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via @wizard_bisan1

21 January 2024

Hi everyone, it’s Bisan from Gaza, I am still alive Alhamdullah.. it’s been 107 days of genocide, 15 weeks, 2568 hours of killing us, taking over our homes and lands in Gaza Strip, and forcing us to choose between leaving or death.. and sometimes we can’t even choose.. the Israeli air strikes simply kill us without any warnings. Now, we are without any connection, neither the internet nor the cellular, we can’t reach each other’s inside Gaza, we don’t know if our families and friends are alive or not, wounded or not.. still in their places or not! We take hours of walking and searching to reach someone, while moving became very risky! We can’t reach to you as well! The footage, information and news from Gaza are not reaching you as before because the Israeli army intentionally destroyers the signal towers and the servers, even using the E-SIM requires being in a high place which is very risky!. I borrowed this vest to upload this post! I am not scared of death, but of being displaced, scared of losing my family or friends, scared of being wounded and can’t have my treatment because the health system is collapsed in Gaza, and to die in pain! I am not scared of the destruction.. I lost my work place.. my home and my family work place and source of income, I am terrified of being killed by an occupier, and to be forgotten, one oppressed Bisan of a whole occupied people. The strongest governments and weapons manufacturers are supporting this genocide against my people, and you are our only hope! STRIKE globally and call for a ceasefire! Strike, protest, stop the economic movements and make pressure on your countries to stand against this and stop it, if ISRAhell don’t find the financial and weapons support, or governments to hide their crimes they will be forced to stop the genocide! Go to the streets, protest and Globally strike for a week, (21-28) January! YALLA Brave and free people of the world, CEASEFIRE NOW!

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"A Child’s View from Gaza" was an art exhibition showcasing drawings created by the children of Gaza.

"The captioned illustrations were created by Palestinian children who lived through the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in 2008-09. The pictures were drawn as part of an effort to help children deal with the horrors they had experienced. A Bay Area nonprofit, Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), arranged to display a collection of these pictures at the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California. However, under pressure from the Jewish Federation of the East Bay and other organizations, the museum backed out of the agreement at the last minute."

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Palestinian food recommendations? I’m on a mission to expand my cooking skills.

yesss okay so automatically i have to recommend knafeh, but other than that we have msakhan, sfeeha, and i like manaeesh also. we have maqlouba, kufta, and this one is more jordanian but i LOVEEEE mansaf. we're really big on breads, if you like those. there are lots of recipes that you can easily search for, but i hope this helps!

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"Your curiosity must outweigh your longing of what you think you know of her."

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Couldn't help but cry while I am visualizing one of the testimonies from the Salah Al-Din street as it was the so called "safe passage" when people were forced to move to the south of Gaza. They killed her son while she is carrying him, they forced her to leave him in the street and continue walking without him! I mean what level of genocide is that!

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A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

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Hello, are you able to share more information around how foreign journalists report on gaza? I only learned recently about the how israel has gaza under blockade, and that it also has to give foreign journalists permission to enter and report. I've heard that there are no foreign journalists in at the moment except for CNN, which has embedded with the Israeli army and uncritically shared a paper with days of the week in arabic and presented it as evidence of terrorism (good journalism!) I don't know very much, but from what I can tell al jazeera is the only like, big press that actually has reporters in gaza and offers english language reports. When i go to other sources like CBC or BBC and see where they're reporting from it's usually somewhere in Egypt or israel but they don't disclose at the top why they aren't reporting from gaza. Idk maybe im just dumb and the blockade on journalists is a widely known thing but i felt pretty deceived that international press don't bring up that they aren't permitted into gaza by the israeli gov

aljazeera actually isn't the only outlet with local correspondents, though it might seem like it.

the bbc, NPR, AP and several other corporations also have reporters on the ground in gaza—palestinian correspondents. some of them are freelance photojournalists for outlets like the NYT and some are employed by the local AP or reuters or bbc bureaus (that israel has in fact bombed in 2021) the bbc's palestinian correspondent is rushdi abu alouf. the lebanese correspondent who was killed in lebanon worked for reuters.

this is partly why a lot of arab journalists have been appalled by the complete disregard these western media outlets have for their colleagues. as hind khoudary put it:

western agencies do not clearly disclose that the only thing preventing foreign reporters from going in is the israeli blockade. israeli controls everything coming in and out of gaza.

this article from the washington post It’s becoming impossible to report from Gaza highlights the difficulties faced by local journalists, but it says:

In an interview, Mansour said Israel’s recent history of targeting media exacerbated the current reporting crisis in Gaza. In May 2021, Israel bombed a building in Gaza that housed the offices for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. In May 2022, Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head while reporting in the West Bank. The Israeli military initially claimed that Abu Akleh had been killed in crossfire with Palestinian fighters, but numerous independent investigations, including by The Washington Post, concluded that Israeli forces were probably responsible. Mansour said these cases have changed the risk calculations for international journalists — leaving local photo and freelance journalists to do the job of covering conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.

this makes it sound like its security issues that keep foreign journalists from entering gaza, right? but in fact, an earlier article from the washington post News networks ‘scrambling’ to get journalists to Israel puts it far more plainly:

But at least one massive logistical challenge remains: getting into Gaza. CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams has been reporting from the Israeli border town of Sderot, which is only a few miles from Gaza. Williams reported from Gaza in 2014 and 2021, but said it’s not possible right now to get there. “Even in normal times — and right now it is not a normal time — it is very difficult logistically to get into Gaza, because you need permission from the Israeli side,” she said. “I think a lot of journalists would like to be covering what’s happening in Gaza right now, but it comes with some very obvious dangers.” “Gaza is impossible to reach right now,” said Fox’s Yingst, though he argued that the “logistics are easier than in other conflict zones I’ve reported from.”

