• Monthly Review
  • Monthly Review Press
  • Climate & Capitalism
  • Money on the Left
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Mastadon
MR Online
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact/Submission
  • Browse
    • Recent Articles Archive
    • by Subject
      • Ecology
      • Education
      • Imperialism
      • Inequality
      • Labor
      • Literature
      • Marxism
      • Movements
      • Philosophy
      • Political Economy
    • by Region
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Australasia
      • Europe
      • Global
      • Middle East
    • by Category
      • Art
      • Commentary
      • Interview
      • Letter
      • News
      • Newswire
  • Monthly Review Essays
 | Malak Mattar Palestine A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun 2023 | MR Online Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

Your enemies destroyed one Palestine; my wounds populated many Palestines: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2023)

By Vijay Prashad (Posted Dec 08, 2023)

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on December 7, 2023 (more by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)  |
Human Rights, Inequality, State Repression, WarGaza, Israel, Middle East, PalestineNewswireTricontinental Newsletter

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Hanaa Malallah Iraq The Looting of the Museum of Art 2003

Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the debris from the first rounds of Israeli bombs could be cleared, the bombing resumed just as viciously as before.

The word ‘humanitarian’ has been severely bruised by the West. You might remember another phrase, ‘humanitarian intervention’, that was used as cover for the destruction of Libya in 2011 after the legitimacy of Western military intervention had been eviscerated by the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. To rehabilitate this legitimacy, the West pushed the United Nations to hold a conference that resulted in a new doctrine, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which, while purporting to ‘ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, instead provided the West with a UN Security Council mandate (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) for the use of force. The attack on Libya in 2011 took place under this doctrine. The guise of humanitarianism was used to destroy the Libyan state and throw the country into what appears to be a permanent civil war. There has never been even a whiff of R2P when it comes to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza (not in 2008—09, not in 2014, and not now).

It does not seem to matter that more Palestinians have been displaced and killed by Israel since 7 October than were displaced and killed in the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948. If the word ‘humanitarian’ meant something in 1948, it certainly does not mean much now.

As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly escalating into the tens of thousands. In Iraq, approximately a million people were killed by the U.S. onslaught, the sheer scale of death and the anonymity surrounding it forcing a sense distance from the rest of the world. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.

Abdel Rahman al Muzayen Palestine Untitled 2000

Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

Part of the problem here is that the international division of humanity makes for unjust accounting of human life: were the Palestinians killed in Gaza treated with as much dignity as the Israelis killed on 7 October? Are their lives, and deaths, assigned equal worth? The uneven response to these deaths, alongside the uncritical acceptance of this unevenness, suggests that this international division of humanity remains in place and is not only accepted, but also perpetuated, by Western leaders, who make allowances for the killing of more brown bodies than white ones, the latter seen as precious, the former seen as disposable.

During the ‘humanitarian pause’, a hostage transfer took place through which Hamas and the Palestinian factions released 110 Israelis while Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children. The stories of the Israeli casualties, many of them residents of settlements near the Gaza perimeter fence, and other hostages such as the Thai and Nepalese fieldworkers are now well-known. Less frequently discussed and much less understood are the stories of the Palestinian casualties. Equally disregarded is the fact that after 7 October, Israel launched a mass campaign to detain over 3,000 Palestinians, including nearly 200 children. There are more Palestinians in Israeli prisons now than before 7 October. During the first four days of the truce alone, Israel arrested almost as many Palestinians as it released through the hostage transfer.

It is of note that most (more than two-thirds) of the Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are never charged with any crime and have been held in ‘administrative detention’ in the military’s legal system, meaning that they are held without a time limit, ‘without trial [and] without having committed an offence, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future’, as defined by the human rights organisation B’tselem. Some of them have been lost in the maze of the Israeli incarceration system indefinitely, unable to exercise even the most basic right of habeas corpus, with no court appearance, no access to a lawyer, and no access to the evidence against them. Israel currently holds more than 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of them associated with left-wing factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). More than 2,000 of these prisoners are being held in administrative detention.

