Since October 7, 2023, Gaza has become the final mirror of the colonial world: a space where the oppressor’s violence is no longer concealed by virtue-signaling for 'civility', where entire neighborhoods are flattened not to win a war, but to annihilate the very notion of Palestinians and their memory of resistance — and where the oppressed are slaughtered with such impunity that even their corpses are denied the right to testify. But testify before Allah, they surely will.
"Do not think Allah is unaware of what the oppressors do. He only delays them until a Day when eyes will stare in horror." — Surah Ibrahim, 14:42
This genocide is not a “conflict.” It is a program of extermination by design. It is not accidental. It is structural. And it is global. What is happening in Gaza is not only a campaign of mass killing — it is a systematic campaign to erase a people: their bodies, their culture, their past, their future. And this erasure is not just military. It is epistemic: an assault on what can be known, seen, and remembered.
Epistemic erasure — a term grounded in decolonial theory — refers to the deliberate destruction or silencing of knowledge systems. In Gaza, this takes the form of bombing universities, assassinating journalists, silencing Palestinian voices on social media, and framing all resistance as 'terror'. What is denied here is not merely life — but legibility. The Palestinian is not permitted to narrate their own suffering, at least not within the matrix that dominates mainstream Western media and its propaganda machine.
Frantz Fanon taught that colonialism does not merely seize land — it distorts meaning, twisting language, history, and reality to legitimize the illegitimate. In Gaza, this distortion is not abstract: it looks like a bombed university being labeled a 'terrorist site'; a murdered journalist framed as a casualty of war; a child's final cry recast as propaganda. It is the transformation of suffering into suspicion, of resistance into criminality — where every Palestinian word is pre-condemned, and every truth must fight to be heard. It renders the colonized unknowable, criminal by default, and invisible by design. Paulo Freire warned that oppression is a pedagogy: it conditions the world to mistake domination for order, and to expect the oppressed to accept inferiority as natural. But in Gaza, Palestinians defy that script. They do not accept inferiority — they resist it, at every scale of being.
Still, the colonial machine does not rest. The psychological war it wages is not collateral — it is foundational. Narrative is erased by criminalizing resistance and framing every act of defiance as terror. Memory is erased by bombing homes, mosques, libraries, and schools — the very sites where a people remember who they are. Presence is erased by dehumanizing survival itself, casting Palestinian life as provocation. This threefold erasure — of story, of memory, of existence — is not accidental. It is structural. It is how empire sustains its fiction of legitimacy while annihilating those who dare to speak outside its script.
The psychological war is not a symptom; it is the foundation. It erases narrative — by criminalizing resistance, silencing testimony, and rewriting history in the occupier’s tongue. It erases memory — by flattening homes, mosques, libraries, and schools, destroying the physical sites through which a people remember themselves. And it erases presence — by casting even survival as a threat, portraying the very act of existing as provocation.
To colonize a people is not just to occupy their soil — it is to try to unwrite them from the moral imagination of the world.
Gaza today exists as a "zone of non-being" — Fanon's term that not only denotes death, but the targeted deletion of personhood and presence. This zone of non-being is where the colonized are pushed — outside the boundaries of recognized humanity, outside access to writing history, outside rights to personhood, and even outside the permission to experience and express grief. In Gaza, memory is severed, grief is criminalized, and even survival is framed as 'terrorism'. The Palestinian breath itself is politicized — and sentenced to death, indiscriminately, from fetus to grandfather.
This genocide is not merely about ideology. It is also about systems — about how empire operates through law, media, and capital. The Israeli assault is subsidized by billions in U.S. aid, shielded by Western media narratives that frame mass killings as self-defense, and normalized by institutions that silence dissent, and finally by ordinary people who normalize the silence. The erasure of Gaza is a global enterprise — and its complicity is bipartisan, corporate, and, quite often, liberal.
