The Day After
As Israel and the Palestinian resistance factions agree to the first phase of a ceasefire, doubt remains as to whether Israel can commit to ending its genocide.
“Gaza will never fly the white flag of capitulation.”
—Georges Abdallah
The bullets, drones, bombs, and planes have (mostly) gone silent. Instead, all one hears is a nation rejoicing. Palestinians are gathering around those few places that have power, such as hospitals, and are singing and chanting, celebrating the agreement on the first phase of a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian resistance factions led by Hamas. Two years and two days after the commencement of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, which Israel responded to with a war of annihilation, it seems as though immediate relief is imminent, as thousands of trucks full of aid are said to be ready to flood into Gaza, while over 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, 250 of them serving life sentences, are to be exchanged for the remaining prisoners of war held by the resistance in the coming days.
At the time of this publication, the Israeli bombing of Gaza has (again, mostly) ceased against the backdrop of successful negotiations in Sharm El Sheikh, the Egyptian resort city where the Americans, the Israelis, and Hamas are all present, alongside interlocutors from Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, who are back in the fold a month after Israel’s botched assassination attempt on the Hamas negotiation team in Doha. In fact, it is the opinion of this writer (and various other more qualified analysts) that the failed operation in Doha, and the subsequent global condemnation of Israel, especially by its Arab neighbors, was the catalyst for this latest ceasefire push. Though Israel has historically gotten away with daring operations in the past, going as far back as Operation Wrath of God in the aftermath of the Black September Organization’s Munich operation, and as recently as the assassination of Hamas leader, and then-lead negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024, the Doha operation reeked of a hubris emanating from a state that cannot operate rationally.1
Israel has to act irrationally.
Back in March, it was Israel that callously tore up the last ceasefire agreement, killing over 400 Palestinians on 18 March. And it is this callousness, this treachery, this irrationality, that seems to be at the root of this national project of Jewish supremacy. This irrationality, while it has always existed at the core of this sick society, was unleashed in the aftermath of Operation Al Aqsa Flood. I’ve long said that the Israeli body politic will never recover from Operation Al Aqsa Flood, that the events of 7 October were the beginning of the third act for Israel, a third act that promises to be long and bloody, but a third act, nonetheless. To have had their long-held notion of invincibility shattered in the shape of the complete and utter collapse of the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) Southern Command and the taking of over 200 prisoners of war is fatal for a society predicated on death and theft. Two years later, and this very society is forever stained with one of history’s gravest crimes: a blood sacrifice, a livestreamed genocide, whose participants—from the upper echelons of the government, to its reservists in the military, to the protesters in Tel Aviv waving Israeli flags while expressing outrage, not at the genocide-in-itself but at Netanyahu’s brutish approach to said genocide—have done so with glee coursing through their bodies.
Perhaps, dear reader, you can relate to this, too, but I can’t help but feel an ineffable dread.
This feeling, one unlike any of the near-infinite emotions that have stricken me over the last two years, has been lingering for the last week or so. I have wept, I have lost sleep, and at times, it has felt as though some invisible force has placed its weight on my shoulders, pushing down, trying to keep me in place. I’ve been feeling like this since the announcement of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s 20-point so-called peace plan, the first phase of which is on the verge of being implemented as I write in the early morning hours of 10 October.2
I wrote about the announcement of the plan last week, but it’s worth remembering that the 20-point plan, a nightmarishly sparse document, promises to introduce technocracy and bring back Balfour-era colonialism to Palestine in the form of an “international transitional body” called the “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump and world historical war criminal Tony Blair. Of course, this plan was conceived without having addressed a single Palestinian, with Trump threatening, as he has done countless times before, that the Palestinian resistance factions accept it or something along the lines of all hell breaking loose or the gates of hell opening would occur, as if 193,000 buildings haven’t been destroyed in Gaza already, with the death toll certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Hell is already here.
The announcement and subsequent push for an agreement on this plan made me wonder if I had been mired in a particular naivete surrounding this current stage of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Was it always going to end like this?
Is this even the end of anything?
Not even close. Nothing is over. In fact, the suffering in Gaza is going to continue for a long time to come.