Sliman Mansour Palestine Prison 1982

Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

Many of these Palestinian prisoners are children. Many of them spend years in the Israeli system, often under administrative detention, unable to make a case for their release. The Defence for Children International (Palestine) reports that 500—700 children are detained each year, and a chilling report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2015 showed that Israel is in full violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990). Article 37 of the convention says that the ‘arrest, detention, or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’. As multiple cases show, Israel uses arrests as a measure of first resort and holds children for long periods of time.

Defence for Children International studied sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees from the occupied West Bank arrested between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022. The following data emerged from their analysis:

  • 75% were subjected to physical violence.
  • 80% were strip-searched.
  • 97% were interrogated without a family member present.
  • 66% were not properly informed of their rights.
  • 55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand.
  • 59% were arrested at night.
  • 86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest.
  • 58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest.
  • 23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days.
Hakim Alakel Yemen from the series The Eye of the Bird 2013

Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

There are thousands of untold stories of the brutality inflicted upon Palestinian children. One of them, Ahmad Manasra, was arrested on 12 October 2015 at the age of thirteen in occupied East Jerusalem on the charge that he stabbed two Israelis: Yosef Ben-Shalom, a twenty-year-old security guard, and Naor Shalev Ben-Ezra, a thirteen-year-old boy, who survived the attack. The Israeli courts initially found Ahmad guilty of the stabbing but then changed their opinion to say that his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan Khalid Manasra, who was shot dead at the scene, had stabbed the two Israelis. There was no evidence of Ahmad’s complicity, yet he was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison.

Still in prison, Ahmad Manasra (now 21) has been held in solitary confinement for months on end. Khulood Badawi of Amnesty International said in late September that Ahmad ‘was taken to the mental health unit at Ayalon prison after spending the better part of two years in solitary confinement. The Israeli Prison Service has requested an extension of Ahmad’s isolation for another six months in brazen violation of international law. Prolonged solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment’.

Ahmad’s case took place during a wave of what were called ‘knife attacks’, when young Palestinians were accused of rushing at Israeli military posts with knives and were then shot dead. At that time, I investigated several of these attacks and found them to be based on little more than the word of Israeli soldiers. For instance, on 17 December 2015, Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint shot fifteen-year-old Abdullah Hussein Ahmad Nasasra to death. Eyewitnesses told me that the boy had his hands in the air when he was fatally shot. One of them, Nasser, told me that there was no knife, and that he ‘saw them kill the boy’. Kamal Badran Qabalan, an ambulance driver, was not allowed to retrieve the body. The Israelis wanted control over the body and the story they would tell about it.

Another story is that of twenty-three-year-old Anas al-Atrash in Hebron. Anas and his brother Ismail returned home from a week of work in Jericho, their car filled with fruits and vegetables. At a checkpoint, Anas got out of the car when instructed to do so and an Israeli soldier shot him dead. The next morning, Israeli media reported that Anas tried to kill the Israeli soldiers. The journalist Ben Ehrenreich, who reported the story with a fierce determination for the truth, sought out the family’s version. Anas had no interest in politics, they told him. He was studying accounting and hoped to get married soon. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials kept asking Ismail if his brother had a knife. There was simply no knife. Anas had been killed in cold blood. ‘This is a savage country’, an eyewitness told Ehrenreich. ‘They have no shame’. He meant the Israeli soldiers.

The grammar of the Israeli occupation is to put pressure on Palestinians until an act of violence takes place—a knife attack, say, or even a fabricated knife attack—and then use that event as an excuse to deepen the displacement of Palestinians with more illegal settlements. The events that have followed 7 October maintain this logic. Israel has used people like Anas, Abdullah, and Ahmad, and the fabricated narratives surrounding their alleged crimes, as the raison d’etre to increase the demolition of Palestinian homes and expand illegal Israeli settlements, accelerating the Permanent Nakba.

