A Palestinian's plea for life of her people to be valued by humanity

Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank is not an isolated atrocity... history is littered with similar inhumane examples of the savagery mankind is capable of. Cambodia, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Nazi Germany, the list is endless and spans centuries.

But I refuse to believe that this blood lust defines what it is to be human. The vast majority of people on this planet are not savages caught up in a frenzy of hate and horror, but too few are prepared to rage against the madness and meekly look the other way in the face of the unspeakable cruelty our unscrupulous governments unleash on innocent victims.

Subject good people to enough brainwashing, mind control and coercion and many will lose their sense of humanity and embrace the hate of their programmers… the Israel Defence Forces being one such incarnation of the evil men can be equipped to carry out.

What the IDF is being commanded to do in Gaza by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government in Jerusalem is genocide, cultivated by 75 years of state conditioning that has created a bestiary of monsters with no respect for human life and a lust for human suffering.

Not all have succumbed to the dark side of the force but the machine itself is pure evil and resistance is futile, so the massacres in Gaza become just another day’s work for the dehumanised automatons carrying out the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.

There’s supposed to be a four-day ceasefire at the moment but despite the allowance of some humanitarian aid into Gaza and prisoner and hostage exchanges, the IDF killing and torture has not stopped… died down perhaps, but it’ll return with a vengeance later this week and the purge of Palestine will be there for the United Kingdom and United States to ignore once more.

Yesterday in Cardiff humanitarian crusaders from across Wales gathered at Central Square for a Welsh National March For Palestine to echo the Senedd’s condemnation of Israel’s terror campaign and call for the UK government to add its weight to growing cries for a permanent ceasefire and international resolve to bring justice for the persecuted Palestinian people.

A host of speakers – including MP Beth Winter, MS Peredur Owen Griffiths, singer Charlotte Church, Cardiff councillor Ali Ahmed, Betty Hunter from the Cardiff Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Swansea doctor Ahmad Sabra who, with his family, became trapped in Gaza when the tragedy was unfolding – all railed against the genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel has ramped up over the last month but it still seems far too few British citizens are motivated to call out our senior politicians in Westminster and demand they take the humanitarian path to a permanent solution to this crisis 75 years in the making.

The words from the speakers at Central Square were extremely heartfelt and very emotional, particularly those from Church and Sabra, but Palestine Solidarity Campaign activist Lujane Hamzeh summed up the plight of the Palestinian people perfectly.

“I’m sure you’ve all seen too much of us at this point,” she began. “But just like the Palestinian people and the Palestinian land, I refuse to disappear. We, the Palestinians, are a people that refuse to disappear.

“The world tends to forget that we are seeds. The more they try to scatter, the more they actually sprout. The world forgets that just like our olive trees, we are deeply rooted in our land, our heritage and in our identity. No force will succeed in uprooting the Palestinians.

“You have cut the electricity and fuel off of Gaza but you’ve lit a fire in every one of us. You’ve ignited flames across the world that you will not be able to extinguish. You may have cut the food off of Gaza but you’ve left the world hungry for justice.

“You may have torn Gaza into pieces, but look at what you’ve created. Just like the kufiyya, you’ve woven and united people globally that will stand taller than the buildings you’ve demolished.”

Hamzeh is just one of many Palestinian activists desperately trying to express the horrendous suffering the children and civilians are enduring in their homeland but it’s an incredibly difficult battle when the mainstream media around the world shuts its eyes to the slaughter and churns out Israeli propaganda about Hamas hiding in tunnels under hospitals and a false-flag attack on 7 October.

Israel condoned the 7 October attack by leaving the most secure and technologically-advanced border on the planet wide open for the insurgents to cross, it sent an IDF combat helicopter to gun down hundreds of its own citizens at the Nova music festival and then blamed it on the Hamas insurgents who, I contend, are under the command of Israeli puppets manouvered into position before the 2006 elections took place. No elections have been allowed there since.

The tunnels? How does Israel seem to know so much about them? The simple answer is that they constructed them after Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in 1967 and held the territory under full military occupation until 2005 when it withdrew its settlers and soldiers before the elections.

The incursion on 7 October was staged for one reason, and one reason only, to provide the justification to the world that Israel had the right to “defend itself” by carrying out a merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The negotiations with Hamas, the phoney ceasefire now, all part of the smokescreen… just the propaganda to make genocide seem palatable to the world.

In Cardiff yesterday Hamzeh continued: “You may try to censor our voices and control the media, you may try to sell your propaganda of self defence to the world. But a state built on terrorism and violence is weak in the face of humanity, justice and the truth. History doesn’t like the oppressor, haven’t you learned your lessons. You may have tried to silence Gaza, but you’ve turned the world into Palestine.

“All I can hear are the protesters marching, all I can see is the Palestinian flag waving, all I can feel is the strength of our unity. So you may bomb us, you may torture us… but your brutality has awakened the world’s humanity. The flame of freedom will never be extinguished.

“So let’s get this straight. It's not a conflict, it’s occupation. It’s not a war, it’s ethnic cleansing. It’s not fighting, it’s genocide. It’s not complicated, it’s western imperialism.”

Her speech was not long but it came from the heart and her words need to be heard above all the phoney-baloney propagated by the world’s mainstream media.

“I cannot close my eyes because all I can hear are the children crying,” Hamzeh concluded. “All I can hear are the mothers screaming, all I can perceive are the fathers praying and I am drowning in the silence of a complicit government.

“So you tell me, is it really complicated or is it just another Middle Eastern child… because I thought we said all lives matter.”