I’m Neither Impartial nor Antisemitic
Coinciding with the entry of Israeli troops into the Al-Shifa hospital complex, located about 500 meters from the Mediterranean coast, in the northern Gaza Strip, converted by the Zionist regime of Benjamin Netanyahu into a theater of war, some 200,000 people demonstrated in Washington D.C. in favor of the Palestinian massacre.
I say this without a pretense of any kind: I am not impartial, nor am I an anti-Semite, but the March for Israel chanted “no ceasefire” and banners read “Let Israel finish the job,” when in Gaza it counts.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas did not start the war, although no one with any love for humanity can approve that in their act of defending their right to exist as a nation, civilians were also killed.
This war, which has become more complicated over the years, has grown disproportionately. This injustice is driven by the imperial political class that promoted the partition of Palestinian territory, to give the State of Israel a home for Jews who would come from all over the world. They legalized the dispossession of land and forced the exodus of the Palestinians who lived there for millennia. This is what is known as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
Israel was born, but there was no Palestinian State, and little by little, in 75 years of outrage, those lands were reduced, while other wars by Israel occurred and Israel grew illegally and by force of extremist settlers’ settlements.
Every day is harder than the previous one as we read the reports, the cries, the drastic actions of extermination, know the numbers of the dead, see the little white wrappers of the children whose time has run out in the hourglass of their lives, those left orphaned, those who stopped breathing in the rubble, the mutilated, the desperate mothers, the helpless, unarmed, defenseless fathers, the hundreds-of-thousands who walk in a second version of the Nakba and never stop being bombed and stare death in the face....
“Let Israel finish the job,” they cry vociferously, and an Israeli singer writes on the metal body of one of the bombs to be dropped, “May God make it fall on the head of the snake.”
As the bodies pile up unburied next to the Al-Shifa hospital and the first rains of winter add more tribulations to those who have lost their homes to the indiscriminate bombardment of Israel’s bloody siege of the Gaza Strip, other weapons are being fired from the well-guarded offices of the imperial capitals, in Washington and London they are called “terrorists” and agree to financial sanctions, punitive measures against Hamas—coercive measures they impose on anyone who does not affiliate with their policies or consider that they should be ripe fruit in their baskets of gains. I also feel shame for the impiety of others, much more than that, I feel the rage of impotence.
I repeat, I do not believe in impartiality when it comes to human integrity. I want peace. Those of us who cannot see in calmness a crime because it would be committing it, as the Master—who also pondered “the necessary war” when it was a matter of seeking freedom, independence, and Homeland said—we need peace....
Palestine has those rights, and it is not the head of a snake, it is a dove flying high.
Translated by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
—Juventud Rebelde, November 15, 2023
https://www.juventudrebelde.cu/opinion/2023-11-15/no-soy-ni-imparcial-ni-antisemita