[News] The great march of hope: Gaza’s defiance against erasure

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 The great march of hope: Gaza’s defiance against erasure
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Tuesday 4-February-2025 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/the-great-march-of-hope-gazas-defiance-against-erasure/

The return of one million Palestinians from southern Gaza to the north on
27 January felt as if history was choreographing one of its most
earth-shattering events in recent memory.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched along a single street, the coastal
Rashid Street, at the furthest western stretch of Gaza. Though these
displaced masses were cut off from each other in massive displacement camps
in central Gaza and the Mawasi region further south, they sang the same
songs, chanted the same chants and used the same talking points.

During their forced displacement, they had no electricity and no means of
communication, let alone coordination. They were ordinary people, hauling a
few items of clothing and whatever survival tools they had, following the
unprecedented Israeli genocide. They headed north to homes they knew were
likely destroyed by the Israeli army.

Yet, they remained committed to their march back to their annihilated
cities and refugee camps. Many smiled, others sang religious hymns and some
recited national songs and poems.

A little girl offered a news reporter a poem she composed. “I am a
Palestinian girl, and I am proud,” her voice blared. She recited simple but
emotional verses about identifying as a “strong, resilient Palestinian
girl.” She spoke of her relationship with her family and community as the
“daughter of heroes, the daughter of Gaza”, declaring that Gazans “prefer
death over shame”. Her return to her destroyed home was a “day of victory.”

“Victory” was a word repeated by virtually everyone interviewed by the
media and countless times on social media. While many, including some
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, openly challenged the Gazans’ view of
their perceived ‘victory’, they failed to appreciate the history of
Palestine—indeed, the history of all colonized people who wrested their
freedom from the claws of foreign, brutal enemies.

“Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut
the soul of (someone) armed with the hope that he will rise even in the
end,” iconic anti-apartheid South African leader, Nelson Mandela, wrote in
a letter to his wife in 1975 from his prison cell. His words, written in
the context of South Africa’s struggle, feel as if they were written for
Palestinians, especially Gaza’s latest triumph against erasure—both
physical and psychological.

To understand this better, examine what Israeli political and military
leaders said about northern Gaza immediately after the start of the
genocidal war on 7 October, 2023:

Israel will maintain “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip
“for an indefinite period,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
in an interview with the ABC News network in November 2023.

One year later, the Israeli army reiterated the same sentiment. In a
statement, Israeli Brigadier General Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters
that there would be “no return” for any residents of northern Gaza.

Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, went further. “It is possible to create
a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current
size in two years,” he said on 26 November, stating that Israel should
re-occupy Gaza and “encourage” the migration of its inhabitants.

Many other Israeli officials and experts repeated the same notion like a
predictable chorus. Settler groups held a conference last June to assess
real estate opportunities in Gaza. In their minds, they were the only ones
with a say over Gaza’s future. Palestinians seemed inconsequential to the
wheel of history, controlled, as the powerful arrogantly believed, by Tel
Aviv alone.

But the endless mass of people sang, “Do you think you can measure up to
the free, measure up to the Palestinians?… We will die before we surrender
our home; they call us the freedom fighters.”

Many media outlets, including Israeli ones, reported a sense of shock in
Israel as the population returned en masse to a fully destroyed region. The
shock does not end there. Israel failed to occupy the north, ethnically
cleanse Palestinians from Gaza or break their collective spirit. Instead,
Palestinians emerged stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for
Israel, with a new objective: returning to historic Palestine.

For decades, Israel invested in a singular discourse regarding the
internationally recognized Palestinian Right of Return to their homes in
historic Palestine. Almost every Israeli leader or top official since the
1948 Nakba (the ‘Catastrophe’ resulting from the destruction of the
Palestinian homeland) echoed this. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud
Barak, summarized it in 2000 during the Camp David negotiations, when he
drew his “bottom line” in any peace deal with the Palestinians: there would
be no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

As Gaza has proven, Palestinians do not take their cues from Israel or even
those who claim to represent them. As they marched north, four generations
of Palestinians walked together, at times holding hands, singing for
freedom and return—not only to the north but further north to historic
Palestine itself.

Since the Nakba, Israel has insisted it will write the history of the land
between the Jordan River and the sea. But Palestinians continue to prove
Israel wrong. They survived in Gaza, despite genocide. They remained. They
returned. They emerged with a sense of victory. They are writing their own
history, which, despite immeasurable and unimaginable losses, is also a
history of hope and victory.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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