الكاتب: kafej

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Between her live presentations on TV, Khawla al-Khalidi takes a sip of water, or coffee if it’s available, and searches her phone for updates.

Her husband, Baher, adjusts her hijab, murmuring words of encouragement, then stands beside the camera as al-Khalidi prepares for another live update.

The 34-year-old journalist, like many of her colleagues, practically lives at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which has become a makeshift bureau because it is one of the few places where the internet works and the journalists can charge their phones, laptops and other electronics.

“I’ve always loved journalism, and I’ve been in this industry for 11 years,” al-Khalidi said. “I used to produce and present the morning show for Palestine TV, and since this war started, I’ve also been given the opportunity to work for [the Saudi-owned] Al Hadath and Al Arabiya channels as well.”

Al-Khalidi has not stopped working since October 8, a day after Israel began its offensive on the Gaza Strip after unprecedented attacks by Hamas on army bases and towns in southern Israel.

In the midst of war and its constant developments, any stability and daily routines are thrown out the window.

Al-Khalidi had barely worked a day in her usual office before all of the Gaza Strip was threatened with air raids. Her Palestine TV colleagues evacuated, and she began working from home, doing live interviews with various channels over the phone.

One night at nearly midnight during the first week of bombing, she was doing her last phone interview of the day when she noticed Baher signalling her.

The Israelis were going to target their neighbourhood, he told her, and they needed to leave right away.

“We got a message saying we had to evacuate in 20 minutes,” she said. “I ended my phono by telling them that, and then I walked around the house in a daze, not knowing what to pack or take with me.”

Dream home destroyed

The couple and their four children – the eldest is 12 and the youngest five – stayed for about a week at al-Khalidi’s parents’ home in Gaza City. On the second day, al-Khalidi got the news that her beloved home, the one that she and Baher had built together over 10 years, had been destroyed.

“My family tried to play it down at first, saying: ‘Oh, it was just the kitchen that caught fire,’ or that it was partially damaged by shrapnel,” she recalled. “But it was all gone.

“I cried, of course, then calmed down. A couple of days later, I cried again, then pulled myself together. I knew that this is the situation in Gaza now and that everyone is going through the same experience.”

Al-Khalidi’s paintings were hung up by Baher on the walls of their home. It was their dream house, and everything inside from the furniture to the interior decor to what filled the nooks and crannies were all chosen and made lovingly by the husband and wife.

“It didn’t hit me at the beginning that my house was gone,” al-Khalidi said. “I feel it more now, every time we get displaced farther and farther away.

“You realise that it’s not about the money or the decor or the paintings, but it’s about having a private and secure space for you and your family to be around each other.”

The family woke up one morning to the sound of violent bombardment on the street. An Israeli air attack had targeted a house metres away, reducing it to rubble. The windows of al-Khalidi’s parents’ home shattered from the blast, and the journalist decided to leave for al-Maghazi refugee camp in the centre of Gaza to stay with her brother’s in-laws.

Al-Khalidi continued to work. She had her car, and the roads were still not as dangerous or damaged as they are now.

One day, as she was driving to the Rafah border crossing to cover the movement of the second group of patients going to Egypt for treatment, she heard on the radio that the Afaneh family home in al-Maghazi was targeted.

“That house is directly next to the house that my husband and children are in,” she said. “I tried calling my husband and brother, but no one was answering their phones, so naturally, I assumed the worst.”

She turned her car around and drove straight to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, her heart in her throat.

Baher was at the entrance, immediately reassuring her that everyone was fine, save for a few stitches on her son Karam’s head. The couple then decided it was best to send their children to Rafah to stay with their other grandparents while they remained in Deir el-Balah.

‘My backbone, my wings’

For the past 12 days, the couple would talk to their children six or seven times a day, at any opportunity when the phone lines weren’t down.

