Gaza: On Zionism, Judaism,

Racism and Barbarism

Ariel Feldman

I last visited the occupied territories in 2016. The photos accompanying this article are from my visit to Hebron. Knowing I was Jewish (my name is Ariel, like the infamous Ariel Sharon), they opened their homes to me, told their stories, and let me take pictures. The girl in the portrait on the stone wall suffered an assassination attempt by settlers, and the teenagers on the terrace told me about their impossible futures. Hebron is a highly contested city because it is home to the Abraham Mosque, where the tombs of the patriarchs who share a Jewish and Muslim religion are said to be located (in 1994, Goldstein, a fundamentalist Zionist, entered the mosque and murdered 29 people at prayer and wounded more than 100 others). The city is home to fewer than a thousand settlers and more than 200,000 Palestinians. The photos of soldiers and children are from when I witnessed the Israeli army guarding, as it does every Friday, a provocative parade of settlers through the streets of the Palestinian market in Hebron to show them that they not only dominate the Jewish quarter in the heart of their city but that the whole city belongs to them.

In Gaza, the reality is radically worse. Palestinians in the West Bank often excuse themselves from commenting on Hamas's methods in the Strip because they say they cannot know what they would do under that level of oppression. When one considers the systematic attempt at dehumanisation that Israeli colonialism entails, which seeks to drive the Palestinians to their bare minimum, the perseverance of the Palestinian people is simply admirable. Gaza has been under a 16-year blockade by land, air, and sea, with constant bombardment of the civilian population, with cuts in the supply of water, electricity, fuel and essential goods. It is now customary to call Gaza an open-air prison. But it should be added that it is a prison where the most basic human rights are not respected. Gaza is a ghetto, and we are witnessing in real-time and on television the process of annihilation of that ghetto and its population. The Jewish ancestors, whom the Nazis tried to dehumanise in the concentration camps, the victims of the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the very worthy uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto, today would rise in indignation at the racist colonialism of the State of Israel and its ongoing genocide. Again, not in our name.

For a full read of this brief, click here or on the picture to download the pdf file.