At a time when four generations are disappearing in Gaza, torn apart by Israeli bombs, crushed by Israeli tanks, starved to death by the Israeli blockade, Europe continues to consider the Palestinian question not as a perpetual crime against humanity but as a crisis to be managed with declarations and cosmetic operations.

At a time when Palestinian resistance is ready for unprecedented concessions [1], the occupier and its supporters set the disarmament of the resistance as a precondition for any solution.

Asking the resistance to lay down arms says so much about us. About our own submission. About our colonialist heritage. About our abysmal ignorance of the Palestinian question. About our obstination in refusing to take the problem at its root and name the primary cause: the Zionist colonial project.

The sacred right to resist

Mustafa Barghouti [2] summarises the situation thus: “The survival of the Palestinian people depends on defeating the Zionist project.”

For 77 years, Israel has been killing children, women, men, the elderly, the sick, the wounded, with bombs, bullets, fire. Now Israel forces parents to witness the slow agony of their children through starvation.

Ask any Palestinian, any people who have suffered colonial repression what they think about surrender. The right to armed resistance is a sacred right.

“Palestinians must cease whilst Israel continues to fire,” formulates the assassinated poet Refaat Alareer [3], who explains Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [4] as follows:

“This is the Gaza ghetto uprising. We know that Israel is going to kill us, one way or another. The occupier starves us, besieges us, dispossesses us, expels us. Israel wants to bring us to our knees, so we might as well fight back and die with dignity.”

Let us understand that capturing Israelis in order to exchange them for the thousands of Palestinian hostages imprisoned in Israeli prisons [5] is the only means available to the resistance to get their children out. They would prefer not to have to do this and accompany them to school instead.

The West pretends to ignore why Hamas cannot accept surrender.

Demanding that the resistance lay down arms amounts to denying Palestinians the right to resist their own extermination, the theft of their lands and homes. It leaves them only the choice between death or surrender. And strips them of all dignity.

“You have the most powerful army in the region, one of the most powerful armies in the world. You’re fighting a second-rate armed group, equipped with rudimentary weapons cobbled together locally. In two years, you haven’t managed to defeat it. In two years, you’ve been unable to achieve what you claimed was your primary objective. And then you hope to obtain at the negotiating table what you couldn’t obtain on the battlefield?”, points out Moin Rabbani, Palestinian analyst [6].

A popular resistance

The problem is not this or that resistance group. Let us recall, moreover, that since October 2023, all decisions concerning negotiations are taken by all Palestinian groups, armed or not. By reducing everything to Hamas, whom they never meet nor quote, by systematically attaching epithets dictated by Tel Aviv, Western media and politicians try to discredit the resistance. A resistance without history or face, without voice or reason.

“Hamas is not a foreign entity that was implanted in Palestine. It’s a national liberation movement, Islamic, because Palestinian society is permeated by Islam. Its members have spent their entire lives in a concentration camp. Their whole lives have been marked by oppression and assassinations, occupation and invasions by Israel,” recalls Jeremy Scahill [7].

The weapons do not belong to a faction, but to the people who rise up against the oppressor. The struggle is not the work of a group, but of every sister who loses her brother, of every father who buries his child, of every child who knows they have the right to know something other than a life of oppression, imprisonment and submission.

“With our soul, with our blood, we honour your death, martyrs”: this chant has accompanied the funerals of occupation victims for decades, throughout occupied Palestine.

“No matter how many of us they kill, time is with us. We will not abandon our land,” declares Musa at the funeral of his 18-year-old son, assassinated in Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank [8].

After 700 days of genocide in Gaza, after 700 days of accelerated colonisation in the West Bank, after 700 days of a policy of indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, are Israelis more secure?

Israel has never sought security, and even less peace. For decades, to every Palestinian proposal, to every Palestinian concession, to every hand extended by the different groups of Palestinian resistance, the occupier has responded with violence and repression.

Even before the proclamation of the State of Israel, Zionist militias knew only one mode of expression: bloody attacks in markets, hotels. In 1948, the terrorist group Lehi [9] assassinates UN mediator Folke Bernadotte [10].

“Israelis are more afraid of peace than war, because peace would mean equality, the end of apartheid, and accountability,” summarises Palestinian analyst Mohammed Shehada [11].

Genocide as the erasure of a people and their memory

The oppressor is always wrong. And it continues with complete impunity to erase a people. Taking “control” of Gaza City, for the occupier, does not mean putting a checkpoint at the city entrances, it does not mean patrolling from time to time in a jeep to show authority, it does not mean arresting one or two leaders and trying them. No, it means bombing every house that remains, burning every tent, bulldozing every hospital service still standing, completely razing a city of a million inhabitants and erasing millennia of history.

For nearly two years, the occupier’s relentless destruction of ancient mosques and churches, libraries, millennial cemeteries, museums shows its will to annihilate Palestinian collective cultural heritage. During the bombing of the Archives in Gaza City in November 2023, 150 years of documentation were pulverised. Already in 1982, in Beirut, occupation forces had stolen the PLO archives [12], and from 1948, occupier troops had robbed Palestinian homes of between 60,000 and 70,000 volumes of books, manuscripts, newspapers, in the already displayed will to eradicate shared history and memory.

According to Nimer Sultany [13]:

“We are witnessing the deliberate destruction of Gaza as a social group, with the systematic destruction of houses and infrastructure, through bombing, ground explosives and bulldozers. This is what differentiates mass killings from genocide. Genocide is the crime that aims at destroying a society as a collective.”

If we attended the funeral of a child murdered in Gaza every day, we would go to the cemetery every day for more than 53 years.

It is from his stretcher that Zohir bids farewell to Awad and Aboud, his children killed by a missile. He had waited for their birth for 10 years.

Raed kisses the little feet of Jamal. Jamal was the one who still connected him to life. What he held most precious in the world.

Manal and Brahim see their daughter Ibtissam slip towards death day after day. Like thousands of parents, they are condemned by the occupier to watch their child weaken, her eyes grow larger, her cheeks hollow, her entire body hollow, her smile fade. The child’s vital organs fail one after another, the parents know it, the child knows it, and everyone knows what will happen.

Dr Tareq Loubani [14], at al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah [15], explains:

“With the best treatment in the world, some children suffering from malnutrition in Gaza could survive. But the reality is that every child suffering from malnutrition in Gaza today is going to die. At best, they will have irreversible consequences and will not be able to develop their full potential in terms of cognition and growth.”

Behind every figure, broken lives

Behind every statistic, there is a child and a countdown. For a child suffering from malnutrition, with infected burns or a deep wound, time is counted in minutes.

Malek observes:

“I envy those who were lucky enough to die at the beginning of the genocide. I envy those who died before the famine. I envy those whose elderly father died before the sugar shortage, and those whose baby died before the milk shortage.”

I would like to end with a thought for Omar, who caresses again and again the face of his niece Siham, two years old, murdered by the occupier whilst she was playing in front of her house. Omar had taken in Siham, the sole survivor of her family.

A thought for young Samir, who moves with crutches, one leg lifeless, and who brings a jerrycan of water to his tent neighbours.

Marie Schwab