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The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was supposed to start at 08:30am local time, January 19th 2025. It was delayed by 3 hours as Hamas took longer than planned to release the names of the three Israelis who would be released as part of the ceasefire deal. Netanyahu took advantage, and in those final 3 hours after the official ceasefire started his forces killed 19 Palestinians. This is the victory that Israel can now add to its long list of victories. This is the victory that Israel is now haunted by, one so grim, so devastating, it may as well have been the most abject of defeats. At least with defeat you do not need to ask yourself what to do with victory. That is the victors' curse.
Those final bombs over Gaza killed 16- and six-year-old Adly and Sama al-Qidra, in addition to their father Ahmed who was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Twelve-year-old Yasmin dragged her eight-year-old sister Aseel before a second Israeli missile hit the same spot that had already killed their loved ones. In other words, a 12-year-old had the forethought to drag her younger sister immediately after witnessing three loved ones killed because she knew that Israel often deployed their infamous double tap strikes whereby they bomb, wait a bit, and then bomb again. Yasmin knew it was time to run away as fast and as far as possible, because she was 10 or 11 years old when Israel started its genocide, and 15 months are more than enough to understand the pattern of death and destruction unleashed by that genocidal state.
I cannot mourn the dead of Gaza yet because it is not over.
I am struck by it even as I write these words, but I do not know anyone who believes that the Israelis are done with bombing Gaza. Why would they be? They now have fifteen months of evidence of how much they can get away with, which is to say almost everything.
I cannot mourn Gaza because this death and destruction was committed by an Israeli government backed by the ostensibly center-left Biden administration, the one that trampled over as many international and even American laws as they could to secure over $17.9 billion of American taxpayers' money in military aid to Israel. This is not to mention protecting Israel diplomatically all over the world, to make sure that Netanyahu had everything he needed to kill as many Palestinians as he could, until the very last minute, and then for three more hours after that.
They did that despite the ICJ, ICC, multiple UN special rapporteurs and their reports, and virtually all human rights organizations from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch to B'Tselem. More data has been compiled on Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilian infrastructure than has ever been technologically possible before 2023, and yet all that the Biden administration opted to do with this information was to choose to become an active participant in the Gaza genocide. This effectively makes Biden himself the single most lethal killer of Palestinian children as far as American presidents go, at least so far.
So how do I celebrate this ceasefire? I am relieved that Palestinians are able, at least for some time, to stop running for their lives. I also feel angry, to be honest, because we know what the Israelis mean by ceasefire. They imbue this word with as much meaning as they do the words 'hospital', 'school' or 'children' where the Palestinian untermenschen are concerned. There are no longer any safeguards within Israeli political culture today, no acts that are beyond the pale, no innocents on the other side - and that was under a Democrat in the White House.
Meanwhile, what the Americans currently offer in way of hope is the possibility that Trump may be too busy destroying American institutions and going after that country's most vulnerable communities, such as trans people and non-white immigrants, to give Israel as much flexibility as Biden did. Then again, he appointed the Christian Zionist fanatic Mike Huckabee as his ambassador to Israel, a man who, like Biden's ambassador, rejects the very existence of Palestinians as a people. That is as good as it gets with the Americans today, so how can I be expected to feel anything other than dread in anticipation of more violence?
On this very day, January 20th 2025, one day after the official ceasefire in Gaza, the Americans are planning on inaugurating their most far right government in living memory, an event described by a friend as 'not an inauguration, but a rally.' Attending this rally are far right leaders from around the world, from Zemmour (France) to the AfD (Germany) and Farage (UK) among others. Even before the ceremony start we can already describe this moment as the most self-confident the far right has been in the West since the peak of the Third Reich. The man being appointed commander-in-chief of the world's most destructive army ever is himself a convict who tried to overturn the US elections. Not only did the American legal system prove itself incapable - or unwilling, rather - to punish its most overtly anti-democratic politician, but that same man was rewarded with 77,303,573 votes four years later.