“They would tell me every detail of their lives from the lack of water and the little food they had to playing with their cousins and neighbours and what they did with their uncle that day,” al-Khalidi said. “Their main complaint was that they couldn’t shower.”

Every day, she wakes up at dawn with her husband, prays, and then they set off to the hospital about 1km (0.6 miles) away, walking hand in hand. At the hospital grounds, she greets her colleagues, then connects to the internet to gather the information for her first live at 8am for Al Arabiya. She keeps going until her last live at 4pm.

“I report about 18 times a day in front of the camera,” she said. “I’m exhausted by the end of it and like to leave the hospital before it gets dark. My husband and I walk back, and after changing my clothes and a quick bite, I do phone interviews until 10pm.”

She is full of praise for Baher, who is a prosecutor but hasn’t worked since the war began.

“I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I am doing now if it wasn’t for him,” she said, smiling.

“He’s encouraged me from the first day, saying that I have the ability to keep working and to get my message out there, which not every journalist has.”

It also comforts her to be around him, whether simply feeling his presence among the many journalists, patients and displaced people living in the hospital’s courtyard or when he brings her water or coffee or food between her reports. He watches every one of her lives and gives her feedback.

“He’s my backbone, my wings,” al-Khalidi said. “You know the old adage that behind every great man is a great woman? Well, I also believe that behind every great woman is a greater man. I’m blessed to have him.”

The couple went to Rafah to see their children on Monday and realised that it was not safer than other areas because Israeli warplanes and tanks had targeted the city, so they decided to bring the children back to al-Khalidi’s aunt’s house in Deir el-Balah, where the couple had been staying.

“I was so excited to see them again,” she said. “My daughter Rama said she hasn’t hugged me in so long. I thought, ‘You know what, we either die together or live together.’”

‘Palestinian journalists the best in the world’

The biggest challenges that journalists face in doing their jobs during the war are the lack of transportation, the slow and unreliable internet connectivity, and the lack of electricity. Many of the male reporters at the hospital haven’t seen their families in weeks and sleep on mattresses in the courtyard. With winter around the corner, the absence of proper shelters has become a main concern.

“It seems like every day I hear about a colleague whose family members were killed in an attack or of their own deaths,” al-Khalidi said. “This makes me think, ‘Will I be next? Will my family be next?’”

What motivates her to keep working, she says, is the hope that one day she will look into the camera and say: “And now, Palestine has been liberated.”

“For this time, I want to say: ‘The war is over. Go back to your homes,’” she said. “Who said people in Gaza are used to conflict and strife? We’re definitely not made to live in hospitals or be displaced over and over or run from the bombs in the sky.”

She is convinced that what makes Palestinian journalists continue their work while facing such danger and witnessing unspeakable horrors is their belief in Palestinian freedom and self-determination.

“I consider Palestinian journalists to be the best there is in the world, from their bravery, their presentation, their language skills, their experience, their strength,” al-Khalidi said.

“This war has made me appreciate all of life’s little blessings,” she added. “It also strengthened my resolve, and I will definitely build another house, an even better and more beautiful home than the one before.”

NewsFeed

Chants of ‘no ceasefire’ were heard as tens of thousands of people joined a rally in Washington DC in support of Israel as it continues its war in Gaza.

NewsFeed

Israel’s military has been calling doctors working inside Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, where its forces has been carrying out a raid. One doctor recorded his conversation. Here’s what he told the Israeli army.

“From the river to the sea, Israel will be free.”

OK, that is not the way it is supposed to go, is it? But at this moment of war and mass death, this proposition is worth reflecting on: Palestine cannot be free without Israel – or at least the Israelis – being free. True freedom between the river and the sea can only be achieved by breaking free from the chains of settler-colonialism but also the narrow bounds of the nation-state.

Before I explain further, let me get into the current debate over the slogan “river to the sea”.

When most Israelis, and no doubt a significant number of Palestinians, hear the phrase “river to the sea,” they imagine it in exclusivist terms. This is not surprising.