Language is the battlefield. Words like “restraint,” “human shields,” and “neutrality” function not to inform, but to anesthetize and narcotize the public mind. They are not accidental. They are colonial tools of disorientation — what Freire would call the banking model of communication, where knowledge flows unilaterally from oppressor to world.
In this grammar, the colonizer is always rational; the colonized, always irrational — denied authorship over their own condition.
Empire does not only erase with bombs — it erases with grammar, shaping the very terms of debate to obscure its crimes and reframe domination as defense. Through euphemism and obfuscation, language becomes a weapon — softening public outrage, sanitizing settler violence, and scripting imperialism as stability. The language of the occupier is not just descriptive; it is destructive. “Security,” “restraint,” “clashes,” “conflict” — these are not neutral terms. Not accidental parlance, spoken out of emotion. They are, instead, tools of epistemic violence and disorientation, rendering the oppressed illegible to the world and their suffering unworthy of recognition, while rendering the global public confused in the quagmire of semantics, so that they cannot trace the truth about Israel's ongoing U.S.-backed genocide of Palestine.
This grammar of erasure does not simply distort reality — it replaces it. It unpeoples a people, transforming genocide into geopolitics and memory into myth. To resist, then, is not only to survive the material violence, but to speak against the linguistic machinery that makes that violence disappear.
Gaza’s resistance is not just physical. It is grammatical — a direct answer to the colonial project of epistemic erasure described above. Palestinians do not merely resist with their bodies; they resist with their words, their memory, their refusal to disappear. In the face of a global system that bombards their homes and censors their voices, they assert their presence by interrupting the occupier’s narrative with unfiltered truth. They speak even when speaking costs them everything. And it is precisely because Gaza speaks — because it unlearns silence and names the unspeakable — that empire targets its poets, doctors, and journalists.
I say, again, Gaza’s resistance is not just physical. It is grammatical — not as metaphor, but as strategy. When universities are leveled, they teach in rubble. When their histories are erased, they write them again on prison walls, in exile, in song. When their bodies are buried, their words survive — inscribed in last text messages, live-streams, poems. Every utterance is defiance; every phrase, testimony. This is not passive resilience. It is the frontline of epistemic battle. And it is precisely because Gaza speaks — because it unlearns silence and names the unspeakable.
The question now is not whether we mourn. It is whether we rupture. Whether we are willing to sever ourselves from the institutions, ideologies, and comforts that make this violence upon Palestinians seem acceptable to the Western gaze — that make monstrous criminality permissible to people, even when it is genocide.
Mourning without rupture is performance. Solidarity without risk is theater. To stand with Gaza is to unlearn the lies we were raised on — to do what Walter Benjamin demanded: to shatter the continuum of history, that smooth, deceptive narrative, which paints empire as progress and erases the suffering beneath it. For history, as told by the powerful, does not flow innocently — it piles up, wreckage upon wreckage, made sacred by repetition. If we do not interrupt its momentum, like thorny friction, we become its servants and surface upon which it glides onward, frictionlessly.
Gaza does not ask us to grieve. It demands that we pull the emergency brake of inertia.
This essay is not a eulogy. It is a demand — that we name this genocide without euphemism, that we refuse neutrality, and that we treat the erasure of Palestine as the erasure of the human. The erasure of all humanity.
This is not just Gaza’s fight. It is the world’s final moral test. Our action and our inaction serve as our behavioral proclamation and expression of our conscience and character, now more than ever before.
Call to Action:
Do not donate and disappear. Do not post and move on. Do not grieve in private and call it solidarity. To rupture means risk. It means severing ties with complicit institutions, refusing the grammar of genocide, and confronting the lies buried in our language. Dismantle the euphemisms. Say the banned words. Name the crime. Boycott every brand, weapon, and funder of this slaughter. Flood your schools, workplaces, and communities with truth — not later, now. Make Palestine unignorable. And when they try to silence you, speak louder. If Gaza refuses erasure under bombs, then you must refuse silence under freedom. This is not charity. It is obligation.