Ten years ago, I met with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaloub-Kevorkian studies how the occupation produces an everyday form of victimhood that stretches from the streets to Palestinians’ most intimate of spaces. Her book Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear (2015) provides a glimpse into the industry of fear that is produced and reproduced in the everyday violence inflicted upon Palestinians by settlers and the military, including the difficulties that Palestinians face in giving birth and burying their dead. The depth of the violence and uncertainty, Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, moves Palestinian women to speak of ‘being choked, suffocated, or gagged’ and has led many of their children to lose their will to live. There is widespread social trauma in Palestine or what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls ‘sociocide’: the death of society.

Abdul Rahim Nagori Pakistan Sabra and Shatila 1982

Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

More than fifty years of an occupation and war have created a strange dynamic. Both Ehrenreich and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work offer windows into this madness. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lives in Jerusalem, told me that she is part of a group of women who walk Palestinian children to school each day, since it is too dangerous for them to confront the police and the settlers on their own, or even in the company of their Palestinian family and friends. ‘Bikhawfuni!’ (‘They scare me!’), one girl, Marah (age 8), told her.

The children draw pictures at school. One of them drew a clown, a Palestinian clown. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian asked the child (age 9) what a Palestinian clown is, he explained, ‘This is a Palestinian clown. Clowns in Palestine cry’.

The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who moved to Beirut to edit the magazine Lotus in the aftermath of the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, wrote with horror about the plight and struggles of the Palestinians:

Tere aaqa ne kiya ek Filistin barbaad
Mere zakhmon ne kiye kitne Filistin aabaad.

Your enemies destroyed one Palestine.
My wounds populated many Palestines.

Faiz’s poem ‘A Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, written during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reflects the reality facing Palestinian children today:

Don’t cry children.
Your mother has just cried herself to sleep.

Don’t cry children.
Your father has just left this world of sorrow.

Don’t cry children,
Your brother is in an alien land.
Your sister too has gone there.

Don’t cry children.
The dead sun has just been bathed and the moon is buried in the courtyard.

Don’t cry children.
For if you cry,
Your mother, father, brother, and sister
And the sun, and the moon
Will make you cry ever more.

Maybe if you smile,
They’ll one day return, disguised
to play with you.

Warmly,

Vijay

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.

About Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
Tricontinental Newsletter
COP28: Where fossil fuel industries go to gloat
Pitfalls of export-led growth
  • Also by Vijay Prashad

    • A language of blood has gripped our world: The Twentieth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad May 16, 2025
    • Vietnam celebrates 50 years of the end of its colonial period by Vijay Prashad May 15, 2025
    • They are making Venezuela’s economy scream: The Eighteenth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad May 02, 2025
    • Two hundred years ago, France strangled the Haitian Revolution with an inhumane debt: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad April 28, 2025
  • Also By Vijay Prashad in Monthly Review Magazine

    • The Actuality of Red Africa June 01, 2024
    • Africa Is on the Move May 01, 2022
    • Preface January 01, 2022
    • Introduction January 01, 2022
    • Quid Pro Quo? October 01, 2011
    • Reclaim the Neighborhood, Change the World December 01, 2007
    • Kathy Kelly’s Chispa December 01, 2005

    Books By Vijay Prashad

    • Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective November 15, 2022
    • Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations September 16, 2020

    Monthly Review Essays

    • US Imperialism in Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges to a Global Community with a Shared Future
      Sam-Kee Cheng  | A late 1940s Soviet poster showing a US military service member lounging on top of a German factory smoking a cigar The text beneath reads DER DOLLARIMPERIALISMUS dollar imperialism | MR Online

      1. Introduction The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world wealth in 1948. As the only power which had used nuclear weapons on civilian […]

    Lost & Found

    • Journalism, democracy, … and class struggle
      Robert W. McChesney  | Bob McChesney on Saving Journalism | MR Online

      Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.