The zero-sum understanding of the nation-state – a specific territory under the exclusive control of one national community, has been the determinative communal identity for at least four centuries. Its logic is as simple as it is violent: if this territory belongs to my group, it cannot belong to yours.

Not every country’s identity and politics are based on this logic, but many are. Even countries with a long tradition of intercommunal tolerance can rapidly veer towards chauvinism.

The dynamics are even clearer in settler-colonial societies, where the settler community has to conquer the territory and subdue or expel the Indigenous population in order to build its own society. Genocide is more often than not a core experience of this process.

Israel is, of course, the quintessential settler-colonial society; yet it is also one whose maximalist impulse has yet to be realised. Palestinians have not been reduced to a manageably small minority who can be given formal political rights and then ignored, repressed and extracted without meaningful resistance – as was the fate of Indigenous Americans and Australians.

Given the violence inherent to colonialism, Indigenous resistance has naturally been imagined by settler societies as the mirror image of their eliminationist impulses and policies: We want them gone and will commit whatever violence is necessary to achieve that goal, so they must want and would do the same. Not surprisingly, when resistance does take the form of mass violence, as happened on October 7, that imagination is powerfully reinforced.

In this context, when most Zionist Israelis and Israel supporters hear the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they hear “a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”. The fact that some Palestinians, particularly Hamas, have leaned hard into a violently exclusivist connotation of the phrase only serves to reinforce the idea.

But Hamas has never represented most Palestinians, despite the concerted efforts of the movement and successive Israeli governments (for very different reasons) to elevate its status. Its popularity in, if not control over, Gaza had waned significantly before the October 7 attack.

Into this deeply dysfunctional mix enters Representative Rashida Tlaib, currently the only Palestinian American member of the United States Congress. Along with her colleague Ilhan Omar and occasionally other members of “The Squad”, she has been the only national political voice advocating unhesitatingly for Palestinian rights.

For the vast majority of her congressional colleagues and most who describe themselves as “pro-Israel”, Tlaib’s use of the “river to the sea” slogan permanently marked her as an enemy of Israel. This was why, on November 6, she was officially censured by the House of Representatives.

Of course, Palestinians are not the only ones advocating a “river-to-sea” discourse. It has more or less been the official policy of the Israeli state since 1967, when it occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Since then, every Israeli government has pushed for the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, rendering the two-state solution an impossibility well before the Oslo peace process began.

Within the Israeli political space, from the far-right to the liberal left, the idea of sharing the land with the Palestinians as equals was never on the table.

The problem Israel has faced – like other settler-colonial powers – has been that Indigenous populations rarely if ever go gentle into that good night. Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky would not have disagreed with Tlaib’s argument in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, that the “suffocating, dehumanising conditions” of permanent occupation inevitably “lead to resistance”.

Exactly a century ago, in his 1923 manifesto, The Iron Wall, he advocated overwhelming Jewish power to turn Palestine from the river to the sea into a Jewish ethnostate precisely because of the inevitability of Palestinian resistance.

Regardless of whose side one is on, as long as the understanding of the “river-to-sea” discourse is filtered through the prism of the inherently colonial nation-state, one’s imagination of other possibilities will be highly constrained. And a far more expansive imagination is precisely what is most desperately needed today, not only to establish freedom, justice and peace for all the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel in the midst of the present horror, but to address humanity’s myriad existential problems, in which the Israeli occupation is deeply embedded.

In that regard, Tlaib’s argument – echoed by innumerable Palestinian activists and their allies, including many Jews – that “from the River to the Sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate” represents a radically post-nationalist imagination of the future in Palestine and Israel. In fact, it is one that Palestinians on the front lines of the occupation, joined by Israeli and international solidarity activists, have been putting into practice, however tentatively and against overwhelming force, for decades, as anyone who is engaged in solidarity work in the occupied territories will attest.

