Gaza Quotes

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“What to tell you? Gaza is frustrating these days—well, these years. It’s a good exercise in patience, at least.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“But not all Gaza residents were committed to the war. A reporter asked one of the Arabs what he most wanted. He was a taxi driver, father of ten. All he wanted was 'to eat and to work.' What did he think of Nasser? 'Nasser is good, Israel is good, America is good, Britain is good, Canada is good, India is good, Anything is good.”
― Robert J. Donovan, Six Days In June: Israel's Fight For Survival

“No one has the luxury of deciding "when" to travel; you wait prepared to travel whenever the border is open, which could be today, tomorrow or next week or three, four months from now.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

“Every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.”
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

“I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and videos of the mutilated, the starved, the dismembered, and I am reminded that all of this is functionally invisible to so many in the part of the world where I now live. That if it were presented to them, some would undoubtedly respond the way Barbara Bush once did when asked about the Iraqi dead: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” But others, I think, would recoil in a different way. Stubborn as anything, I hang on to the hope that, presented with proof of injustice, the majority human reflex is to act against it.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“On October 7, 2023, armed groups led by Hamas’s military wing launched a coordinated attack on multiple cities near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Fighters killed 1,195 people, of which 815 were civilians, according to an analysis by Agence France-Presse, including at least 282 women and 36 children. They abducted more than 250 people. It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power–the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The silence itself becomes an empty canvas, onto which any fantasy can be painted. When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all. Maybe they will have all been terrorists or supporters of terrorists or whatever adjacency to terror is sufficient to scare off those who, in possession of something approximating a soul, might otherwise look upon such obvious assassination and say: This is wrong. Absent an act to describe and the language to describe it, we are capable of believing nothing, or multiple contradictory things, or anything at all.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“You can't take over someone's land, resources, power if you see them as human and deserving of rights. If an egalitarian Zionist state was possible, it's no longer. Israel has made that clear. You can have some parts of cultural Zionism, you can love the land, but you have to love it, not destroy it, and you have to love the people who have been tending to it for thousands of years”
― Daniel Maté

“People die.
Others are born.
For us,
the fear of dying before living
haunts us while we are still
in our mothers' wombs.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“This world is big, it could be welcoming, accommodating, even comfortable. In Gaza, you imagine the world as a small place, and you never know what will hit you next, or from where.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“The Labour Together Project was thus a major hidden hand driving a crisis that would have devastating consequences for not just the British left but also the very fabric of British democracy and those people in Britain who needed a redistributive, democratising government to help them get by. In addition, as I show later, the 'antisemitism crisis' would also frame and haunt the Labour Party's response to Israel's destruction of Gaza.”
― Paul Holden, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy

“Later that night, I passed through a public garden [in Córdoba] that was
displaying hundreds of small multi-coloured flags. They were part
of a protest against the Israeli government’s military action in
Gaza and were accompanied by a prominent list of the names of
those who had been killed. I was heartened to see that in a
provincial city like this one there were people who were well aware
of events a long way outside their own area. The continuing existence of this display in a public place was an example of local
government tolerance towards left-wing causes, and I wondered if
the same attitude would be shown by the town hall in conservative
Madrid, 400 kilometres away.”
― Brett Hetherington

“The war in Gaza has caused immense human suffering, and many people around the world are deeply disturbed by the scale of destruction and loss of civilian life. Reports from humanitarian organizations, journalists, and international bodies have documented heavy casualties, displacement, and the devastation of homes, hospitals, and infrastructure.
Whenever advanced military weapons are used in densely populated areas, the humanitarian consequences can be catastrophic. Civilians — especially children, the elderly, and non-combatants — often bear the heaviest burden. This has led to widespread global debate about the legality, morality, and proportionality of modern warfare, as well as the responsibility of countries supplying weapons.
International humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, requires that all parties in conflict distinguish between civilians and combatants and avoid disproportionate harm to civilian populations. Calls for ceasefires, investigations, and accountability have come from various governments, NGOs, and human rights groups.
Beyond politics and military strategy, the core issue remains human: thousands of families on all sides are grieving, displaced, and living through trauma. Many observers stress that long-term peace and security can only come through dialogue, diplomacy, and respect for human rights and dignity for all people in the region.”
― Sheikh Gulzar-Gaza in Ruins: When Advanced Weapons Meet Civilian Lives

