Permanent Stains

The blood of the innocent is not just on our hands, but on our souls

This is a longer version of a post I recently shared on IG. I have expanded on it with the text of a speech I gave a few months ago in Naarm at a rally for Palestinian freedom and liberation. For more posts from me, you can subscribe below.

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On the right of this photograph is a beautiful little boy named Ahmed al-Najjar. He’s pictured here with his big brother, who says Ahmed liked cats, soccer and jumping on the trampoline.

In this photo, Ahmed was alive. In tact. Happy. At 18 months old, his whole life stretched out before him, a universe of possibility.

Israel murdered Ahmed when they bombed the Tal al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah. Ahmed was one of many Palestinians sheltering there with his family after Israel directed civilians to the area, claiming it would be “safe”.

Ahmed was decapitated in the attack, a baby beheaded by Israel. Unlike the fabricated “40 beheaded babies” lie used to justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza, actual children are being beheaded, maimed and slaughtered by an ethnostate that continues to act with total impunity while claiming to be under threat. The children who have managed (thus far) to survive despite Israeli’s relentless bombardment now live with the horrendous statistical reality of having the highest number of pediatric amputees in the world, in what is also the world’s most densely populated area.

Ahmed al-Najjar, 18 months

Rather than prompt the world’s “leaders” to sanction Israel, move to enforce the ICC’s arrest warrants or expel their respective Israeli ambassadors, the bombing of refugees in Rafah has simply prompted more mealy mouthed “stern condemnations”.

Anthony Albanese, our hypocritical embarrassment of a Prime Minister, has gone from giving speeches in Parliament about Palestinian oppression to chastising Greens party Senators for attending “un-democratic” protests and causing “emotional distress”.

Even more disgracefully, the US House of Representatives voted this week to sanction the ICC for issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. They won’t sanction the state committing genocide, but they will sanction the international body seeking to exert the legal authority to stop it.

As reported by Al Jazeera, Ahmed al-Najjar’s mother, sister and brother were also murdered in what is very clearly one of countless Israeli war crimes. His father and two surviving brothers now have to live without half of their family, and the knowledge that their beautiful baby had to be buried without his head.

This is monstrous. It’s unforgivable. There is no coming back from this evil. Blood is on the hands of every single person who has acted to enable Israel or excuse its actions.

How many children need to die before Zionism is destroyed once and for all? This hubris is putting the lives of Palestinians AND Jews at risk, and creating the kind of historical stain that can never be lifted.

But the gaslighting! It is so real, and it tastes like the poison it is. The insistence that somehow this is just and right. That “this could all stop right now if Hamas just returned the hostages”.

Firstly, anyone with even a passing interest in history knows this isn’t true. This didn’t begin on October 7 and it won’t end when the last of the victims created by Israeli occupation and brutality are returned - hopefully alive, but at ever increasing risk of being buried under rubble. The people who argue this have no interest in peace. What they want is a return to the normality of ignorance and privilege. They want Palestinians to be destroyed entirely so they can stop being morally inconvenienced by their existence, but in the event that this eradication does not happen they want them to go quietly back into their cage and to keep the noise down.

It is very difficult to maintain a position of persecution and victimhood when the sounds of the prisoners paying for it while screaming for freedom keep interrupting your fantasy.

This stone cold commitment to superiority is one of Zionism’s most hateful aspects. Consider this tweet, written by a woman named Lahav Harkov and published on April 14. Lahav is an American born and raised journalist of European descent who moved to Israel when she was 17. She describes herself on her Twitter as a “proud Zionist”. For months, she has been sharing Zionist propaganda and incorrectly labelling anything critical of Zionism as antisemitic (evidently, she forgets that there are more white Christian Zionists in America than there are American Jews, many of whom are anti-Zionist and active in movements to free Palestine from Israeli occupation.)

She wrote:

“I love living in Israel. Not even hundreds of missiles can get us down. I took my kids out for an activity in a strip mall, and Israelis are out in full force shopping, eating in restaurants, kids are having fun like it's a regular afternoon. We love life.”

We love life. We love life.

Lahav - who loves life, and her children, and living in Israel - moved there as a settler in 2005. This was the same year the Israeli Occupying Force, who are more accurately described as a terrorist militia, supposedly “withdrew” from Gaza. Or, as some Zionists claim now, “gave it back”. As if it was theirs to take and/or give in the first place.

The school year in America ends in June, so it’s conceivable that Lahav may have taken up her “right to settle” exactly as Israeli militants were dismantling illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza - 21 settlements in total - and praising themselves for “giving it back”. This gotcha argument persists even now, a neat little rearranging of reality in which Gazans somehow live freely, without air, land and sea blockades and Israeli drones and barbed wire surrounding the strip. And it persists despite the Israeli government’s own admission, revealed in 2004 by Dov Weissman, that the Ariel Sharon designed the withdrawal with the specific intention of “freezing the Palestinian peace process”.