Netanyahu is also attending the Trump rally. He is not, however, far right - not by Israeli standards in any case. The man who committed a genocide is not even Israel's most 'extreme' politician but merely a man who was willing to do it, because he could. He succeeded in destroying most of Gaza by dropping more bombs than were dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II, combined. Between October 7th and November 17th 2023 alone the Israelis dropped "nearly 600 highly destructive 2000 lb" bombs made by the American arms manufacturer General Dynamic and Ordinance Tactical System near most of Gaza's hospitals. In barely 2 months in 2023, what the Israelis did was already described as "among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history." They then did that for 13 more months.
The truth is that I am furious at this ceasefire. In many ways, Ben Gvir may be the only remaining honest man in this theater of lethal mediocrity. He resigned because of the ceasefire, because he believes Israel did not go far enough, was not violent enough, did not ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible and made the rest of them subservient to Israeli Jewish supremacy. That is what Biden effectively made possible as well, that is what Netanyahu has always wanted, but neither Biden nor Netanyahu were willing to go the full distance. This does not mean that Netanyahu won't do so under Trump, and/or that whoever comes after Netanyahu concludes that Smotrich was wrong when he said in August 2024 that “no one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.” Smotrich said this before Israel started besieging and starving Palestinians in northern Gaza in October of that year. No one in the world stopped them.
So I cannot mourn Gaza yet. What I can do, and I am genuinely trying to take it all in, as much as I can, is to also take Palestinian joy seriously. Many are currently celebrating the ceasefire, as any one of us would, and this means that the Netanyahus and Bidens of this world, as the Huckabees and Ben Gvirs, have not been able to crush the Palestinian psyche. Whether they succeed in the end or not will likely be as much up to the rest of us as it is to Palestinians most directly impacted on the ground, because so much of the upcoming battles are going to happen outside of Israel-Palestine. Whether this means derailing the far right in Europe or diminishing the power of Big Tech, now even more so that billionaires such as Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are fully on-board the Trump train, there is a lot of work to do ahead of us.
I will one day mourn Gaza, but not yet. Right now I can only be angry, and I hope you are all too.
Edit: 22nd of January 2025:
Dr Oula Kadhum was kind enough to share with me a poem she wrote in February 2024 after reading my piece. I asked for her permission to share it below so here it is. Oula Kadhum is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at SOAS University of London. Her work explores diasporic transnationalism and its effects on international and domestic politics. Her previous case studies include Iraqi and Shia transnationalism, and currently she’s leading a project on Russian diasporic anti-war resistance to the Ukraine war and Putin.
You can follow her on Bluesky.
How can we mourn the dead?
How can we mourn the dead
when the living are still dying?
When the scorched earth and the rubble
Keep the bodies piling
When the children’s cries
still echo in our ears
and the air still heavy
with blood and smell of fear
Tell me,
How can we mourn the children
too young to stand on bare burnt feet
Who never shrieked with laughter
but apocalyptic fiery heat.
When their bodies, like jigsaw puzzles
lie quiet under earth
Or charred like cattle
by a godforsaken hearth
Can we mourn the dead
when there’s no one left to mourn?
When the tanks and drones
are thieves of Gaza’s dawn
When the toxic air
leaves life to lifeless souls
As the boots march and raise their flags
Above their native home
Thank you so much for sharing your feelings. I feel much the same…almost afraid to celebrate for fear that the dread will start again any minute and of course because they’ve turned their attention to the West Bank and the killing and destruction continues there. My husband said he forced himself to rejoice with them in support. I’ve done the same and it’s hard…until I see the jubilant faces of those who have returned to their homes in the North…whether they still have an actual house or not. Then the tears of joy and relief finally flow. I’m a slow painter and an even slower writer. My website design work keeps me from painting as much and as often as I’d like, but I will continue painting everything that has shattered my heart and sharing them here until Palestine is free. THEN I can finally paint the joy of victory and freedom.
I reserve my harshest feelings for the one here named as the most honest. I want be clear that I do not dispute his honesty. That he is the most honest in this means less than nothing to me.