“Is there any death other than one that smashes your face with a massive concrete block? Or dying slowly, trapped under the rubble, hearing them trying to reach you but failing?
God, people usually die in their beds, warm or as elders tired of life and its pleasures. But we die before we live, we die as children who remember nothing of the world but hunger, siege, and panic.”
This is a snapshot of the Gaza genocide through the eyes and words of Marah Shamali, my dear friend from Gaza, who is currently living through the horrors inflicted by the Zionist entity and its criminal army. A recent dental graduate, she was in the process of crafting a life in the medical profession, driven by her immense compassion and care for others.
After seven displacements since the genocide began in October, she now wakes up in a “room” in the sand, covered by only a thin tarp above her head, which she shares with her parents and brothers. There is no bathroom. There is no secure source of food. The sound of bombs is the ruthless backdrop to an unfathomable, bloody hell that drags on with no sign of ending.
“We teach life, sir,” Marah tells me often, a line by Palestinian poet and activist Rafeef Ziadah. It rings and resonates in my ears when I hear it from her. Her steadfastness, bravery, humor, brilliance and unrelenting humanity radiate through the darkness of her circumstances, a warrior shaped by a necessary heritage of resistance against occupation. She now treks through evacuation zones under the threat of bombardment to volunteer dental services and care in camps housing children orphaned by the genocide.
The value of what she has taught me about sacrifice and principles is immeasurable. It has altered my worldview entirely. It has marinated and evolved in my consciousness as we speak each day and I consider how to most effectively and collectively fight alongside my comrades within a system defined by the violence of the oppressor. It has molded my perspective in thinking about our true responsibility, living in the west, watching a live-streamed genocide funded by our governments taking place before our eyes for almost a year. Above all, it has led me to a critical view and understanding of the phrase, “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.”
We shout our support for intifada and revolution, week after week at protests for Palestine in the police state of Germany, where we are beaten for it by the cops charged with upholding the German “Staatsräson” and protecting western imperialism. But truly orienting around them requires something more of us. When we look at a system that not just enables, but funds, supports, justifies and defends the actions of settler colonial violence, ethnic cleansing and a genocidal ethnostate that has perpetrated 76 years of ongoing Nakba, we must be clear with ourselves that this is not a system that can be reformed.
We must understand that as we sit in Berlin, Oslo, New York, Paris, with varying degrees of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly shrouded in the thin cloak of “democracy,” that we are demonstrating against the same system that holds us all captive. We are fighting the same forces of oppression and exploitation under western imperialism and capitalism that will come for every single one of us if and when we rise against it. And as such, we must internalize that our fighting for Palestinians and all other oppressed people is our fighting for our own people, our own families, our own comrades, ourselves – literally and figuratively, past and present, in the struggle of the masses against injustice over the vast expanse of time.
The threat of our unity, the realization of our responsibility to each other in uprising, is the reason why Germany raids our homes in the early morning to intimidate us into silence, drags us through the media for fabricated antisemitism, deflects its historical atrocities onto the shoulders of an unrelated group of people in its obsessive attempt to achieve its status as an economic and world power once again. It is the reason why Norway, where I have also spent time within the movement for Palestine, makes superficial concessions to pacify its society and hinder momentum from within the nest of riches earned off of 110 billion krones of oil fund money invested in the criminal Zionist entity. Fueled by the effectiveness and organization of the respective ruling classes in stifling and eradicating dissent, the system revs with gusto, aiming to quash and capture us in its entrapments of violence and bigotry.
Our solidarity from the belly of the beast requires of us that we heed the calls of the Palestinian resistance — for global disruption, for macro mobilization, and by orienting our organizing around a refusal to be distracted. It has been one year and 76 years of genocide, and it is our responsibility to be nothing short of consumed by a commitment to our principles in supporting the Palestinian people.
Eat and think of the people of Gaza. Drink and think of the brave resistance fighters struggling until their last breaths for justice and to liberate their land. Sleep with the knowledge that the fuel of rest is a privilege that we have a responsibility to use in organizing for Palestine and for all oppressed people around the world. Allow yourself to be changed and taught life by a people who understands what it means to live and to die for a cause.
And wake up with the understanding that organizing must begin with full clarity around the necessity of dismantling and composting the entire system, from Washington to Berlin to “Tel Aviv,” comprising the genocidal capitalist world order we live under. It must continue with unequivocal, uncompromising and unconditional support for the resistance by any means necessary. And it must ultimately lead to our answering the call of revolution from all corners of the globe, to say together in one voice:
There is only one solution,
Intifada revolution.
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