Eyeless in Gaza

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. Sketches in Arabic have surfaced on social media with instructions on how to boil sea water to drink. Yet even the south is not safe from airstrikes. Fadi himself, a dentistry student I met in Cairo, pulled his own relatives out of the rubble of his family home in South Gaza. ‘Fuel, water, and food dwindle,’ writes We’am to me. ‘The bread lines grow long.’ Beyond the spiraling humanitarian crisis, the most horrifying prospect, Fadi said, is the risk of blunt force trauma at any time. ‘It comes so quickly / the bird of death,’ Chinua Achebe wrote in his poem ‘Air Raid’:

The news brim with creatures of another violence. Two months ago, while Israeli Jews celebrated on Sukkot the end of their Biblical exodus, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack, the Al-Aqsa Flood. Fifty years after Egypt launched its own coup de main to regain the Sinai, the symbolism was not lost. Surreal images dazed a world public—militant paragliders, a bulldozer punching through Gaza’s separation barrier, parades of captured Israeli armored trucks in Gaza City. Gradually, as Israeli forces fought the Palestinian resistance back to the Gaza border, the scale of brutality left behind has become clear. Graphic videos on Telegram show scores of corpses at a music festival; those who surrendered executed under bursts of AK-47 fire. Errant rockets from Gaza killed dozens of Bedouin, many children, whose many unregistered villages in the Negev are not shielded by Israel’s Iron Dome. Forgotten victims of the October 7 attacks. Others remain captive; among the estimated two hundred held hostage by Hamas is a Tanzanian who came to Israel to study agriculture.

Perhaps the most shocking photos of October 7th are from a bus stop in Sderot; piles of old folk, flies buzzing on the corpses. The bus driver, a Palestinian from Tel Sheva, survived under the cover of the dead. He lay with them for hours, telling an Israeli broadcaster the scene haunts him. ‘They were good people, how do you do such a thing? How?’ Massacres also occurred in Netiv HaAsara, Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and Holit kibbutzim in southern Israel.  In one kibbutz, a video shows a Thai farm worker hacked to death with a garden hoe.  Whatever the evasive assurances by the white-bearded Hamas leaders in Qatar—that their fighters only target Israeli military, that soldierly discipline and strategic exigency elide any indulgence in gratuitous violence—the bodies in the morgue tell of a more grisly, wanton story of killing. Killing either at the hands of Hamas or the ones who followed them through the breach.

The October 7th attacks and ensuing siege have polarized public opinion on predictable lines, as it has polarized Nigerians. For some voices on the left, the Palestinian resistance are like Biblical Samsons, bringing down the house upon their enemies, even as it spells self-destruction. How else to avenge oneself of the betrayal, humiliation, and enslavement from half a century of suffering? From Frantz Fanon to Achille Mbembe, Mahmood Mamdani to Albert Memmi, Aimé Cesaire to Léopold Sédar Senghor—generations of Black and North African thinkers have explained to us how the Manichean divisions of the settler-colony prefigure the pathologies and violence of the subaltern who fight to end it. That resistance, even at its most brutal or ugly, is not sui generis. It is a consequence of the brutality of the colonial state, whether in Israel or elsewhere. As South Africa’s ANC spokeswoman, Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri wrote, ‘the decision of Palestinians to respond to the brutality of the settler Israeli apartheid regime is unsurprising.’

One can imagine the most famous Nigerian in the Palestinian resistance, Fatima Bernawi, taking this position. Born to a Nigerian father and Palestinian mother, she grew up in the African quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and became the first woman to plot an armed attack in Israel. She is now buried in Gaza. In 2002, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, also remarked on the resentment created by Israeli rule, saying it ‘reminded me of my own country, Nigeria, between the first military coup and the Biafran Civil War, and its immediate aftermath. It recalled the faces of despair and resignation, but also the simmering anger of a populace that faced daily humiliation at the hands of an arrogant military.

Like Soyinka, some Nigerians have framed the events in Gaza in terms of their painful memories from the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, in which the federal government’s blockade against Biafran separatists consumed 1 to 2 million lives, according to UNICEF and Nigerian medical officers at the time, judging from the rates of edema and marasmus. Images of an attendant train of horrors—mass famine, kwashiorkor, rape, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and mass graves—were beamed across the world. Like Gaza, journalists televised Biafra real-time with unprecedented granularity, shocking an otherwise-apathetic world with images of infants’ rust-colored hair and distended bellies: ‘Americans may not know much about Biafra,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut, ‘but they know about the children.’ Parallels between Gaza and Biafra have not escaped some observers; one Facebook user on the Radio Free Biafra page, would write about Gaza during the May 2021 crisis, ‘[It’s] like the first Biafra war when Nigeria had everything …We were Palestine.’  Acts of solidarity with Palestine, of course, enjoy a long tradition in post-colonial Africa, embodied by the continent’s towering statesmen: Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Yet the general tone of most Nigerians is cautious. Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf M. Tuggar condemned the ‘cycle of violence and retaliation that the current escalation has assumed’ urging restraint and the ‘safety of civilians.’ A message shared on the Radio Free Biafra page announces ‘I will never behave like British and American President that says they stand with Israel neither will I behave like [Colombian] president and Iranian president that says they stand with Palestine.’ The author lays ultimate fault with the United Nations for failing to resolve disputes such as Palestine and Biafra diplomatically. In other words, what is happening in Gaza and Israel is a senseless civil war, a fratricide between the sons of Shem, Arab and Jew, with no clear moral hero. Such is tragedy. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s poem ‘Dis Nigeria Sef’ about the agony of Biafra comes to mind: ‘For yonder soza dey shoot him enemy / Nigeria soza de shoot him brother.’

Yet for the Israeli right and its supporters, Hamas’s attack has re-ignited a fuming rhetoric of revenge. Quoting a line from the Yiddish poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Mr. Netanyahu declared war on the 7th of October: ‘Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.’ Defense minister and Likud party member, Yoav Gallant, announced a ‘complete siege’ on the ‘human animals’ of Gaza: no electricity, food, water, or fuel. Another Likudnik, Ariel Kallner, called for a ‘second Nakba’. The cabinet minister Avi Dichter called it a ‘Gaza Nakba’. Plans to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza to the Sinai desert, leaked by an Israeli ministry ‘concept paper’ have for now been temporarily rebuffed by Egypt. However, celebrations of corpses and genocidal calls to ‘erase’ Gaza have become ubiquitous on Israeli social media. In Netanyahu’s declaration of a ground offensive on Gaza, he cited a genocidal passage of Biblical scripture, I Samuel 15:2, in which the God of the Hebrews commands them to ‘go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, infants and children.’

Radicalizing effects of such rhetoric have rippled outward. A mob in Tunisia burned down a synagogue. Followers of Meir Kahane, an ultra-nationalist idealogue, have shouted on the streets of New York to ‘KILL ALL THE PALESTINIANS. ALL OF THEM!’ Israel’s settler right, led by ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, have used the attacks as a pretext to funnel machine guns to Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Calls proliferate to #TakeBackGaza for Jewish settlers, who resent Ariel Sharon’s decision in 2005 to dismantle their outposts and swap the occupation of Gaza for a siege. According to PA officials, Israeli security forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians in the West Bank in the first six weeks since October 7. Several villages have since faced attacks by violent Jewish settlers. On Gaza, the United States and Western Europe have, predictably, rallied to Israel’s defense, with the US positioning aircraft carriers on the coast, supplying Israel with arms, and vetoing diplomatic resolutions for a ceasefire in the UN Security Council. A $14 billion aid package is in the works.