In the years since, Lahav Harkov - who loves life, and Israel and shopping with her children - has been in close proximity to relentless Israeli assaults on Gaza, overseeing the murder of thousands. By September 2023, the West Bank had recorded the highest numbers of children killed by Israeli violence - children who are not free to “love life” and for whom a “regular afternoon” is very likely to involve threats and intimidation from soldiers and/or settlers who want them dead.

For these children, a “regular afternoon” might also include having one or more of their family members illegally detained in an Israeli prison. It might even involve that happening to them. We know that thousands of Palestinians have been held under illegal, indefinite detention for years, in yet another of Israel’s many violations of international law. We know that many of these hostages are children, and that physical, sexual and emotional abuse and torture are common tactics of state sanctioned violence used against them.

But Harkov loves Israel, and she loves her children. More than anything, Harkov wants you to know that Israelis love life. That they will continue to shop, and laugh, and go to the mall, and eat ice cream and pizza and play with their children, and take them to parks where they won’t be murdered by Israeli drone strikes and their children won’t be beheaded by bombs or scream for mothers who can no longer come or whose dead bodies won’t be blasted with such force that they are left hanging on iron fences or whose pleas for help will not be heard only to have their saviours murdered by Israeli soldiers who then kill them too and whose slaughter won’t be ignored by the international media and imperialist governments or diminished or reframed as “the cost of war”, because They. Love. Life.

Just two days after Harkov posted this reprehensible gloat, the Israeli terrorist militia fired a missile at a playground in Gaza, killing 20 people - 11 of them children.

But war is hell, and if Hamas would just return those hostages this would all be over! They use their own children as human shields, so we can’t be blamed for killing them! They had it coming, October 7 October 7 October 7!

In April 2003, two years before a European-American woman named Lahav Harkov took up her “right to return” to a land she is not from and 21 years before she’d preen about how she and other settlers “love life”, Zionist extremists planted a bomb in a playground in the West Bank, injuring 20 Palestinian children.

Eleven years later and during the six week Israeli military assault on Gaza in 2014, Israeli terrorist forces launched missiles against numerous sites including the Shati refugee camp. Eight children playing in the park were killed. Across the six week assault, yet again funded and excused by the US government, a total of 1462 Palestinians were killed - 551 of them children.

Since the year 2000, a total of 2416 Palestinian children living in the Occupied Territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) have been killed by Israeli military and settler violence. This figure DOES NOT INCLUDE children killed in what is deemed “military conflict”. It does not include the 551 children killed by Israel in 2014, or the 15,000 children killed by them since October 7. Rather, this figure represents casually fatal violence meted out by a nation committed to psychopathy and fascist white supremacy on what Harkov would call a “regular afternoon” in the life of Palestinian children.

Sidra Hassouna, 12

To Harkov and her fellow Zionists who claim to “love life”, I say this - you disrespect life. You insult the sanctity of life. You are a DISGRACE to life.

Israel has become the new Zone of Interest. Complicit monsters living alongside a genocide, unconcerned by the barbarism being enacted just next door. Just going about their regular afternoon, eating ice cream and cheering on Bibi’s final solution.

And I think maybe what it is that Harkov and her fellow psychopaths really hate is that, despite their best efforts, Palestinians refuse to go gently into the night. That it is Palestinians who love life, who love it and each other so much they refuse to lay down and surrender.

I have learned more about what it means to live in the last eight months than perhaps my entire forty years up until this point - and it’s the movement to liberate Palestine that has taught me that. How much spiritual horror have we wrought as a human species in idly allowing this slaughter to continue.

Hind Rajab, 6

Did we lose a future Refaat in Ahmed? In Hind? In Sidra? A future singer? A future dancer? A future scientist? A future mother, father, human just trying their best to wake up every day and love the life they have?

Everyone one of these children carried with them a universe of possibility. They represented, as Khalil Ghibran says, “life’s longing for itself”. How can you not claim that children, all children, are the very embodiment of what it means to “love life”?

None of them, not a single one, no matter where they’re from or who their people are or what greed they are made the pawns of, deserves to be buried without their head. No one who claims to “love life” can consider such barbaric cruelty the necessary cost of defending it.

History will remember. We are all being called on in this moment to be the kind of ancestors who defend and protect life. Who show what it means to really love life and all that it offers. To see, above all and as the great James Baldwin said, that the children belong to all of us, every last one of them. How can we love life and not feel the deepest of wounds when we see mothers wailing over their children’s bodies, children brought here against all odds by the strongest of magic - the fierce urge to love them?

Rest in peace Ahmed, Hind, Sidra, Mohammed and every single one of these perfect gifts of life we have failed to honour and protect. May your memories all be a blessing - and may all of us devote the rest of our lives to earning your forgiveness.

End the occupation. Dismantle the Israeli state. Return the land to her people. Expel all Israeli ambassadors. Sanctions again at Israel now.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever.

And we will love her and all her children.