From The River To The Sea...

A brief reflection on the recent escalation of Israel's oppressive ambitions against the people of Palestine (written by Taskeen Khan)

Oct 23, 2023

The past 11 days have been one of the darkest, heaviest, and most isolating I have ever experienced. Besides seeing countless footage, video after video, of a people being massacred and slaughtered in real-time and the obvious mental and psychological toll that takes on a person, I still find myself having to justify their resistance and explaining to some that supporting an occupational, barbaric, genocidal, apartheid regime is wrong.

Preposterous. It is for this reason that this thought piece will take the form of a reflection because the idea that I have to sit here and try to convince the reader that an occupier who humiliates, imprisons, rapes, oppresses, and murders innocent people on their own land is absurd, and frankly a waste of time that could be employed towards raising more awareness, praying, and mobilising actions for change.

What I cannot seem to grasp is the hypocrisy and bias of those in support of Israel. The vile accounts of Hamas beheading babies and the numerous claims of Israeli women being raped, which have now been inconspicuously debunked and revoked, were shouted from the rooftop of so many - the same people who did not once utter a word of sympathy for the Palestinian people who regularly experience these unfathomable horrors since the inception of the state of Israel 75 years ago. A global outcry for a simple claim of Israeli suffering but silence for the thousands of factual pieces of evidence, including video footage and statistics, of the trauma of Palestinians.

This is illogical, unfair and only leaves one explanation; that to these people, the life of an Israeli human being is more valuable than that of a Palestinian’s. What the illegal Israeli settlers were subjected to for about 48 hours has been the reality of the Palestinian people for the past 75 years. This I know because the plight of the Palestinian people is one I have been aware of for most of my life. I have seen countless, probably over the hundreds, of videos of parents pulling their lifeless children out of the rubble, innocent children being arrested and held hostage in Israeli prisons, women and children blown to pieces, their limbs scattered around them. This is not an issue that started 11 days ago.

To reduce the magnitude of the crimes of Israel to a blanket statement of, ‘They have the right to defend themselves’ is completely invalid. Mohamed Hijab said it best in his appearance on the Piers Morgan show,

“How can it be that an occupier is defending itself in the first place? The notion that Israel is defending itself is as absurd as the notion that the rapist is defending itself from the victim” (Piers Morgan Uncensored, 2023).

Palestine has not only the right to resist its oppressor, but in my view, it is a noble duty; one that the world praises when it is a Ukrainian freedom fighter, so why is it different for a Palestinian?

As of today, the 18th of October 2023, it is estimated that well over 3 000 Palestinians have been killed, including about 1 500 children. This excludes the carnage of the attack on the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on Tuesday the 17th of October, in which between 800 -1 500 Palestinian refugees seeking shelter and safety were eliminated. The Israeli death toll sits at 1400. I urge the readers of this newsletter to do their research, it takes very little digging to see the truth for yourself. Israeli propaganda is very rampant at the moment but once you see through the lies, the biases, and the agenda of Western media and its influencers, you’ll never go back.

Beyond The Border

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