to put it simply: israel prevents international journalists from getting into gaza and only allows them to embed with its own military where it can approve everything they put out. embedded journalism has historical precedent in reporting on wars, although it may be interesting to note that during the iraq war journalists who spoke arabic were sidelined by the US military once they realized that the journalists could communicate directly with civilians.

a petition signed by over 100 french journalists has made this very clear:

“We were able to record the stories of the victims of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, we need to work in security to report on what is happening in Gaza [...] let us enter the Gaza Strip so that we can do our job. We understand the risks,” reads the missive. Since the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza 16 years ago, journalists cannot enter the Palestinian territory without authorisation from Israeli authorities. With the outbreak of the latest war, “Israeli authorities are not letting us (journalists) enter the Gaza Strip [...] the other possibility would be to enter through Rafah but we cannot enter because the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt is closed,” journalist Céline Martelet, who signed the petition, said to FRANCE 24. The international media has continued reporting on the situation in Gaza despite the restrictions, but there is a glaring disparity between the quantity and quality of information coming out of Israel and Gaza.

israel may claim this is for their own safety but there's also a history of foreign journalists getting killed by israel in the gaza strip or witnessing israel bombing children on a beach and consequently contradicting israel's version of events

tldr; yes israel has a blockade on international journalists entering gaza, and only allows them to embed with the idf. it should also be noted that both hamas and many palestinians have invited international bodies to enter gaza and disprove israeli propaganda for themselves multiple times, particularly for claims that hospitals were operating as terrorist headquarters. medical personnel, the red cross, and other NGOs have asked for international oversight and intervention repeatedly. only one party has total control over every border in gaza.

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Pray, tell people about this et cetera do whatever you can do online and offline

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Your stance on Hamas doesn’t even matter here, you have to agree that every news article you see referring to Hamas as terrorists while refusing to associate any negative terms with Israel is insane. This isn’t even a “Hamas-Israel conflict,” this is Israel in the process of completely wiping out any trace of indigenous Palestinians off the face of the earth. They call Hamas terrorists and completely ignore Israel killing children and families, bombing over a dozen mosques, a church, and a hospital (while threatening to bomb others). This is very deliberate criminalization of one side, making it easier to justify their genocide and feeding deeper into their characterization as less than human, while leaving the other side’s crimes completely unaccounted for. Everyone is so ready to start screaming about injustice and human rights violations until the victims are Palestinian. You’re so ready to believe any lie you see online about Palestinians being “barbaric” and then look away when the truth about Israel shows.

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Gaza, Palestine (2004). Photographed by Abid Katib.

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Israel has been committing unspeakable war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza for 15 years. 15 years. Any comment or analysis that doesn’t take this fact into consideration today is hollow, immoral, and dehumanizing.

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Some things to note when you're discussing Palestine and Israeli apartheid in the coming days/weeks/months (not a complete list but will update as I have the emotional energy):

Do not refer to what is happening in Palestine as a "conflict" or "war." These words imply a balance of power that does not exist. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no military, no control of their borders, no control over their access to resources like electricity, water, and medical supplies, no freedom of movement, and, most importantly, they do not have the most powerful government in the world funding them.

Israel is an apartheid state. Refer to it as such. It is based in a settler colonialist system that actively recruits and funds people from the Jewish diaspora to move into homes on stolen Palestinian land. Since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, 42% of the West Bank has been illegally settled while 86% of East Jerusalem has been stolen for settler use. Under international law, the expansion of these settlements is illegal. Israel has faced zero repercussions for their actions. Hold them accountable in your speech.

Do not refer to the Israeli army as the "IDF" (Israeli Defense Force). Palestinians refer to them as the "IOF" for a reason--Israel does not need to defend themselves from civilians who have no military. From 2008 to September 2023, over 3,800 Palestinian civilians were killed by the IOF. There is no need for oppressors to defend themselves--they are the ones on the offense at all times by the nature of their positions of power.

Remember that decolonization will not be a peaceful process. Do not condemn a group of people who have been brutally colonized, ethnically cleansed, and displaced from their homes for 75 years for fighting back against those oppressing them. This post concisely explains why the violence necessary for decolonization will never match that of the violence necessary for the sustained process of colonization. You cannot break free of a violent system with nonviolence. When Palestinians attempted peaceful protest in 2018 on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, they along with clearly marked journalists, doctors, and medics were shot and killed for their actions. Oppressors will maintain their power status by any means necessary; the ongoing genocide of Palestinians is proof of that. Decolonization requires violence because colonization itself is an inherently violent system.

Zionism does not equate to Judaism. Do not let Zionist propaganda fool you into believing that condemning the Israeli government is in any way antisemitic. The Israeli government does not represent the views of all Jews, even those who are Israeli citizens. Governments should always, always be criticized and held to account for their actions. Israel is no exception to this rule. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Anyone who tells you otherwise is weaponizing true Jewish oppression and suffering as a means to gain support for a violent, racist, apartheid government.

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There are ads here on tumblr as well. Tiktok is putting warnings on videos of people who are only mentioning what is happening in palestine. Instagram is deleting accounts of people who are reporting straight from gaza.

Biden questioned the number of deaths reported in Gaza, after which the health ministry came out with a report over 200 hundred pages long with personal information on the killed individuals.

24 journalists have been killed in 21 days.

Yesterday internet and phone services in Gaza went down, due to the heavy bombardments.

The voice of the people in palestine is being silenced in every way you can imagine.

So the least you can do, is share what is going on. Use all your platforms. Even this one.

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Part of the Pro-Palestine march in London today, November 11 2023.

Possibly the biggest in history.