Nine-year-old Jamal is paralyzed. He constantly experiences severe, uncontrollable convulsions. He can’t sleep during them. Neither can his mother. A drug called baclofen is needed to control the seizures. Relaxes muscles and stops shaking. Stopping Baclofen suddenly can have serious health consequences.
Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me a week ago from her family’s tent in the al-Mawasi concentration camp in Gaza. It’s been 7 days since my son stopped taking his medicine. Jamal screamed in pain as severe neurological spasms gripped his limbs.
Baclofen is not available anywhere in Gaza. It is not available in hospitals, clinics, Ministry of Health warehouses, or even the Red Cross. Shaima examined them all. It is one of many medicines banned by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.
Jamal now endures dozens of seizures every day. There are no substitutes or substitutes. There is only pain and no peace.
If former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others want their way, Jamal’s story should not be told.
Speaking at the US-based, Israel-focused Miryam Institute last month, he said: “We need to make sure this story is told properly so that when this is written in the history books, it’s not about the victims of Gaza.” The audience applauded at this line.
Secretary Pompeo went on to say that while all wars have civilian casualties, the real victims in this case were Israeli citizens. His concern is that October 7 and the war in Gaza will be remembered “incorrectly”.
Mr. Pompeo seems to want to argue that Gaza residents are merely “collateral damage” to Israel’s war. They must remain nameless, faceless and forgotten. He wants to erase their stories from the pages of human history.
His statements reflect the next phase of Israel’s genocide. Frustrated by the ongoing exclusion of Gaza’s people, mosques, schools and universities, cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies, including Mr. Pompeo, are now seeking to erase the memory and martyrdom.
This campaign is evident both inside and outside Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which has long maintained the status of Palestinian refugees and protected their right of return under international law, is being systematically weakened and dismantled. TikTok, one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices can be heard a little more freely, is now shadowbanning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts after being acquired by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.
In countries such as the US and UK, local laws have been misused to attack pro-Palestinian youth, with many detained for exercising their protected right to free speech. In the United States, state-level laws govern what is taught in schools about Israel and Palestine.
But what Mr. Pompeo, and those like him who have misread Bible verses to justify support for Israel and its genocide, fail to understand is that Palestinians have faced and overcome erasure before. I would do that again.
When I think of memory and witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus,” which means “witness,” and it appears prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the Arabic word “shaheed” comes from the root of the word meaning “witness” or “witness.” As the word evolved, it came to mean intense suffering due to one’s beliefs and even heroic fortitude due to the magnitude of sacrifice.
I can’t think of a better word to describe Jamal and those around him than ‘shaheed’. They are living martyrs. Jamal’s small body has seen untold suffering. Although he has been exposed to the violence of war, he, like his mother, continues to press forward due to an overwhelming desire to live.
Thousands of tents are set up around Jamal and Shaima’s tent. Day and night, each of them is pierced by Jamal’s cries. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from recent flooding, are thousands of other people in need of urgent and critical medical evacuation to hospitals.
Despite the immense pain and suffering, people like Mr. Pompeo continue to justify the ongoing process of exclusion of Palestinians, which is rooted in history.
Palestinians are also poets at heart. And what Mr. Pompeo, with his disdain for language, memory, and history, will never understand is that poets are witnesses.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes in his poem:
Those who come and go between fleeting words
take your name with you
Let’s waste our time and go out
Let’s steal what we like from the blue of the sea and the sand of memory.
What kind of photos do you take so that you can understand
Things you never do:
How stones from our land become the ceiling of our sky.
Just as we have kept alive the pain of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif, and the roots of every olive tree torn from the soil, so Palestinians will keep the memory alive. Millions of people around the world in solidarity with the Palestinian people witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and in honor of the living martyr Jamal, let each of us pick up the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
