"And you, my father, there on the sad height," wrote Dylan Thomas, "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
There are no good nights in Jenin. There are nights when Israel bombs Jenin with American-made fighter jets, and other nights when one stays up worrying about when bombs might again fall on their families.
Let there be rage.
On July 3, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved an extensive military campaign against Palestinians living in the Jenin refugee camp on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, stating as a pretense for the assault that Israel was attacking “the most legitimate target on the planet - people who would annihilate our country.”
The Jenin camp is a squalid city of poverty, high unemployment, and raging resentments against their Israeli occupiers. Built in 1953, it is one of dozens of refugee camps designed to house most of the 750,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which Israelis call their War of Independence and which Palestinians call Al Nakba - The Catastrophe.
The Palestinians Netanyahu claimed Israel was targeting were not resistance fighters "who would annihilate [Israel]." No, it appears he was targeting Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad and the Jenin-based Lion’s Den, resistance fighters whose targets include illegal Israeli squatters and occupiers of Palestinian territory on the West Bank; fighters resisting home demolitions, land expropriation, and expansion of illegal settlements.
Under such a pretense the apartheid state of Israel in July attacked the refugee camp of 17,000 residents packed into a quarter of a square mile with aircraft, drones, military forces and bulldozers. It sealed off the camp, attacked it, and destroyed roads and buildings and crucial infrastructure for water and electricity as collective punishment.
Netanyahu's invasion - which killed 12 Palestinians, wounded hundreds, and displaced thousands while causing wanton damage to residences and public infrastructure, came just two weeks after Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, said: “There needs to be a full settlement here. We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed, thousands.”
Let there be rage.
“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' Ghassan Kanafani wrote in "Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories." "When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house... I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child ...”
Let there be rage.
The truth is that the battle is not just about Jenin, just as it wasn't just about South Africa or about Ukraine.
As Prime Minister Netanyahu has said: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and them alone,” and the truth is that today his government is trying to annihilate Palestinian resistance [against] occupation, on behalf of settler colonialists who daily build illegal settlements, destroy Palestinian crops and deny the Palestinian people the right to dignity and respect.
“For
a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete,
is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread
and, above all, dignity.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
Let's be clear: Under international law, the Palestinian West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, is all occupied territory, in spite of the fact that Israel has built illegal colonies across the land with the intention of annexing them to Israel.
Today, protected by United States policy and 3.9 billions of dollars annually, Netanyahu's government represents a nation which, according to international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, is practicing apartheid against the Palestinian people.
As former Israeli Environment Minister Yossi Sarid once pulished in an OpEd in an the Israeli newspaper: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”
And as former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni published in the Israeli website Ynet in 2006. “The state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”
It's a loser's game: What Israel, as the last settler colony of the 20th century, refuses to recognize is that resistance to colonial repression and systems of oppression and humiliation grow so desperate and intense that the state is unable to control the outcome, as in Algeria where, in 1962 after 132 years of occupation, the French were driven from power.
“Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him," Susan Abulhawa wrote in "Mornings in Jenin." "To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?”
I am a supporter of BDS, a movement formed by Palestinian civil society organizations that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel. It's a movement that worked against South African apartheid and it will, over time, work against Israel.
I am not drawn to Palestine by ethnicity or faith, by love of falafel and musakhan. I am drawn by a sense of justice, by a refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, by my understanding that Palestinians as as worthy of respect, dignity and liberation as Ukrainians and South Africans.
I cannot go on living my privileged life - enriched by the laments and cautions of Franz Fanon, Ghassan Kanafani, Susan Abulhawar, Dylan Thomas and so many others - without acting on my beliefs - and protected by my First Amendment rights.
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Let there be rage.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
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