By Hanan Kattan
Hanan Kattan reflects on three years of genocide in Gaza, tracing how Palestinian testimony exposed Western complicity and galvanized resistance.
Three years on, even as my heart breaks with the continued, unnecessary, inflicted, unimaginable suffering of our people, I see hope.
The endless horror of three years of genocide, streamed from where it is happening, has exposed so-called liberal democracy, mainstream media’s biases, the true reach of the financial industrial complex, and the brutal profiteering of the military-industrial complex. Once you see it – really see it – you can’t unsee it. The people in the shadows are slowly being exposed.
Young people don’t get their news from billionaire-owned or state-sanctioned media, which has conditioned us to accept Islamophobia and a one-sided narrative about Palestinians for decades. More of us than ever get our news straight from the source.
A live-streamed genocide, publicized by Israeli army soldiers so inhuman that they TikTokked their way through horrifying war crimes, has led to thousands of ordinary people doing what their governments will not. In Britain, people come out to be arrested. People speak out, risking college degrees, jobs, futures, because they cannot stay silent in the face of the horror being endured by Palestinians.
And it is happening at scale. For the first time, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. More Jews are speaking out against the racism at the heart of Zionist political ideology. A tenet that once seemed permanent- that Israel’s interests and America’s are one and the same- has cracked from the left and the right at once.
The financial puppeteers who run our hyper-capitalist world remain incredibly strong; they know how to pivot, and they have the resources to control us. But more people see the strings holding them – from an ultra-capitalist system that keeps them too busy to think, to the so-called ‘liberal democracy’ of the West that turns out, when it comes to Palestine, to have no interest in human rights or democracy.
More and more of us are unwilling to be controlled. We understand that what happens in Palestine does not stay in Palestine: the AI surveillance, the belligerence, the colonization.
No empire wakes up one morning, sees its own inhumanity and decides to stand aside. It fights its demise all the way down, reaching for ever more heavy-handed, fascist tactics to hold on to control. Now is the time to keep pushing back.
Empires always crumble. People outlast them. Palestinians, above all.
– Hanan Kattan is a Palestinian-British author, award-winning film producer and host of The Enlightenment Podcast. Her mother was forced from West Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba, and her father’s family is from Bethlehem. In her book Palestine Revealed, she draws on extensive research and lived experience, including childhood crossings of the Allenby Bridge under Israeli military questioning, to tell her people’s history.