Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralyzed. He has constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them. Neither can his mother. To control spasms, a drug called baclofen is needed. It relaxes the muscles and stops shivering. Stopping the use of baclofen suddenly can have serious health consequences.
Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me a week ago from the family’s tent in Al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza. Her son was on his seventh day without medication. Violent, neurological spasms wreak havoc on Jamal, causing him to cry out in pain.
Baclofen is not available anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has explored them all. It is one of many drugs blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.
Jamal now has dozens of seizures every day. There are no alternative medicines or alternatives. No relief, just pain.
Jamal’s story cannot be told if we want to be liked by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
to speak At the United States-based, Israel-focused Miriam Institute last month, he said, “We need to make sure the story is told correctly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. The audience burst into applause at this line.
Pompeo added that while every war involves civilian casualties, the real victims in this case are the Israelis. His concern is that October 7 and the war in Gaza will be remembered “in the wrong way”.
It seems that Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war. They want to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.
His statement shows the next stage of Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with the progress of destroying the people of Gaza, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now begun erasing the memory and martyrdom.
The campaign is evident both within and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an organization that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and protected their right of return under international law – is being systematically reduced and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a little more freedom to speak – has now been banned and Limiting pro-Palestinian accountsAfter being taken over by a pro-Israel group.
In the US, United Kingdom and elsewhere, local laws are modeled after pro-Palestinian youth, many detained for exercising what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are equal passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught in schools about Israel and Palestine.
But Pompeo — and those like him who misread biblical verses to show support for Israel and its genocide — don’t understand that the Palestinians have been uprooted and overcome before. We will do it again.
When thinking of memory and witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus,” meaning “witness,” and features prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the Arabic word for “martyr” is derived from the root word for “witness” or “witness”. As the word evolved, it also took on the meaning of violent suffering due to one’s faith and heroic steadfastness due to the extent of one’s sacrifice.
I can think of no better word than “martyr” to describe Jamal and the people around him: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s little body has seen immense suffering; It is burdened by the violence of war, and he – like his mother – pushes forward because of his overwhelming will to live.
Jamal and Shaima’s tent are surrounded by thousands of other tents. Day and night, everyone is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from recent floods, are thousands of others who need urgent and important medical evacuation.
The pain and suffering is immense, yet people like Pompeo continue to support the ongoing and historically rooted process of extermination of the Palestinian people.
Palestinians are also poets at heart. And Pompeo—who devalues language, memory, and history—will never understand that the poet is a witness.
As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his verses:
which pass through fleeting words
Take your names
Take our time off your hours and go
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sands of memory
Take some pictures to help you understand
What you will never do:
How the stone of our land becomes the roof of our sky.
The Palestinians will keep the memory alive, just as we have kept alive the roots of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif and every olive tree torn from its soil. In solidarity with the Palestinian people and millions around the world, witness Israel destroy of Gaza. Defying Pompeo and honoring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.