Jamal’s nine-year-old physique is paralysed. He experiences fixed, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He can not sleep by way of them. Nor can his mom. To maintain the spasms underneath management, a drug known as baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscle tissue and stops the shaking. Abruptly halting the usage 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 drugs. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs go away 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 by way of the Purple Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is likely one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, together with painkillers and antibiotics.
Jamal now endures dozens of spasms every day. There is no such thing as a various medicine or substitute. There is no such thing as 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 manner.
Speaking on the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute final month, he stated, “We have to guarantee that the story is instructed correctly in order that when the historical past books write this, they don’t write concerning 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 folks. His concern is that October seventh and the conflict in Gaza could be remembered “incorrectly”.
It appears Pompeo needs to argue that the folks of Gaza are simply “collateral injury” in Israel’s conflict. They’re to stay anonymous, faceless, forgotten. He needs their tales erased from the pages of human historical past.
His remarks replicate the subsequent section in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s folks, 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 legislation – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of many few social media platforms the place Palestinian voices have had a bit extra freedom to talk – is now shadow banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.
Within the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, native legal guidelines are weaponised to return after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for utilizing what needs to be their protected proper to free speech. Legal guidelines are even passed on the state stage within the US to form what could be taught at colleges about Israel and Palestine.
However what Pompeo – and people like him who misinterpret biblical verses to justify their help 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 fascinated with reminiscence and bearing witness, the phrase “martyr” involves thoughts. “Martyr” comes from the Greek phrase “martus”, that means “witness”, and options prominently within the Bible. Equally, the phrase “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the foundation of the phrase for “witness” or “witnessing”. Because the phrase developed, it additionally took on connotations of violent struggling as a consequence of one’s beliefs, and even a way of heroic steadfastness because of the scale of 1’s sacrifice.
I can consider no higher phrase than “shaheed” to explain Jamal and the folks round him: they’re dwelling 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 due to his overwhelming need to reside.
Throughout Jamal and Shaima’s tent are hundreds of different tents. Day and evening, every of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Contained in the tents, chilly and infrequently moist from the current floods, are hundreds of different individuals who require pressing and necessary medical evacuation to hospitals.
The ache and struggling are immense, but the likes of Pompeo proceed to justify the continuing and traditionally rooted strategy of the elimination of the Palestinian folks.
The Palestinian persons 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 certainly one of his verses:
Those that move 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 ocean and the sands of reminiscence
Take what footage you’ll in order to grasp
That which you by no means will:
How a stone from our land turns into the ceiling of our sky.
The Palestinian folks will preserve reminiscence alive, simply as we’ve stored 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 folks, and thousands and thousands in solidarity all over the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the dwelling 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 replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial coverage.
