Movie Review – Gaza Fights For Freedom

Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019)
Written by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner
Directed by Abby Martin

You can watch this documentary in its entirety here. It is age-restricted so I cannot embed it, sadly.

One of the talking points of the pro-occupation crowd is to talk incessantly about 7 October 2023. If you respond by bringing up other relevant dates and incidents that establish a slow-rolling genocide, the counterargument is that they are talking about “right now,” not the “ancient past.” When asked for their justifications of why the occupying force should have any claim in Palestine, they will respond with “evidence” from a dubious religious text by practitioners of the religion this occupying force has appropriated that this is their homeland circa two millennia earlier. 

Time is apparently quite malleable for the occupier’s argument, with 1948 being “ancient history” but stories of Moses being very contemporary and relevant. The story of Palestine in the last 20th/early 21st century is one of horror, how an invading European force using traumatized genocide survivors as fuel to the fire established a Western outpost in the Middle East to keep the people there in constantly destabilized. 

The foolish notion that the conflict between Palestinians and their occupiers has been symmetric warfare is proven false at the slightest examination of any clash since 1948. The Great March of Return (2018-2019) was an effort by Palestinians who had been funneled into Gaza to peacefully march as a collective to the edges of their prison and stand in defiance of the unlawful authority that has sequestered them there. At most, some rocks were thrown, and balloons carrying burning rags were sent over the fences, fences which shouldn’t have been there in the first place. How did the occupying forces respond? Chemical warfare in the form of tear gas and other compounds caused permanent damage, as well as live rounds that led to the sniping of children as young as two years of age. 

As of this writing, it has been a couple days since the International Court of Justice issued its frankly tepid and timid rulings that the occupying forces might possibly be committing genocide only to tell them they better stop while no immediate consequences are on the table. Multiple Western governments responded to this mild reprisal by ceasing funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), taking up the occupier’s claim that these human rights works were directly involved in the 7 October attack. UNRWA workers saw 227 injured by occupying forces in the first year of the March, as well as 13 being murdered. They have been losing people to the occupying force while trying to help Palestinians simply live for a long time.

Among the Palestinians themselves during the March, the death toll was even higher. 195 Palestinians were murdered by the occupiers, including 41 children, with 29,000 injured. Yet the scourge of the West has made those numbers pale in comparison in the last few months. The death toll in Gaza since 7 October 2023 as of this writing is soaring quickly towards 30,000, with over 64,000 wounded. On Friday, 26 January alone, 183 Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes and 377 injured. 

The incessant claim will be that if only Hamas would turn over the hostages or the people of Gaza turned over Hamas, this would all be over. That flies in the face of the ubiquitous evidence being put out by the occupying forces and their Western allies that Gaza will be carved up and turned into beachfront property with some resource extraction in other parts. Their plan is clear: remove the Palestinians from Gaza, alive or dead. The occupying forces do not see these people as well, people. 

If you have wondered what it is you would do if you had been a German during the rise of the Nazis and the horror of the Holocaust, you now know. You are living in the moment that reveals that answer to you. For most of us, the answer is to silently cower with our heads down and hope they don’t come for us. We’ve all heard Martin Niemöller’s poem; we’ve all had the standard Western education on the Holocaust. But from what I can see, it was a waste of time. 

We learned nothing as a society; we processed none of the suffering we saw, and it all became Saturday morning cartoon fodder, a reductive fantasy where the good guys beat the bad guys. This ignores the fact that many of the Nazis in leadership positions that weren’t more well-known or easy to throw under the bus remained in power and helped form organizations like NATO. Even today, Germany cracks down on protestors marching in support of the Palestinian struggle, a sick revivification of that nation’s fascistic roots. The United States did its part by quietly helping Nazis slip out of Europe and reestablish themselves in new lives in the Americas.

World War II realigned the world. The Fall of Communism in Europe did it again. And now we’ve come to yet another moment where the pieces on the board become scattered and chaotic, perhaps more so than either of those previous events. The invention of the atomic bomb seems to have been the moment that doomed humanity, locking us in a perpetual state of potential apocalypse. Israel wields nukes hand-delivered by the States and has made no qualms about killing everyone around them if they feel the eleventh hour is near. The Western powers, the actual directors of the Israeli colony, will back them up on this. Thus, the Palestinians and their neighbors live waiting for the collapse of the United States and Europe or death by the heat of a thousand suns. 

I see many who argue that revolution without a plan for the disabled, the marginalized, and the vulnerable is unfair, and they are not wrong. Yet people from all those demographics suffer en masse globally at this very moment. It seems suffering is inevitable for someone somewhere, at least at this stage of humanity’s development. The West has grown very fat from exploiting these poor people, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Violence feels like a foregone conclusion; it’s happening already. I don’t hold out much hope that when the dust settles, those in power will do anything but simply recreate the previous evils but in new configurations. 

Every border is an admission of failure by humanity. Every war is a tragedy of immeasurable proportions. In the days, months, and years to come, you will see brutality that you’ve only ever read about in history books or fiction. People who hold power now will not give that up quickly; they will not submit defeat to cleverly phrased memes on social media. These human devils will use their wealth & their power like they always have to unleash living Hell on the rest of us to stay in their position. What will matter is how the rest of us can endure such assaults. If we cannot weather them and submit to incessant pain (which is entirely understandable), nothing changes, and the march to oblivion continues. 

If you think the reality show politics of the United States still matters, there really isn’t any hope for you. Things will fall down around your head while you look about, mouth agape in shock at something that was chugging toward you like a train before you were even born. My fellow Americans are some of the most arrogant & ignorant people on this planet, and that is a perilous combination for the rest of humanity. There are good people, but clearly not enough who possess the bravery to end this needless suffering. The facade of the West crumbles and the fantasies spun by collaborators like Aaron Sorkin are shown to be falsehoods. This “order” was only created so that a few might benefit on the backs of everyone else. May it all crash to the ground sooner rather than later so that humanity might know some glimmer of liberation before this planet is extinguished.