Shouting At The Wall

That's how I feel sometimes, like I'm shouting at a wall. You know, that feeling of knowing something's not right, saying that something terrible's about to happen, but no one's listening.

Palestinians living in Gaza however, have been shouting at a physical wall, built by the people who stole their land, drove their people off the land, stole and destroyed their houses and their businesses, renamed their streets and towns, and confined all 2.2 million of them to a small strip of land along the coast, 25 miles long and 5 miles wide. Maybe I'll write a longer post in the future going into more detail about how Palestine was transformed into Israel, but for now, I'll do a short one about Gazans shouting at the wall, one young Gazan in particular.

I'm talking about the young rapper Abdel-Rahman Al-Shantti, who's 15 years old and is known as MC Abdul. He wrote a song, two years ago now, called "Shouting at the Wall". This song and the growth of its popularity on YouTube are a perfect illustration of how little attention the world pays to the people inside its largest open-air prison. You can find on YouTube many react-videos for this song, almost all of them from the past 2 to 4 weeks; a clear indication that only the October 7 attacks, and Israel's disproportionate response of turning Gaza into a parking lot full of innocent blood, refocussed the world's attention to their plight. More than 15,000 deaths were necessary to get the world to recognize once again the deep injustice committed against the Palestinians by Israel with the backing of all Western nations.

I'm writing this three days after the UN voted on an immediate humanitarian cease-fire and the immediate release of all the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. The vote in the Security Council had 13 in favor, and one - the US - against, while the UK abstained. The US is getting a lot of backlash because of this, but just like with the popularity of "Shouting at the Wall", this is no surprise as all resolutions for Israel to stop its illegal actions have the same outcome: the US, UK, and Israel always vote against them. The backlash against the US, all the pro-Palestine protests around the world, and all the reaction videos for the two-year-old rap song show the same pattern: only when Israel fails to hide its true face are the Palestinians heard, while they've been shouting at the wall for almost 18 years now...

Many times Palestinians tried to protest their occupation and imprisonment peacefully, like in the First Intifada starting in 1987, and the Second Intifada which lasted from 2000 to 2005. From 30 March 2018 through 27 December 2019 we had the Gaza border protests, which are also known as the Great March of Return. These were a series of weekly peaceful demonstrations where each Friday Gazans marched to the Gaza-Israel border. A total of 223 Gazans were killed by Israeli snipers during that time; men, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled were targeted. Many more were injured for life:

At least 189 Palestinians were killed between 30 March and 31 December 2018. An independent United Nations commission set the number of known militants killed at 29 out of the 189. Other sources claim a higher figure, of at least 40. Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and live ammunition. According to Robert Mardini, head of Middle East for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded as of 19 June 2018. The majority were wounded severely, with some 1,400 struck by three to five bullets. No Israelis were physically harmed from 30 March to 12 May, until one Israeli soldier was reported as slightly wounded on 14 May, the day the protests peaked.

[...]Kuwait proposed two United Nations Security Council statements, both blocked by the United States, which called for investigations into Israel's killing of Palestinian protesters. The Israeli government praised Israeli troops for protecting the border fence. Media coverage of the demonstrations, and what has been termed the "PR battle", has been the object of analysis and controversy


_{source: Wikipedia}

Anyway, the Zionists who founded and were gathered in Israel were never planning on giving back Palestinian Arabs their rights or their land; if you study all of the so-called peace proposals, the main UN resolutions 181 (United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine) and 242 (1967 resolution on withdrawal of Israel and recognition of boundaries), you'll see that Palestinians were never given the right to self-determination. The world-famous 1967 borders were negotiated while Israeli settlers were grabbing land in the West Bank, for Pete's sake. Their politics have never changed either, only gotten worse while successive governments moved further to the right, culminating in the current one that's openly advocating for, and executing ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Shouting at the wall, or marching to the wall hasn't helped at all. But I'll leave you with the brilliant rap song, linked above, and also MC Abdul's latest posting on his YouTube channel from 5 days ago called "Let it Rain". That boy is spitting truth and has been for two years now. As of August 2022 "Shouting at the Wall", which was released in June 2021, received some 930,000 views, and right now the view count stands at 2 million; let's tell him that we hear his voice and upvote his latest song!

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!