, who was subjected to rape. He described what happened to him in the most precise detail. How he was raped, and how prisoners are currently subjected to sexual torture — regardless of whether they ultimately rape him or not, the pattern of the torture itself targets the sensitive organs, targets the entire sexual identity inside the prisons.
I just want to say this: these testimonies express the will of life.
The question of how Palestinians can produce forms of resistance capable of protecting the Palestinian not as a victim, but as a political and epistemic subject, is a thorny topic and a long discussion. It means rebuilding the entire struggle in line with what has happened in the last three years. This is a great task that falls on everyone's shoulders, without exception. It is not just writing a quick project for the work. It needs reflection on what has happened, drawing serious lessons, and inventing mechanisms that fit all the developments and transformations that have occurred.
In the history of peoples, no matter how the occupier and colonizer have used mechanisms of repression, subjugation, annihilation, ethnic cleansing, and racial cleansing, the will of the peoples remains alive, and it is the one that triumphs in the end. This is the rule. No matter how long this struggle lasts, we will triumph, and we will achieve freedom.
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