In the Time of Almosts and Maybes
Yesterday, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported that Israel used a 500 lb (230 kg) bomb in the attack on the al-Baqa cafe on Gaza’s beachfront on Monday, which killed at least 24 people.
“Experts in international law said the use of such a munition… was almost certainly unlawful and may constitute a war crime,” it reports.
Journalists and legal experts, we know, must measure words cautiously, couch their judgements with calculated risk. Yet the cognitive dissonance these words provoke is sickening.
Almost.
May.
These nearly-words sum up too well the half-measures and the diluted condemnations that still, after 20 months, have not galvanised collective and coordinated mass action across Europe in the name of popular resistance to a genocide being committed in our names. Action that is urgently needed to force an end to the weapons sales, the reconnaissance flights and refueling stops , and the gross abuses of power deployed by politicians and law enforcement across the continent against the few who truly resist the barbarity of Israel’s occupying force and European complicity with it, having weighed the personal risk it carries and decided to act anyway.
Ismail Abu Hatab was a journalist and photo-videographer, who wrote that the places he preserved on film told him and his fellow Gazans,
“Do not abandon us, for we carry your memories and dreams.”
He was the 228th journalist to be killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Amna “Frans” al-Salmi, a visual artist who also had her life stolen at the cafe,filled her Instagram page full of portraits; digital and sketched. Her portrait of Ismail is also his Instagram profile picture.
On 20th June, Frans shared a different piece of art. Three faces, appearing as if shrouded, depicted in vivid, urgent slashes of red and white.
Art by Amna “Frans” al-Salmi
Ten days later, images of her final moments would be juxtaposed with this picture, and shared worldwide.
Ismail and Frans were two of the 22 whose richly illustrated and intertwined lives were taken at al-Baqa on Monday. Tens of others were killed that day. Hundreds more in June. And more than 55,000 in the last 635 relentless days. This paragraph cannot even begin to detail those injured, orphaned, displaced and dispossessed in this timeframe.
Amidst the ‘almosts’, the ‘mays’ and the ‘nearlies’, one thing is certain: Each one of us must judge ourselves against the actions and decisions we are prepared to take at this moment, and in these times, to resist.
For we are what we tolerate.
End the genocide.
End the occupation.
End European complicity with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.
Images shared from the Instagram accounts of Amna “Frans” al-Salmi and Ismail Abu Hatab. May they rest in peace.
Words by Poppy G.