When resistance becomes law

The occupation of Palestine continues to be perpetuated daily through torture, imprisonment, assassinations, humiliations at 300 checkpoints, curfews, annexation of Palestinian land through settlement expansion, home demolitions, and a systematic policy of economic deprivation and cruelty. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty and the ability to choose against it. Or the ability to choose to ignore it. The Palestinian people resist because they have been deprived of everything � their freedom, their self-determination, their family, their safety and security, their sense of peace and the most basic freedoms. Every human right �sacrosanct and immitigable. And when everything is taken from you, you do everything you can to get it back.

They resist because they have endured the most brazen and depraved acts of violence and cruelty, and they refuse to celebrate passivity and non-violence in the face of those who are the most deliberately violent. They refuse to remain docile and kind when it comes to their own destruction and annihilation. They resist because they choose to be liberated from the shackles of their oppression and despair, not just to become more comfortable with these shackles. They resist because Palestine is a condition of resistance against the cruelty of humanity. Palestinian resistance is necessary and successful in corroding Zionist impunity and bloodthirsty, unrestrained and seemingly gratuitous violence and acts of terror. This has never and will never be a two-sided anything because there will never be symmetry between the oppressor and the oppressed; the occupier and the occupied.

And what we are witnessing now, thanks in great part to social media, is the baring of Zionism�s ugly face and fangs. Unlike previous Intifadas, Israel cannot control media access and the flow of information to the outside world. Social media affords us another narrative, unpolished and uncensored. And no matter how deliberately obscured it is, one simple truth remains: No human beings can tolerate to see their children, parents and loved ones executed, burned alive, bombed, traumatized, scarred and broken. No human beings.
Anywhere.

This is not a war

This is not a war. What is happening in Palestine right now is not a war. There are not two sides in equal defense of each other. Youth wielding stones in their hands up against armed-to-the-bone military forces is not a war. The murder of an occupied people by an occupier is always, always, always the murder of innocent civilians. Israel continues to play fast and loose with the term �self-defense� to describe its egregious, indiscriminate and disproportionate actions to the point where the language doesn�t appear to merit a second thought from the general public. Dubbing itself the perpetual victim of villainous actions by �terrorists� wielding knives and stones, Israel continues to commit egregious atrocities. But how does a systematic abuser of human rights, a belligerent, uncompromising, expansionist and genocidal settler state find itself under attack by the occupied and oppressed?

Israel�s genocidal assault on Gaza last summer was incomprehensible in its scale and impossible to quantify was not a war. 67 years of unfettered instruments of butchery and asymmetric murderous terror campaigns that erode international standing are not wars. A military force with almost unimaginable might against a civilian population, some of whom are armed with tin-can rockets which are mere fireworks in comparison to the weapons of their enemies is not at war with an unarmed civilian population. Justifying the gratuitous mass slaughter of unarmed men, women and children is indistinguishable from the logic that justified the Holocaust. The merciless assaults on a people, particularly in the case of the epistemic violence and cruelty carried out on the fish bowl that is Gaza, is not a war. It is systematic genocide.

Genocide to the level of extermination and mass obliteration, year after year after year, to the verge of extinction. Gaza had survived several attempts to eliminate it over the years, and when the battered, beleaguered survivors of an ongoing genocide decided that they�d had enough and would resist their own annihilation, they were the ones condemned, while the murderers, terrorists, and their enablers were victimized. And worst of all, they expected a halo for their unrepentant criminality and intransigence, flaunted in the face of international humanitarian law and basic human decency.

This world has failed the Palestinian people in every conceivable way. It has become so desensitized to its own egregious hypocrisy and double standards have been woven into the very fabric of imperialism. This world is pro-justice, so long as it�s justice for the oppressor not the oppressed. There�s sympathy with the oppressed, so long as it�s sympathy for the oppressed the West deems worthy of sympathy. And there�s tolerance, so long as it means tolerating the oppressors that are intolerant of your very existence for 67 years and counting.

But anyone who really claims to care about unequivocal justice and peace will challenge this blatant hypocrisy. There are few times in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place. Where we have the opportunity to stand, unequivocally, on the right side of history. On the side of the oppressed. This is one of those times. This is the power of human dignity and what should propel us to action is human dignity. The inalienable human dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity every single day we continue to tolerate the intolerable, unconscionable acts that continue to deform and mutate an entire people. Without concrete action, our words will remain hollow.

This article was written by Dina Elmuti for American Herald Tribune on Nov. 21, 2015. Dina is a first-generation Palestinian-American living in Chicago, working at an Urban Youth Trauma Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works in the States and overseas with an NGO for victims of torture in the Occupied Territories of Palestine (Ramallah). Dina has written for online publications like The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and The Daily Beast since 2008.