Yet every day, the Palestinian resistance, and the political acumen they’ve put on display throughout these rapidly moving negotiations, reminds me that I do not have the privilege to be mired in dread, ineffable or otherwise. On 4 October, in a joint response to the Trump/Netanyahu plan, the resistance was brief, mostly expressing gratitude for efforts put forth by the mediating parties, in particular the Arab parties who were present, though the most interesting section was the penultimate paragraph, which I quote in full below:
“We affirm that our Palestinian people, who have made all the sacrifices and stood firm against the Zionist fascist machine of crime, deserve to have their heroism crowned with outcomes that meet their national aspirations for freedom, independence, and ending the occupation, not by liquidating their cause and robbing them of their rights.” (Italics are mine)
The resistance is well aware of the risk they are taking, and their focus remains the establishment of a Palestine state with Al-Quds as its capital and the liberation of every single Palestinian prisoner. In asserting the importance of Palestinian “national aspirations,” i.e., self-determination, the resistance is discursively denying Trump and Netanyahu their dreams for a demilitarized and defanged Tony Blair-run riviera. It was with this statement, and several others from individual resistance factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), that the resistance, in essence, responded, “yes, but…” to the Trump/Netanyahu plan, and it’s worked (for now).
Additionally, on the topic of risk, in releasing the last remaining prisoners of war, the resistance are essentially giving up their last piece of leverage (though it is debatable as to how much the Israeli political establishment really cared for their prisoners of war, but alas, they were bargaining chips nonetheless). The resistance is also aware of the fragility that’ll underline the coming days, when negotiations on the second phase of the ceasefire are set to commence. These negotiations will include discussions on disarmament and the future of political leadership in the Gaza Strip. Regarding the former, anyone who believes that Hamas, PIJ, or the PFLP, are going to simply lay down their arms without the promise of freedom and self-determination, hasn’t been paying attention to the last two years. Lest we forget, Israel failed to achieve any of its war goals, which included neutralizing any military threats from Gaza and the return of its prisoners of war, and is now functioning with a depleted and demoralized army. It is also difficult to believe that an international peace-keeping force made up of Arabs is going to go into Gaza and assist in disarming the resistance, especially in a world where Israel has attacked seven countries in two years. If history has taught us anything, it is that the guerilla and their rifle are the guarantor of the masses—this won’t be changing at the whim of a maniacal Zionist and an egomaniac. Beyond this, there are also lingering questions of aid. Before October 2023, 500 trucks were entering Gaza a day. With over half a million Palestinians living in the grip of famine, a steady flow of hundreds, if not a thousand, trucks should be entering Gaza every day. But is Israel going to allow for this? And what of the steadfast prisoners, the vanguard of the Palestinian revolution? Of the 250 prisoners facing life-sentences that are set to be released, may we finally witness the release of the likes of Marwan Barghouti, the great unifier, PFLP secretary-general Ahmad Sa’adat, or even Hamas’ Abdullah Barghouti? All three have been attacked in recent months and are said to not be in good health due to abuses at the hands of their jailers. Seeing as how Marwan Barghouti and Sa’adat are in their 70s, is this the last opportunity to get them out? Will Gaza be open to international volunteers who want to assist with relief and reconstruction efforts?
The coming days and months will answer these questions.
As I finish writing this, it dawns on me that the ineffable dread may have resulted from our inability to have answered the one question that meant a damn over the last two years: What is to be done in the face of a genocide? We organized, protested, occupied, started reading groups, printed zines, pressed buttons, raised money for mutual aid projects, wrote essays, plays, and songs—some went to jail, others went to prison, some are awaiting sentencing—and none of it worked. Yet, within all of that aforementioned activity, the will to sacrifice, on a mass scale, was never present. The handful of sparks of revolutionary activism we witnessed quickly faded, because the movement did not wholeheartedly adopt these political actors as their own. The likes of Colombian president, and former guerilla, Gustavo Petro tried to warn us, such as when he said that what was happening in Gaza was a dress rehearsal for the rest of the 21st century. Yet, we didn’t do much. And this is not to say that I lament that we, those of us not in Palestine, did not liberate Palestine. Next week, when we see thousands of Palestinian prisoners released, we will be reminded that Palestinians have and are going to continue to liberate themselves, but it is up to us to open a support front in the name of their struggle. If ever there was a time to re-define our notions of solidarity in the West, to raise the ceiling on what is permissible on a discursive and material level, that time is now. Because of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the movement for Palestinian liberation is at the forefront of global consciousness, and it isn’t going anywhere. Seldom does a single day change the entire trajectory of history, but that is precisely what 7 October did. A page is certainly turning on the history of Palestine, but the book is far from written. In many ways, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has only just begun.
In short, Operation Wrath of God was a secret global assassination campaign, launched by Golda Meir, that targeted anyone and everyone who was even suspected of having a peripheral relationship with the Black September Organization. For a pornographic display of this Zionist thirst for revenge, Steven Spielberg’s Munich is perhaps one of the more beautifully shot pieces of dehumanizing propaganda since the peak of Leni Riefenstahl’s career in the 1930s.
As of 1AM EST on 10 October, Al Jazeera is reporting that Israeli planes and helicopters are shelling parts of Gaza City, in what is a blatant violation of a ceasefire that is still in its infancy.