Ramzy Baroud
( Middle East
Monitor ) – The return of one million Palestinians from southern Gaza to the
north on 27 January felt as if history was choreographing one of its most
earth-shattering events in recent memory.
Hundreds of
thousands of people marched along a single street, the coastal Rashid Street,
at the furthest western stretch of Gaza. Though these displaced masses were cut
off from each other in massive displacement camps in central Gaza and the Mawasi region further south, they sang the
same songs, chanted the same chants and used the same talking points.
During their
forced displacement, they had no electricity and no means of communication, let
alone coordination. They were ordinary people, hauling a few items of clothing
and whatever survival tools they had, following the unprecedented Israeli
genocide. They headed north to homes they knew were likely destroyed by the
Israeli army.
Yet, they
remained committed to their march back to their annihilated cities and refugee
camps. Many smiled, others sang religious hymns and some recited national songs
and poems.
A little girl
offered a news reporter a poem she composed. “I am a Palestinian girl, and I am
proud,” her voice blared. She recited simple but emotional verses about
identifying as a “strong, resilient Palestinian girl.” She spoke of her
relationship with her family and community as the “daughter of heroes, the
daughter of Gaza”, declaring that Gazans “prefer death over shame”. Her return
to her destroyed home was a “day of victory.”
“Victory” was a
word repeated by virtually everyone interviewed by the media and countless
times on social media. While many, including some sympathetic to the
Palestinian cause, openly challenged the Gazans’ view of their perceived
‘victory’, they failed to appreciate the history of Palestine—indeed, the
history of all colonised people who wrested their freedom from the claws of
foreign, brutal enemies.
“Difficulties
break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of
(someone) armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end,” iconic
anti-apartheid South African leader, Nelson Mandela, wrote in a letter to his
wife in 1975 from his prison cell. His words, written in the context of South
Africa’s struggle, feel as if they were written for Palestinians, especially
Gaza’s latest triumph against erasure—both physical and psychological.
To understand
this better, examine what Israeli political and military leaders said about
northern Gaza immediately after the start of the genocidal war on 7 October,
2023:
Israel will
maintain “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip “for an
indefinite period,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an
interview with the ABC News network in November 2023.
One year later,
the Israeli army reiterated the same sentiment. In a statement, Israeli
Brigadier General Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that there would be “no
return” for any residents of northern Gaza.
Finance
Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, went further. “It is possible to create a situation
where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,”
he said on 26 November, stating that Israel should re-occupy Gaza and
“encourage” the migration of its inhabitants.
Many other
Israeli officials and experts repeated the same notion like a predictable
chorus. Settler groups held a conference last June to assess real estate
opportunities in Gaza. In their minds, they were the only ones with a say over
Gaza’s future. Palestinians seemed inconsequential to the wheel of history,
controlled, as the powerful arrogantly believed, by Tel Aviv alone.
But the endless
mass of people sang, “Do you think you can measure up to the free, measure up
to the Palestinians?… We will die before we surrender our home; they call us
the freedom fighters.”
Many media
outlets, including Israeli ones, reported a sense of shock in Israel as the
population returned en masse to a fully destroyed region. The shock does not
end there. Israel failed to occupy the north, ethnically cleanse Palestinians
from Gaza or break their collective spirit. Instead, Palestinians emerged
stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for Israel, with a new
objective: returning to historic Palestine.
For decades,
Israel invested in a singular discourse regarding the internationally
recognized Palestinian Right of Return to their homes in historic Palestine.
Almost every Israeli leader or top official since the 1948 Nakba (the
‘Catastrophe’ resulting from the destruction of the Palestinian homeland)
echoed this. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, summarized it in 2000
during the Camp David negotiations, when he drew his “bottom line” in any peace
deal with the Palestinians: there would be no right of return for Palestinian
refugees.
As Gaza has
proven, Palestinians do not take their cues from Israel or even those who claim
to represent them. As they marched north, four generations of Palestinians
walked together, at times holding hands, singing for freedom and return—not
only to the north but further north to historic Palestine itself.
Since the Nakba,
Israel has insisted it will write the history of the land between the Jordan
River and the sea. But Palestinians continue to prove Israel wrong. They
survived in Gaza, despite genocide. They remained. They returned. They emerged
with a sense of victory. They are writing their own history, which, despite
immeasurable and unimaginable losses, is also a history of hope and victory.
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