https://arab.news/pekz7
The return of 1 million Palestinians from southern Gaza to the north last week felt as if history was choreographing one of the most earth-shattering events in recent memory.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched along a single road, the coastal Rashid Street, in the far west of Gaza. Though these displaced masses had been 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 communicating, let alone coordinating, with each other. They were ordinary people, hauling a few items of clothing and whatever tools for survival they had left following the unprecedented Israeli genocide. They headed north to homes they knew were likely destroyed by the Israeli army.
But they remained committed to their march back to their annihilated cities and refugee camps. Many smiled, others sang hymns and some recited national songs and poems.
A little girl offered a news reporter a poem she had 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 mentioned countless times on social media. Although 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 colonized people who have wrested their freedom from the claws of brutal foreign enemies.
“Difficulties break some men but make others. No ax is sharp enough to cut the soul of (someone) … armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end,” iconic South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela wrote in a 1975 letter to his wife 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, one needs to examine what Israeli leaders said about northern Gaza immediately after the start of the genocidal war in October 2023.
Israel will maintain “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip “for an indefinite period,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in November 2023. A year later, the Israeli army reiterated the same sentiment. Brig. Gen. 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, adding that Israel should reoccupy Gaza and “encourage” the migration of its inhabitants.
Many other Israeli officials and experts, like a predictable chorus, repeated the same notion. 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 the Strip or break their collective spirit. Instead, Palestinians emerged stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for Israel, with a new objective: returning to historic Palestine.
Palestinians emerged stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for Israel, with a new objective: returning to historic Palestine.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud
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) has 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 of Gaza, 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 Israel’s 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.
- Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and author. He is editor of The Palestine Chronicle and nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappe, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.” X: @RamzyBaroud