Jamal’s nine-year-old physique is paralysed. He experiences fixed, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He can’t sleep via them. Nor can his mom. To maintain the spasms underneath management, a drug referred to as baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscular tissues and stops the shaking. Instantly halting the use of baclofen can have critical well being penalties.
Jamal’s mom, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the household’s tent in al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza per week in the past. It was her son’s seventh day with out the medication. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs depart him screaming out in ache.
Baclofen is unavailable anyplace in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Well being warehouses, and never even via the Purple Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It’s one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, together with painkillers and antibiotics.
Jamal now endures dozens of spasms every day. There isn’t a various medicine or substitute. There isn’t a reduction, solely ache.
Jamal’s story is to not be instructed, if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their means.
Talking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute final month, he stated, “We have to make it possible for the story is instructed correctly in order that when the historical past books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the viewers applauded.
Pompeo went on to say that each conflict has civilian casualties, however the true victims on this case are the Israeli individuals. His concern is that October seventh and the conflict in Gaza could be remembered “incorrectly”.
It appears Pompeo desires to argue that the individuals of Gaza are simply “collateral injury” in Israel’s conflict. They’re to stay anonymous, faceless, forgotten. He desires their tales erased from the pages of human historical past.
His remarks mirror the next part in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s individuals, their mosques, their colleges and universities, their cultural establishments, economic system and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now launched into the erasure of reminiscence and martyrdom.
The marketing campaign is clear each inside and past Gaza. The United Nations Reduction and Works Company for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an establishment that has lengthy preserved the standing of the Palestinian refugee inhabitants and safeguarded their proper of return underneath worldwide regulation – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms the place Palestinian voices have had a bit extra freedom to talk – is now shadow banning and limiting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.
In the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, native legal guidelines are weaponised to return after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for utilizing what ought to be their protected proper to free speech. Legal guidelines are even handed at the state stage in the US to form what may be taught at colleges about Israel and Palestine.
However what Pompeo – and people like him who misinterpret biblical verses to justify their assist for Israel and its genocide – don’t perceive is that Palestinians have confronted erasure earlier than and have overcome it. We are going to accomplish that once more.
In enthusiastic about reminiscence and bearing witness, the phrase “martyr” involves thoughts. “Martyr” comes from the Greek phrase “martus”, which means “witness”, and options prominently in the Bible. Equally, the phrase “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the root of the phrase for “witness” or “witnessing”. As the phrase advanced, it additionally took on connotations of violent struggling as a consequence of one’s beliefs, and even a way of heroic steadfastness as a consequence of the scale of one’s sacrifice.
I can suppose of no higher phrase than “shaheed” to explain Jamal and the individuals round him: they’re residing martyrs. Jamal’s little physique has witnessed immense struggling; it has been pounded with the violence of the conflict, and he – like his mom – pushes on as a result of of his overwhelming want to dwell.
Throughout Jamal and Shaima’s tent are 1000’s of different tents. Day and night time, every of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, chilly and infrequently moist from the latest floods, are 1000’s of different individuals who require pressing and essential medical evacuation to hospitals.
The ache and struggling are immense, but the likes of Pompeo proceed to justify the ongoing and traditionally rooted course of of the elimination of the Palestinian individuals.
The Palestinian individuals are additionally poets at coronary heart. And what Pompeo – who devalues language, reminiscence and historical past – won’t ever perceive is that the poet is a witness.
As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in a single of his verses:
Those that cross between fleeting phrases
Take your names with you and go
Rid our time of your hours, and go
Steal what you’ll from the blueness of the sea and the sands of reminiscence
Take what footage you’ll in order to know
That which you by no means will:
How a stone from our land turns into the ceiling of our sky.
The Palestinian individuals will maintain reminiscence alive, simply as we have now saved alive the ache of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif and the roots of each olive tree ripped from its soil. The Palestinian individuals, and tens of millions in solidarity round the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the residing martyr Jamal, every of us will take the stones of Gaza and construct a brand new sky.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial coverage.
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