“Walid is gradually emerging from the imaginary world I created for him”.

Sunday 13 July 2025

–Daddy, look, there’s a helicopter up there.

–Yes, Walid, I’ve seen it. It’s pretty.

–No, daddy, it’s isn’t for parachutes, it’s for firework.

–Yes, but even the fireworks are pretty, aren’t they ?

–Daddy those fireworks are bad. They destroy houses. Look what they did last time. They destroyed houses.

–No Walid, those aren’t destroying houses, those are just fireworks. It’s a mistake.

–No, daddy, I’m going to call the police. They have to stop those fireworks.

A conversation I had with my son Walid the other day. For some time, drones and helicopters had been circling overhead, we could see them very well from our ninth floor in the centre of Gaza City, one of the few high-rises still standing. While we were talking, a missile was launched by one of the helicopters with a hissing sound. We saw it destroy part of a building a few hundred metres away.

That’s what Walid calls in his childish French, “tartifices”(for the French term “Feux d’artifice”, fireworks). Since the war began, I have made him believe that the missiles and bombs were just fireworks. But he is going on four now and is beginning to understand that these “fireworks” can be dangerous and that these helicopters aren’t there to drop humanitarian aid by parachute as planes had done at the beginning of the Israeli invasion. That’s why he wanted to call the police: that helicopter wasn’t using fireworks properly, it was using them to destroy houses. Walid is gradually emerging from the imaginary world I had created for him, to spare him the deadly reality that we are living through.

Colonial law imposes the rules of the game

At the same time, he thinks there should be a form of justice on earth. He wanted to “call the police” to set things straight. He’s loves the helicopters, he wants to go up in one some day to shoot fireworks and drop parachutes. But here, he thinks that helicopter is going too far. A sense of justice is innate in human beings, it’s universal. But not when it comes to Palestinians. We have been experiencing injustice since 1948. This time it is being exposed in broad daylight. The Western world has stopped trying to hide it behind propaganda narratives. It no longer shuts its eyes.

I’m not talking about the people in the west who demonstrate in favor of justice for the Palestinians. But for the majority of their rulers, it is Israel that suffers injustice. France and Italy authorized Netanyahu’s plane to fly through their airspace despite the warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Not only is he not arrested, but he is still supplied with military equipment. At the same time, Microsoft is firing employees for demonstrating in support of Gaza. Banks prevent associations from transferring funds to Gaza. The United States sanctions the ICC judges who condemned Israel.

They recently added the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese to their blacklist. She is one of the few figures of international standing to denounce a genocide in the Gaza strip. She has been sanctioned for telling the truth. Little by little, we are discovering the reality behind those “values” that the West goes on about, especially when it comes to conquer our lands: “We want to free you from injustice, give you democracy and human rights”, is what the Western rulers have always said. We understand full well that those are just words, that their real motive is profit. We can see clearly that neither that justice nor that democracy have any real existence, that it’s the colonial law, the law of the strongest, which sets the rules of the game.

That’s exactly what the occupation army does. October 7^th was a wonderful gift for Israel, enabling it to do today what it has been unable to do since 1948 : expel the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. The debate over the use of the word genocide hides the reality of Israel’s intentions: the forced deportation of the entire Gaza population. And if it doesn’t work with force, it will work with even more force. In other words more massacres, more butchery, more “Israeleries” to make the Gazans move.

Neither a city nor humanitarian, a concentration camp

Recently; the Israeli Defence Minister - Minister of War, rather – announced the plan to build a “humanitarian city” in Rafah. There is no longer any life in Rafah, not a single structure left standing. The Israelis have made it a wasteland, precisely in order to build that “humanitarian city”. According to the minister, it will house 600,000 people during a first phase, with the possibility of ultimately taking in the entire Gazan population. Those 600,000 are Gazans who live in what the Israelis call the buffer zone, a band two or three kilometers wide on the border separating Gaza from Israel. In other words, some 40 % of the surface of Gaza transformed into a no man’s land.

It will be neither a city nor humanitarian. It will have none of the infrastructure of a real city. It will be a camp. All those going in will be screened. People who belong to a party or a faction will not be allowed in. Entrance will be “voluntary” but once you are in, you won’t be allowed out except to go into exile in a foreign country. A decision which will also be “voluntary”. That way the minister hopes to give his plan a legal veneer, as Israel has always done. But even over there, attorneys, associations and now politicians are giving this project its true name: “It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” former Premier Ehud Olmert told the Guardian on 13 July, adding :

“When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away.”

Such words - “concentration camp”, “deportation”- are heavy with meaning on the lips of an Israeli politician. There is no doubt that many more people will use them when there is nobody left in Gaza because everyone will have been killed or deported. On that day, the world will add: “Yes, it actually was a genocide”. A genocide unprecedented in our century.

The only ethnocracy in the Middle East

Walid still believes there is a justice which can put a stop to the “tartifices”. The men who rule the world do not. A child of four can distinguish between good and evil, they cannot. The west, first and foremost the United States, would make the world believe that everything Israel is doing to the Palestinian population is the fault of the Palestinians themselves. According to that story, Israel is mostly trying to improve the lives of the Palestinians. It’s Hamas who is holding the 2.3 million Gazans hostage. If hospitals are destroyed, it’s because of Hamas, infrastructures are destroyed because of Hamas, schools are destroyed because of Hamas, and universities because of Hamas. The lives of 2.3 million people are destroyed because of Hamas - and because in 2006, the Palestinians voted in favour of Hamas. It was the West that had urged the Palestinians to hold legislative elections, but when Hamas won them, the West refused to accept the democratic result because it wasn’t to their liking. It makes me want to laugh when I hear someone call Israel “the only democracy on the Middle East.” The proper word would be “ethnocracy” to describe a country which, in a law passed in July 2018, defined itself as the “Nation-State of the Jewish people”.

Personally, I advise westerners who want to be closer to reality to call Israel “the only ethnocratic state in the Middle East”. And in the name of that ethnocracy, this well-organized state imprisons, kills, tortures and occupies the land of Palestinians from which it now plans to deport them.

The Gazan population is more than exhausted. From one displacement to another, from one bombing to another, from one massacre to another, from one genocide to another... They are experiencing a famine which grows worse by the day with the only remedy the alms of our tormentors who pretend to give us food and drink only to play hunger games with us: in the distribution centres, the strongest contestants can grab a box of food, the weakest are killed by the bullets or shells of the lurking Israeli army.

And that is happening as the whole world looks on, a world where most people have neither Walid’s eyes or heart to distinguish between good and evil.