To those who refuse despair,

As the sun rose over the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, the people of the land repurposed a Caterpillar bulldozer, used by the occupation forces to demolish their homes, into a vehicle of escape. The blade mangled the barbed wire, ripping and tearing the chainlink apart. Hamas fighters, equipped with motorized paragliders, flew over the border. 

The people of Gaza, caged for more than seventeen years, rushed back to their stolen land. The scene was prophetic: the ruins of the colonizer’s machinery gathering dust, the soldiers vanquished, the people reunited with land from which they had been barred. A man running into the open plains filmed himself and repeated the same line over and over again: “We have returned, oh people, after eighty years, we have returned to our occupied lands.”

Hamas’ operation on October 7 was a moment of rupture. It revealed Israel’s permanence to be an expensive façade, and exposed the Zionist project’s fragility. Behind the mythologies of its omnipotence, the entity is frail, weak, rotting—a death cult. Al-Aqsa Flood showed us the basic truth of resistance: Life is stronger than death.

The Flood was an attempted end to a century of colonial and imperial violence: The Nakba of 76 years that forced Palestinians from their homes and razed entire villages; the home demolitions that saw illegal settlements rise atop Palestinian land; the arrest, torture, and rape of prisoners; the assaults on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, that have destroyed its infrastructure, martyred thousands, and maimed many more; the massacres in Deir Yassin, Sabra, Shatila; the martyrdom of our national liberation leaders and assassinations of journalists. The armed resistance project is a direct response to colonial terror. 

But, we also commemorate October 7 as the beginning of a new Zionist genocide. Humiliated by its captives’ freedom, “Israel” unleashed depraved violence against the people of Palestine. The Zionist entity has bombed and besieged hospitals; decapitated infants, exploded tents; sniped children; assassinated journalists; manufactured famine; engineered epidemics; vaporized bloodlines; destroyed churches, mosques, universities, cultural centers, and homes; razed entire neighborhoods; and directed almost-daily massacres. We cite 40,000 martyrs knowing that the number is far greater; the infrastructure needed to account for them has been decimated — the people that count the martyrs, themselves martyred. This horror that cannot be captured through words and evades psychic comprehension.

This is and has always been Zionism: irredeemable, diseased, violent. It must be eradicated for life to prevail. 

How should October 7 be remembered? How can we balance commemorating the horror of genocide with the heroism of the resistance? How do we honor our martyrs and fight for the living? 

We must escalate, must invent new ways of agitating and disrupting the war machines intent on destroying all life. As Israel creates new thresholds of violence, we must imagine new horizons of victory and achieve them. 

Before she was martyred in Rafah in 2001, Rachel Corrie wrote to her parents, “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore.” 

The collapse of Zionism is inevitable but we must commit ourselves to making it imminent. 

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Demand an arms embargo and protest The New York Times’ support for the Zionist genocide.

In the early hours of the morning of October 7, actionists in New York, LA, Toronto, Philly, and the Bay Area plastered their cities with messages of the truth: Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. funds, supplies, and defends every atrocity. Using hand tools and drills, protestors hacked subway ads out of their plexiglass frames and replaced them with their own. Overground, from midtown NYC to downtown LA, whole edifices were redecorated with wheatpaste, while billboards were retrofitted, defaced, and replaced.

These new messages say what the Times won't: that Israel is responsible for mass death. One edited headline underscored the Times's direct role in fabricating atrocity propaganda about fictional mass rapes committed by the Palestinian resistance on October 7; US politicians like Kamala Harris repeat these debunked claims to justify air strikes on Gazan refugee camps, schools, and hospitals. Another poster criticized the paper's role in downplaying and sanitizing the mass torture carried out in Zionist prison camps like Sde Teiman.

A single question now hangs over each subway car: "What if the Times told the truth?" By attacking The Times, the movement seeks to destabilize the fatal consensus undergirding US-funded Zionist genocide.

Read with us

On the anniversary of Oct. 7, we compiled, wrote, and edited several pieces of work in print and online for The New York War Crimes. Read more here:

Writings from Gaza

“I Have Lived My Life With Only Half A Heart”. Nour Abdul Latif, writing from Gaza, shares a diary of displacement and sorrow.

Fighting Words. Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, two of Refaat Alareer’s students, write a tribute to his life and work. 

Writings on this moment

The Sun Rises from the South. In southern Lebanon, war is a pulse that quickens and slows but never dies. 

One Year. The Palestinian Youth Movement reflects on Al-Aqsa flood and the year since.

Writings unearthed from the archives

Zionist Propaganda in the United States: An Analysis. The legendary Palestinian thinker Fayez Sayegh deconstructs the core themes of Zionist propaganda

Free Yourself By Yourself. The martyred freedom fighter Walid Daqqa, who spent 38 years in captivity, wrote this article for "Al-Hadath" newspaper during the recent campaign of repression against him.

On Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich from One Black Woman. June Jordan writes against the Zionism of her peers.

Writing on the crimes of The New York Times

The Genocidal Unconscious. Here’s how to recognize the Pattern in NYT’s Lies

Retract “Screams Without Words.” The mass rape atrocity propaganda fabricated by The New York Times has been thoroughly debunked.

“Better Off Dead”. Palestinian journalists and Israeli outlets have reported on the use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7. Why hasn’t The New York Times?

The State and The Times. When U.S. and Israeli leaders need to justify their war crimes, where do they turn? To The New York Times, of course.

We leave you with the last words from Nour Abdul Latif’s piece in The New York War Crimes.

For a moment, life in the tent nearly defeated me until one day when I went to the market to buy vegetables. The crowds were overwhelming, and everything around me felt gray and dreary until I spotted her: a woman like me, her face sunburned, suggesting that she, too, was displaced in a tent. She cradled a jasmine seedling as if it were a beloved child, carrying it back to her tent to plant at her door. Hope filled my heart, pushing away the loneliness, and I suddenly resolved to confront the harshness of the tent.

I began kneading fresh, clean bread every morning — despite the flies! I washed clothes and hung them out in the sun, taking pride in their cleanliness. I cooked meals with love, despite the bitterness in my heart. I taught my children basic life skills and answered all their questions. I prepared a cup of instant coffee over firewood and drank it by the beach at the door of my tent, just like all the women in the world. I did not care, for I knew that all of this would pass one day, and that Gaza will remain, we will remain, and I will remain!