Gaza War Quotes

“Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.”
― Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

“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

“The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.”
― Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

“Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Goldstone Recants: Richard Goldstone Renews Israel's License to Kill

“إذا كان لا بد أن أموت
فلا بد أن تعيش أنت
لتروي حكايتي
لتبيع أشيائي
وتشتري قطعة قماش
وخيوطا
(فلتكن بيضاء وبذيل طويل)
كي يبصر طفل في مكان ما من غزة
وهو يحدق في السماء
منتظراً أباه الذي رحل فجأة
دون أن يودع أحداً
ولا حتى لحمه
أو ذاته
يبصر الطائرة الورقية
طائرتي الورقية التي صنعتها أنت
تحلق في الأعالي
ويظن للحظة أن هناك ملاكاً
يُعيد الحب
إذا كان لا بد أن أموت
فليأت موتي بالأمل
فليصبح حكاية.”
― رفعت العرعير

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A thief never becomes an owner.”
― Khaled Ibrahim

“I summarize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as two peaceful peoples who form the majority, caught in the crossfire between extremists who are the minority—each dreaming of annihilating the other they call enemy and danger, and extending their control from the water to the water, fueled by hate, revenge and anger.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“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

“If you think I am wrong, I am wrong for all the right reasons.
Dealing with death on a regular basis makes you shallow inside. Your soul sleeps inside your chest, pleading to be woken up. In those dark times in a battle, one bad moment, a step on a mine, a bullet on target, or a lethal explosion, and you are a dismembered lifeless memory. Your dead flesh lays on the hot sand which burns your bare skin if you are unlucky enough not to be numb.”
― Swaraj Bhatia, Our Days :A Survival Odyssey

“As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called. I wonder what reality you now live in. From the point in time at which you read this, what do you say of the moment I am in? How large is the gulf between us?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.”
― Norman Finkelstein

“When the contradictions weigh on you, know that this has never been a war of rights and wrongs, of what is just and what is fair. Never has it been a war of political logic or historic sense. All it ever was and will ever be is a war of semantics that altered, redefined and constructed today’s reality and tomorrow’s path.”
― Aysha Taryam

“The world has gone mad. Again. …
                                                …The fires burn
in the streets at night. The checkpoints flow
with blood and tears. And most of us just want
to go to work, have coffee with friends, teach
our children something other than this craziness
in a world gone mad. Again…”
― Michael Dickel, War Surrounds Us

“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

“People gather in giant rooms like this, deliver fancy speeches, but nothing ever changes. They still hate, they still fight. All we do, despite all our efforts, is put a pause to it, to bury all the dead. People are still the same, the rage inside them is still the same. What we do is not a cure, but mere bandages on the corpses, utterly useless.”
― Swaraj Bhatia

“People don’t change, Emma, especially for their enemies.”
― Swaraj Bhatia, Our Days :A Survival Odyssey

“building bombed, beams through flesh
buried under rubble
suffocated to death
but only beheading is barberic to the West
#Gaza”
― Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

“That’s why tomorrow I’m going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren.”
― Joe Biden

“Peace with peaceful people and war with oppressors and mischievous people.”
― Sheikh Gulzar--------War against Islam

“Gaza is de grootste gevangenis ter wereld.”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“America fought 260 wars in the last 100 years, while China was involved in only three. America keeps earning money, their arms industry is very big and is an important part of their economy. That's why they keep creating conflicts in the world. Countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Libya, which were once rich, have now become poor by fighting wars.' He claimed that America flourishes its arms industry by supporting both sides in wars, which he considers an 'established industry'.”
― Sheikh Gulzar--------------'America instigates wars, then sells weapons'

“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