The Art of Forgetting

"We have nothing to lose but our chains"

On the 9th of May, in South Lebanon, a father was driving his motorcycle on the Nabatieh road near Al Sabah Secondary School. His 12-year-old daughter rode pillion as is common in Lebanon and Syria. A Zionist drone was tracking them. A father and his child. Not military, not a threat. They survived the first strike. The father desperately tried to move away from the motorcycle intent on getting his daughter to safety. The second drone targeted him directly, it killed him instantly.

The 12-year-old girl ran as far as possible from the scene, terrified. A third drone strike targeted her as she ran. She was critically wounded, they rushed her to hospital. She did not survive. She witnessed her father mowed down as they ran, then the merciless predator hunted her down too. These are not mistakes nor are they battlefield strikes.

These are the deliberate and sadistic murders of Lebanese civilians on an hourly basis. Children killed in front of their parents, parents killed in front of their children. The intended eradication of an entire people, their history, their culture, their communities, their homes, their hope.

Zionist occupier desecrates a statue of the Virgin Mary in southern Lebanon May 2026

An Israeli podcaster said “if you give me a button just to erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second. I would press it right now. I think most Israelis would.” Genocide is mainstream culture in Israel, genocide in the cruelest most barbaric ways possible. It is hands-on genocide where an entire people, men, women, children, elderly, disabled, blind, deaf, doctors, nurses, premature babies are legitimate targets, not just for death but death by multiple levels of savagery and humiliation. Even in their last moments of crushed and mangled life they are not left in peace - their barely-alive bodies are driven over by tanks, bulldozers, their last breath a notch on the wall of interminable bloodletting. Gideon Levy just wrote about the Israeli obsession for necrophilia in the soft-Zionist media outlet, Haaretz:

Along came Israel. A state that, for its twisted purposes, kidnaps and keeps hundreds of corpses is a state that’s been afflicted with a serious illness. A deviation has become the norm. The taboo has been legitimised. It’s possible that when discussing the ills of the State of Israel and the ills of the occupation, one needs to use the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] to diagnose an acute case of state necrophilia.

Even rape becomes an escalating violence spree against the frail and tortured Palestinian bodies. The rapists walk free, acquitted by a society that endorses their depravity, and their victims die of internal wounds, their organs ruptured and torn by instruments of pain or they wither away from the shame of their ordeals, if they survive.

A child holds his younger sibling, shrouded for burial in southern Lebanon after an Israeli drone-strike.

Even while I try to find the words to express the infinite savagery and psychotic march of killers towards the ‘final solution’, I am reminded again and again, no words exist that are sufficient to bring to life this infinite death. We are left with slogans that sanitise these soul-wrenching tales of horror and slaughter. ‘Unchilding’ - the Zionist-led process of stripping Palestinian children of any protection from the world’s most ‘moral’ predators. These are children deemed “adult security threats” in Israeli military courts to justify their surveillance, detention, torture and execution under the new Zionist death penalty laws that target only Palestinians.

Wounded Child No Surviving Family (WCNSF). Children arrive at hospitals in Gaza, critically injured, terrified, their entire family obliterated. There is nobody to hold their hand, soothe their terror, they are alone in a morass of death and bloodshed. Their world has just been ripped away from them in one strike, one push of a button, one finger on a trigger in the gloom of disfigured homes and buried lives.

Human Devastation Syndrome. This exceeds the definition of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. There is no ‘post’ there is only more. This is supposed to describe the total psychological collapse of children under permanent trauma and threat to life or children forced to see what no child should ever have to see or hear. Children living in a vortex of fear, terror, tension and disconnection from any safety, stability or security. They have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the relentless cacophony of violence and turmoil.

Scholasticide. Does this sterile word conjure up the erasure of an entire educational structure in Gaza? Not just the deliberate demolition of Universities, schools and learning centres. It also includes the murder of teachers, professors, the burning of libraries, ancient depositories of history, lives lost and remembered, identities, the sense of belonging, creating something above and beyond death. Gone. Celebrated by the Zionist bulldozer and detonation teams as the eradication of what they despise most - the spectre of an intelligentsia and powerful academic imprint left by the Palestinians that must not be allowed to flourish or overshadow the Zionist racist ideologies. Light must be extinguished by the Dark.

Oh, and the drone strike that viciously wipes a 12-year-old girl from the face of the earth as she flees her father’s smouldering body, that is known as the ‘Signature Strike’ - targets are not identified, they are not named, they are ‘chosen’ for their patterns of behaviour. A father carrying his child on his motorcycle was ‘signed for’ by a psychopath in a distant room reliant on AI to direct his murderous intent.

There is a whole dictionary being written to identify and label death, destruction, loss, trauma, terrorism on an unprecedented scale but nothing works, nothing explains the depth of pain, the anguish of surviving genocide, the agony of a life of starvation, dehumanisation and abandonment. Some call this the “moral fading” when ethics are disappeared from view.

The words that emerge protect us from our own deeper psychological wound while eventually disappearing the crimes, the criminals, the entire malevolent campaign, until the next one. This art of forgetting is the engine of the colonialist juggernaut. We are manipulated into forgetting by the new stream of consciousness direction or distraction - the next war, the next ‘pandemic’, the next genocide. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, in Yemen, in Sudan children still die but our focus is directed away from them by the media, the government, the global nudge complex.

As Miral Askar says “Colonialism is not only a political system. It is a psychological contract. It requires you to accept a hierarchy where some lives are worth less than others. It is not accidental. It is decades of programming. From the classroom to the military, the ‘other’ is never a neighbour. They are always a ‘threat’. But here is the trap; when you diminish the value of someone else’s life, you diminish your own humanity. You cannot mute your heart for one group without losing your own capacity to feel. The greatest act of resistance today is the refusal to be indifferent. Once you refuse to look away, the hierarchy collapses”.

The gossamer thread that binds Humanity is stronger than we realise and it is what the predator class fears most, we must defend it, for all our sakes. The alternative is too dark to imagine.

Legendary Black revolutionary, Assata Shakur, wrote from her prison cell on July 4, 1973 - “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It Is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

This article was first published for the UK Column quarterly magazine which I highly recommend buying at this link.