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 upon them, they would 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 happening 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

“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

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
― Omar El Akkad

“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

“O Jews!!
When you were in exile
When you could not bear any country in the world
When you were wandering in the deserts
We were still
the rulers of Palestine.
The coin was still ours.. .!!”
― Ginkgo Gulzar-Middle East Issues

“The people here are civilians. They are doctors, teachers, businessmen—they're the best of society. So why else destroy this tower but for the savagery and barbarism of the Israelis that target everything on this land: humans, stones and plants? Why else but to plant terror and fear and kick people out of their land?"
Israeli violence had become such a consistent feature of Gazan life that few of Barawi's neighbors were terribly shocked by the destruction of their homes. "We actually got used to all the explosions," he reflected. "Everyone was prepared for their ceilings to collapse on them so they sat in their apartments and played with their kids and did what they normally do. We prepared while watching TV or doing mundane things just to move from this world into the next.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Qananeh viewed the destruction of Basha Tower as an attack on Gaza's entire journalist community. "They target journalists and civilians to silence the media outlets that hurt the occupier in front of world opinion," he told me. "For us in the media, this isn't the first time and it won't be the last time that the enemy targets journalists or journalism headquarters. The occupation does not distinguish between a civilian, a journalist, and a child. They just target Palestinians in a barbaric manner. This is not going to affect us. We will continue to cover all of the crimes of the occupation. As journalists, we have to be the messengers and deliver the news.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Basha Tower’s destruction was the final indignity for a Gazan media that lost sixteen members during the war, including several who literally died on camera. Curiously, the attacks on journalists and their offices generated little outrage in the West, even when those journalists worked for major Western media outlets. Israel’s bombing of the office owned by the independently contracted stringer for Bloomberg News, Saud Abu Ramadan, was not mentioned in Bloomberg’s coverage of the war. When Israel attacked the Mushtaha building, another office complex in central Gaza City that housed the offices of major foreign news agencies like Andalou and Xinhua, local photojournalist Wissam Nassar told Dan Cohen that the bombings destroyed his car. Nassar’s photography regularly appeared in the New York Times during the war, however, the attack that ruined his vehicle and destroyed a building filled with media offices was absent from the paper’s coverage.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Throughout Palestine, victory was understood not necessarily as a decisive military triumph, but as a forceful demonstration of qualities like sumud (steadfastness), fidaa (sacrifice/ redemption), and ebaa (stubbornness in the face of power) during a prolonged trial. This attitude has, of course, been a feature of anti-colonial struggles throughout history, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa, but it was especially pronounced in Gaza, where 1.8 million ghettoized refugees were taking heavy losses against a nuclearized army equipped and financed by the superpowers of the West. I witnessed the clearest distillation of this defiance in Beit Hanoun, the decimated northern border city. There, during the mid-August ceasefire, I met a family gathered above the ruins of their home, a four-story structure that had been transformed into a massive crater by a direct hit from an Israeli fragmentation bomb. On a flat slab of concrete that sat above the gargantuan sinkhole, grafiti read "3 to 0," portraying the Palestinian armed factions as the victors of the last three military conflicts in Gaza.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“These reporters had been closer to the fire than most outsiders—many were targeted in their homes and offices—and produced some of the most bracing coverage of the war as a result. Unlike those of us who came from abroad, the Israeli military did not seem to view local correspondents as journalists deserving of any special protection. They were simply Palestinians who could be eliminated like anyone else, and whose deaths did little to generate international outcry or profuse exhibitions of solidarity. During the military escalation in Gaza in November 2012, when Israel targeted reporters working for the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV for assassination, the Israeli army spokesperson's unit declared that any reporter in the vicinity of Hamas "positions" was a potential target.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“I asked Raed if the international community could do anything to help him. “Our message is simple,” he responded. “We don’t need any aid or anything. Just put pressure on the Israelis so they get out of the sea and let us fish and bring a livelihood to our families again.” By October 2014, attacks on Gazan fishermen within the six-mile fishing limit had become routine. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented eighteen shooting incidents in the two months after the ceasefire and at least four instances in which fishermen were arrested while working inside the six-mile line. …fishing off the coast in northern Gaza, peppering the crews with rubber-coated steel bullets and arresting seven of them. Not a single rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza in these two months. Amidst the one-way ceasefire, the New York Times described the atmosphere as “a fragile calm.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The Israeli military had not only torn through the civilian population of Gaza like a buzz saw during the 51 Day War, killing some 2,200 people-more than 70 percent were confirmed as civilians—and wounding well over 10,000; it had pulverized Gaza's infrastructure. Over 400 businesses and shops had been damaged in targeted Israeli strikes, and at least 120 were completely obliterated; 24 medical facilities were damaged, including the Wafa Hospital in Shujaiya, Gaza's only geriatric rehabilitation facility, whose top three floors were razed by tank shelling. A full one third of Gaza's mosques were bombed, from the Al-Amin Muhammad Mosque, a stately structure built in the center of Gaza City with donations from a Malaysian Muslim charity, to the Al-Omari Mosque, a historical treasure that had stood in the same spot in Jabalia since 647 AD until it was brought to the ground by Israeli missiles on August 2. Gaza’s lone power station was decimated by Israeli airstrikes on July 29, leaving most of Gaza without electricity for over 18 hours a day, and sometimes longer. Perhaps the most disturbing figure was the more than 18,000 civilian homes the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Gaza, leaving at least 100,000 homeless or forced to cram into the already overcrowded homes of relatives.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Transportation Minister Katz warned. "I prefer one thousand Palestinian mothers crying than letting one Jewish mother cry.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil? He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them," Refaat explained.
"This is what's happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who's not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“In her final paper, one of the Refaat's students reworked Shylock's famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:
Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“And there is also that feeling of tightness in the chest, tears stuck in your throat unwilling to come out. It’s always there. It’s the default. All the stuff around you—that’s what keeps changing. Sometimes you’re about to miss a deadline, sometimes you drink your coffee with regular milk because they’re out of oat milk, sometimes your kid comes up to you out of nowhere and gives you a hug. And every single thing makes you want to cry, but nothing actually ends up turning into tears. Like an end to the war in Gaza: it’s always close, and it always doesn’t happen.”
― Etgar Keret

“China has donated over 1,610 metric tons of rice to Uganda to feed innocents. According to the Brics News, America has donated 1,610 metric tons of bombs to Israel to murder innocents.”
― China Donates Rice to Uganda, America Sends Bombs to Israel ---Sheikh Gulzar

“Gaza is exposing every oppressor in the world.”
― Gaza-

“Trump of Serving Zionist Interests Over US People”
― US-Jews

“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