Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them. Nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.
Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.
Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.
Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.
Jamal’s story is not to be told, if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way.
Speaking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute last month, he said, “We need to make sure that the story is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the audience applauded.
Pompeo went on to say that every war has civilian casualties, but the true victims in this case are the Israeli people. His concern is that October 7th and the war in Gaza would be remembered “incorrectly”.
It seems Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war. They are to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.
His remarks reflect the next phase in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s people, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now embarked on the erasure of memory and martyrdom.
The campaign is evident both inside and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an institution that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and safeguarded their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a bit more freedom to speak – is now shadow banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.
In the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, local laws are weaponised to come after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for using what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are even passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught at schools about Israel and Palestine.
But what Pompeo – and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify their support for Israel and its genocide – do not understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do so again.
In thinking about memory and bearing witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. “Martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus”, meaning “witness”, and features prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the word “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the root of the word for “witness” or “witnessing”. As the word evolved, it also took on connotations of violent suffering due to one’s beliefs, and even a sense of heroic steadfastness due to the scale of one’s sacrifice.
I can think of no better word than “shaheed” to describe Jamal and the people around him: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s little body has witnessed immense suffering; it has been pounded with the violence of the war, and he – like his mother – pushes on because of his overwhelming desire to live.
All around Jamal and Shaima’s tent are thousands of other tents. Day and night, each of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from the recent floods, are thousands of other people who require urgent and important medical evacuation to hospitals.
The pain and suffering are immense, yet the likes of Pompeo continue to justify the ongoing and historically rooted process of the elimination of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinian people are also poets at heart. And what Pompeo – who devalues language, memory and history – will never understand is that the poet is a witness.
As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his verses:
Those who pass between fleeting words
Take your names with you and go
Rid our time of your hours, and go
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sands of memory
Take what pictures you will so as to understand
That which you never will:
How a stone from our land becomes the ceiling of our sky.
The Palestinian people will keep memory alive, 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 ripped from its soil. The Palestinian people, and millions in solidarity around the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.
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