“When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it turned the tiny enclave into an open-air prison. Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 – the incessant bombardment of Gaza by land, sea, and air – turned this open-air prison into an open graveyard, a pile of rubble, a desolate wasteland.”
― Avi Shlaim, Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine

“In time, there will be nothing particularly controversial about using these words to describe the things they were created to describe. (The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.) Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Instead, as the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes onto the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing. A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count. Soon Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis. As their eradication continues, they must transform into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue--it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In late February 2024 I talk to a friend of mine, a Palestinian Canadian author whose debut novel, rejected by many publishers, seems to have finally found a home. He says he still doubts whether it'll actually go out into the world. But he takes some solace in the likelihood that, by next year or the year after, it won't just be Gaza that's on fire, but the whole world, so what difference does it make what one book does? We laugh, but I can't mount much of a counterargument. I know when an Arab says things like this, there's a natural impulse to believe he's talking about some great violent retribution, but I know what my friend means. A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams. It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip — the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name — and shrug, if not applaud. It’s about the story that convinces even Jews who are genuinely pained by Gaza’s agony that there is no other way to keep us safe. It’s our version of a story told in many variations by many peoples in many places who decide that protecting themselves requires subjugating others, that equality is tantamount to death.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing, writes Jose Esteban Munoz, describing queerness not only as a set of acts or dispositions but an ideality … A loving recklessness, freely renouncing a reality that has never been home…

What if the first word hope utters is no ? What if this word is not only a negation but an opening? After all, if this word is forbidden, can any choice be free?
[Refusal] expresses our unwillingness to be conscripted to man’s project or world… the propertied earth. And if the first field of knowledge is the body, / no may be the sound of our deepest knowing, calling from the far side of the wall.

Gaza is devoted to rejection, wrote Mahmoud Darwish
hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection,
Torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection
Enemies might triumph over Gaza…
They might break its bones
They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women.
They might throw it into the sea, sand or blood.
But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.”

…Setenced to this unlife, Gaza can only exist as no . This no is total; she is long past the appeasement or appeal. Gaza, called المقاومة أم, mother of resistance, daily births her refusal to succumb or disappear. The relationship of resistance to the people of Gaza] is that of skin to bones.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

“The insistence that Israel must destroy Hamas, even as it becomes ever more obvious that it can't, is ultimately just another way of not facing the human consequences of this war. It's another way of not seeing what is being done in our name. It's not all that different from the claim that the Gaza Health Ministry invents Palestinian deaths or that Hamas bears the blame for those deaths because it uses Palestinians as shields, or that what Israel is doing in Gaza is no different from what the Allies did in World War II. These claims don't withstand even modest scrutiny. They're less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame. During Vietnam, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Whenever I open the prayer book I see before me images of children burning from napalm." I suspect that's what we fear: that if we put down our amulets and look Gaza in the eye, we’ll never get its images out of our head. We’ll look at our prayer books, many of which include prayers for the army that killed Muhammad’s friend Ali, and see Gaza’s burning, starving flesh. We’ll see it on the walls of our synagogues and Jewish Community Centers, at our Passover seders and Shabbat meals. The ground underneath us will grow unsteady.
Maybe well even fear the judgment of God. Heschel did.
"God's voice is shaking heaven and earth, and man does not hear the faintest sound," he told an antiwar meeting in 1968. "The Lord roars like a lion. His word is like fire, like a hammer breaking rocks to pieces. And people go about unmoved, undisturbed, unaware." If you consider those fears nonsensical, then rest easy: console yourself that there is no moral accounting, either in this world or in the next. But any Jew who thinks Heschel was right to tremble in 1968 should be trembling now.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning