Price of Palestinian resistance

THE industrial machinery unleashed on the Palestinians in the Gaza strip by Israel and the West have harvested 60,000 lives so far. This official number is dwarfed by the estimates of the bodies entombed under the field of rubble that Gaza has been transformed into. As many as half a million Palestinians appear to be missing, apparently "spirited away" to some other realm, as Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned. The method this time around might not be exactly what he had in mind, but the effect is undeniably the same.

- By Prabath Sirisena

Genocide at this scale and pace, even when it is livestreamed by those getting exterminated, easily reduces people to sheer statistics that lack any affective power. It is not humanly possible to comprehend that every single one of the hundred or so people that die daily in Gaza—while collecting food, attending to the injured, sleeping in their tents, in horrific ways—is a father, a mother, a child, who meant everything to their loved ones. Our humanising capacities are overloaded by the incessant flood of death, and one cannot help but wonder, perhaps this is the whole point. Death at scale gets normalised until we tell ourselves: dying is what happens to people over there. It is all too complicated. How sad. Anyways.

But we Sri Lankans should know as well as any people that things that are made to appear complicated by the empire and its sympathisers are not so at all to the colonised. Having been under colonial rule for centuries, and having experienced genocide ourselves (which is what the crushing of the “rebellion” of 1818 by the British, for instance, truly was), we should have the historical awareness to see through the rhetoric and identify the machinations of settler colonialism.

We, who have known incredible violence and bloodshed since gaining independence in 1948, should be able to understand the displacement and dehumanisation the Palestinians have been subjected to since the Nakba of 1948. This is no new genocide, as the eminent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe points out: it has been incremental, and started many decades ago. Today Israel has the will, the means, and the political support to expedite what has always been their modus operandi in regard to Gaza.