Polemics about Gaza often reflect Israel’s complex relationship to African anti-colonial struggles and Africans’ own dynamic relationship to Zionism and the Jewish people. Gaza, however, also highlights the enduring richness of Africa’s anti-colonial past in defining the terms of Palestinian struggle.
A carousel of horrors has swung to life in Gaza since October 7, transfixing the world. Night reigns over a ‘city of ghosts’, my friend Fadi told me over the phone—Madinat ashbah. Since the Israelis cut off electricity to the coastal enclave of two million, Gaza empties at night, street lanterns dark, while the sleepless listen to the thunder of airstrikes overhead and the wails of ambulance sirens. Fadi tells me his family sleep in day clothes, so when they die their bodies will be ready for the funeral. Images of a cratered Gaza evoke Ken Saro-Wiwa’s verse on Biafra from Songs in a Time of War, ‘Broken houses roofless / Gape forlorn / at wet angry skies.’ The death toll climbs further into the tens of thousands. As Israel continues to pound Gaza with the full-throated backing of the US military and president, the ranks of the dead have risen far beyond those of the 2021, 2014, 2012, and 2008 confrontations with Hamas.
Every day carries news more lurid and shocking than the last—churches cratered, hospitals on fire, mosque and schools demolished, swollen morgues. By the first week of November, the Israeli military had effectively re-occupied the north of Gaza, expelling more than a million Palestinians to the south where they face an uncertain winter...
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