    Trending

    • Wood gavel and open handcuffs symbolizing freeing judge decisions
      High Court opens door to police accountability
    • President Maduro was unscathed from the attack (Hugoshi)
      ‘Neoliberal and authoritarian’? A simplistic analysis of the Maduro government that leaves much unsaid
    • Boat house on Cameron Island on Lake Joseph in Muskoka
      The supply and demand myth of housing
    • South African President Cyril Ramaphosa / French President Emmanuel Macron
      The Colonial past haunts French Military operations in Africa
    • This series of photos was shared on the official Instagram account of the U.S. government-operated Voice of America - Africa radio network on Feb. 15, 2025, with the caption: "White South Africans gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Pretoria...to show their support for U.S. President Donald Trump after he criticized what he terms 'unjust' treatment of White South Africans." | Photos via @voaafrica on Instagram
      Afrikaner ‘refugee’ arrival is latest tactic in Trump’s South Africa destabilization campaign
    • Floyd
      People get ready: Protest on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder
    • Aerial view of Santa Rita strip copper mine near Silver City, NM
      Donald Trump’s feverish lust for green energy resources
    • Secretary Marco Rubio departs Instanbul, Türkiye May 16, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
      Under Trump, NED to continue weaponizing “democracy” in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba
    • Dahlia Abdelilah Baasher (Sudan), Untitled, n.d.
      A language of blood has gripped our world: The Twentieth Newsletter (2025)
    • Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) speaking as President Trump listens. [AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee]
      Republicans move forward with plan to cut an estimated $715 billion in Medicaid funding

    Popular (last 30 days)

    • Langley/Burkina Faso
      The U.S./EU/NATO’s Regime change playbook for Burkina Faso and Captain Ibrahim Traoré
    • Cpt. Ibrahim Traoré
      The rising star of Cpt. Ibrahim Traore – Burkina Faso’s spirit of Sankara
    • Tump and Putin
      Russia rejects Trump’s freeze of the war in Ukraine
    • Trump's Tariffs: Economic Warfare or Winning Strategy?
      The Trump Tariffs and the U.S. Labor Movement
    • Why does the US support Israel?
      Why does the U.S. support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson
    • Wood gavel and open handcuffs symbolizing freeing judge decisions
      High Court opens door to police accountability
    • BAP demonstration in Washington DC gathered outside the Embassy of Burkina Faso, in defense of the Alliance for Sahel States, October 2024.
      Now is the time for all anti-imperialists and all justice loving people to stand unequivocally in defense of Burkina Faso
    • Karl Marx
      Marx’s ontology: A clarification
    • Karl Marx
      150 years since the Critique of the Gotha Programme
    • President Maduro was unscathed from the attack (Hugoshi)
      ‘Neoliberal and authoritarian’? A simplistic analysis of the Maduro government that leaves much unsaid

    RSS MR Press News

    • EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People) May 19, 2025
    • LISTEN: Erald Kolasi on the podcast ‘Real Progressives’ (The Physics of Capitalism) May 19, 2025
    • On the brilliant Bob McChesney April 21, 2025
    • Andy Merrifield, author of Roses for Gramsci, at The Marxist Education Project April 20, 2025
    • NEW! ROSES FOR GRAMSCI by Andy Merrifield (EXCERPT) April 7, 2025

    RSS Climate & Capitalism

    • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2025 May 19, 2025
    • Humans have observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor May 8, 2025
    • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2025 April 10, 2025
    • Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World April 2, 2025
    • Will Mpox be the next global threat to human health? April 2, 2025

     

    RSS Monthly Review

    • May 2025 (Volume 77, Number 1) May 1, 2025 The Editors
    • The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime May 1, 2025 John Bellamy Foster
    • Neoliberalism and Neofascism May 1, 2025 Robert W. McChesney
    • Decolonization and Its Discontents May 1, 2025 Pranay Somayajula
    • China’s “Triple Revolution Theory” and Marxist Analysis May 1, 2025 Cheng Enfu

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Creative Commons License

    Monthly Review Foundation
    134 W 29TH ST STE 706
    New York NY 10001-5304

    Tel: 212-691-2555