To share a communal meal in Nabi Saleh or Bil’in, Atwani or the Jordan Valley after a day spent planting or harvesting olive trees, walking children to school, facing off against Israeli settlers, bulldozers or tear gas – and now to struggle daily together in the US and across the West, is to repeat an experience common to the Freedom Riders, the multi-racial African National Congress, and others who struggled for freedom.

Intercommunal solidarity and joint action towards a common future were central to all these struggles, as they pushed for imagining possibilities for sharing land, resources and power that previously seemed naïve, far-fetched or even dangerous.

Every day, more and more Jews and others join Palestinians in causing precisely the sort of “good trouble” that previously helped end – however imperfectly – apartheid in America and South Africa, and formal colonial rule across the Global South. There is a growing awareness, particularly among young people, that the stakes of Gaza extend beyond Palestine and Israel, representing the front lines of a battle for the future, for the possibility of humanity not being engulfed by growing violence and inequality as we veer towards ever more deadly threats to our collective survival.

For those still trapped inside binary identities and safely ensconced in an increasingly psychopathic global capitalist system, a free Palestine from the river to the sea – indeed, a truly free, equal and sustainable world – remains an unthinkable proposition.

But as the latest wave of violence confirms, Israel cannot be free until Palestine is free, and the price of that freedom is real decolonisation. This means the creation of a political order, whatever its name or form, in which all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are accorded the same fundamental rights and freedoms.

In the face of the horrors of Gaza, we should be working to encourage real decolonisation not just in Israel/Palestine, but globally, before the violence engulfs us all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Lawyers say Israel’s acts against Palestinians in Gaza amount to genocide, call on West to refrain from abetting crimes.

A group of lawyers representing Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks on Gaza have filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC), arguing that Israel’s actions amount to the crime of genocide.

Gilles Devers, a veteran French lawyer and the victims’ representative before the ICC, submitted the complaint to the prosecutor as part of a four-person delegation in the Dutch city of The Hague on Monday.

The civil society initiative could result in arrest warrants being issued against top Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It is clear for me that there are all the criteria for the crime of genocide,” Devers told Al Jazeera, adding that cases such as ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda set the precedent against which the complaint had been submitted.

“So this is not my opinion, it’s the reality of law.”

Israel has made no attempt to hide the hallmarks of genocide, the group has argued, by cutting food and electricity to Gaza, attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure and using dehumanising talk that likens people to “animals”.

The group also collected the witness accounts of Palestinian victims whom they legally represent in court.

With mounting allegations of serious war crimes being committed in Gaza, Devers said governments that did not wish to be found complicit should refrain from backing Israel.

“Governments must choose which camp they are on, if they support human rights or genocide. They cannot give speeches about international law and human rights and then accept Israel’s attack without doing nothing,” he said.

Israel does not recognise the ICC, but Devers said that did not render the court ineffective.

In 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over grave crimes committed in occupied Palestinian territories, including potential war crimes committed by any party on the ground.

The initiative led by Devers is one in a number of lawsuits presented to the ICC in the past weeks.

On November 9, three Palestinian human rights groups urged the body to investigate Israel for “apartheid” as well as “genocide” and issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

#JusticeForGaza, another initiative, aims to bring together diverse voices from international civil society, political leaders and representatives to petition the court. Prominent European politicians who have advocated for Palestinian rights, including Spain’s Ione Belarra and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, are among the more than 80 signatories of that petition.

Devers said the latest bombing of Gaza amounted to the most relevant crimes that the court had seen in decades.

“If the ICC does nothing, then it’s the end of the ICC,” he said. “We have sufficient proof for a mandate of arrest against Mr Netanyahu,” Devers said.

The ICC in March issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged involvement in war crimes in Ukraine. While Putin rejected the verdict and did not surrender to the court’s jurisdiction, the decision was a symbolic moment and limited the Russian leader’s ability to travel internationally, including to attend international forums.