A Bleak Midwinter: Occupation's Onslaughts

“We were drowning in blood and they ignored us; why would they listen when we are drowning in water?”

In recent days, as we enjoy the warmth of our homes amid the impending Winter weather, some of us getting ready for the “festive season” I have been assailed with images of people in Gaza, their tents flooded with deluges of water so that they lie on soaked mattresses in sopping wet bedclothes, or else shovel the water out as fast as it enters, with a franticness borne of desperation.

After a walk in the rain, with our umbrellas, boots, raincoats – we can come into the warm and dry, shake off the cold and switch on the heating, or sit by a warm fire. We go through our day in the sure certainty that we will sleep in a warm dry bed at night. Not so in Gaza.

There is an irony to the title of this piece, for “In the Bleak Midwinter” was the title of a famous poem by pre-Raphaelite poetess Christina Rosetti, about the birth of Jesus Christ in the cold and snow in Bethlehem; around 45 miles due North of Gaza, and in the area now known as the West Bank - where approximately 1,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 7^th.

Although we can largely abandon the pretence that Christmas has any significance today other than jovial get togethers and overconsumption, I still have passing curiosity about the famous “Christian charity” and spirit of giving. Here, in Palestine, Churches have been destroyed, Christians are spat on and beaten up in the streets and Palestinians have limited civil and political rights, which are systematically violated every day by “Israel”.

Checkpoints, physical barriers and the West Bank barrier are there to limit freedom of movement and create the stifling restrictions that remind Palestinians each minute of the day that they are not equal citizens, just as the settler violence sanctioned and indeed bolstered by the “IDF” reminds Palestinians that they are safe nowhere and that they will be besieged by threats so long as “Israel” remains intact.

This is how people are living in Gaza. In open air makeshift shelters because “Israel” is blocking the distribution of tents. In the heavy rain, as the temperature falls, the bombed and devastated sewage systems break and overflow, flooding tents and creating an environment of contamination, ripe for the transmission of waterborne diseases.

“Israel” is also blocking two thirds of aid and allowing through mainly junk food, so that nutritious food or protein is unavailable; this is a deliberate strategy to ensure the further weakening of a besieged civilian population. Every hospital was completely or partially destroyed in the bombing and resources are extremely limited, so that it is impossible to cope with the surge in malnutrition and water borne disease.

Over the past three days or so the rain has been a continuous, heavy deluge of water, mixing with mud and sewage and bursting into the makeshift shelters; there is nowhere to get dry, no way to get warm.

The onslaughts of nature, like any onslaughts, are severe when there is no buffering system; and all buffers – emotional, physical, structural – have been stripped away from the Gazans.

Rain, storms – we barely notice them from the comfort of our living rooms, we know they will blow over with barely a whisper; but in the open air, it is the difference between life and death for some.

This deluge of rain comes after 2 years of bombing and devastation, multiple forced displacements and now with thousands of people crammed into the South where there are makeshift shelters in the open, and the ruins of Gaza City are all people have to look back to.

In life, when we are in the middle of difficulty, the mind often instinctively goes to any positives that we have to look forward to, to mitigate the misery. With their beloved city reduced to rubble, the entry of minimal aid, sky high prices for any quantities of nutritious food and no prospect of work in these impossible conditions, people in Gaza will be living through emotional breakdown and depression, striving to build when all they experience is one difficulty after another – with no way out.

The borders are still closed because cruel “Israel” does not want to move forward to a second phase that will present sone kind of hope of movement or opportunity for Gazans, and because they do not want military withdrawal – it was never in the gameplan, not now, not in 1948, not in 1967 – they want to eat more and more land and resources and squeeze Palestinians out of their home and into despair.

“They want us all to jump in the sea!”

“Where shall we go?”

“They want to kill us all”

By now these Jewish supremacist lies sound to anybody with half a brain, like the deranged screeching of harpies, the platitudes of monsters and thieves justifying their criminality.

Whilst doing the very same to the Palestinians, the Chosen Ones squawk about their rights and the hypothetical injustices that have never happened to them.

Over in “Tel Aviv” life proceeds with an abundance and plenitude untouched by human travail; glittering buildings, sweeping beaches and carefree café culture, nightlife and shopping.

There is no such thing as empathy when you are happy to view the smoking rubble of peoples homes through binoculars set up at special viewing points, where you cheer on the brutalization of civilians and the killing of children, and where you are happy to construct ever more homes over the remains of dead Palestinians.

“Israel” grows fat on the blood of the indigenous and thrives off the slaughter of infants just like the one celebrated in Christina Rosetti’s poem.¹

I hope against hope that the people who have turned away from a genocide for the past two years can at last be moved in some small measure, to consider the uniquely devastating conditions that Palestinians in Gaza are facing this winter. But as a Palestinian man posted today: ““We were drowning in blood and they ignored us; why would they listen when we are drowning in water?”

1. But if you do like poetry you may like Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” about the greedy goblins that resemble the Chosen Ones.