Over the past year, Israel’s genocidal violence has officially killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Estimates put the real death toll at more than 180,000. Simultaneously, the Israeli occupation forces have repeatedly carried out bloody assaults on the West Bank, massacring more than 740 Palestinians. Last month, the colonial regime expanded its violence into Lebanon, where on September 23, more than 500 people were killed. In two weeks, Israel has murdered more than 2,000 Lebanese people.
The Israeli army has flattened whole neighbourhoods in Gaza, digging out roads with bulldozers, bombing infrastructure and utility installations, and pulverising residential buildings. Health and educational facilities have been obliterated – water stations, electricity plants and solar panels destroyed. In short, Israel has tried to wipe out all that sustains life in Gaza.
Palestinians have been ordered to “evacuate” the vast majority of the strip and are being crowded into 16 percent of its territory. This same strategy to empty the land has been applied to some areas of the West Bank and now in Lebanon.
People are told they can return once Israel’s “military operations” are done. But we all know that the slaughter is meant to clear the land for colonisation. It happened before – during the Nakba of 1948 – and the Palestinians were never allowed to return to their homes despite a United Nations resolution demanding it. That is why Palestinians will not leave.
To some outsiders, the enduring Palestinian attachment to their land may seem difficult to understand. It is especially incomprehensible to the Zionists who expelled so many of us, hoping we would just move elsewhere in the Arab world and assimilate. But the Palestinian people have not given up their rightful claim to their land for more than seven decades now.
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