Two years of genocide in Gaza, 77 years of denial
By Jamal Kanj
Author, columnist
Following the revolt of the besieged against their jailors on October 7, 2023, the Zionist hasbara machine mobilized across the world to impose a false narrative. Its goal was clear: erase history, distort reality, and present Israel as the eternal victim. According to this framing, Israel was a peaceful entity blindsided by an unprovoked attack that supposedly emerged out of nowhere.
October 7 did not fall from the sky. It was the culmination of decades of dispossession, siege, and systematic dehumanization. Long before October 2023, Gaza was described by international observers as the world’s largest open-air prison. It was subjected to a starvation diet blockade for more than 16 years, or 5,800 days. Long before that, its 2.3 million inhabitants, of whom 1.3 million are refugees or their descendants, were driven from their homes and villages in 1948 during the Nakba, a catastrophe created by Zionist terror militias who ethnically cleansed the native Palestinians to create a state for Jews escaping European hatred.
To understand October 7, one must place it within the continuum of Palestinian suffering. That single day was not an aberration. It was one out of nearly 28,000 days since 1948 of Zionist hate and Israeli oppression. Each day carried the weight of exile, siege, humiliation, poverty, and hopelessness. Yet hasbara wants to delete those decades from recorded memories, 28,000 days of Palestinian statelessness, and reduce history to a single day divorced from context.
The “first October 7” was not in 2023; It was in 1948, when Zionist terrorist militias, transformed into today’s Israeli army, committed massacres, razed villages, and expelled Palestinians en masse. That foundational act of ethnic cleansing continues today. The daily bombardment, the starvation, the denial of basic human dignity to the people of Gaza are extensions of that original Zionist sin.
The hasbara’s greatest weapon is controlling the media, reframing narrative, and selective memory. It seeks to decontextualize memory and conceal the structural violence that made October 7 inevitable. To remember the 28,000 days that preceded it is to expose the ongoing injustice at the heart of this so-called war: a colonized, besieged people struggling for survival against an occupying power that insists on their permanent subjugation.
Two years have passed since Israel unleashed its genocide plan. A strategy of systematic destruction, of homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, and of life itself. Gaza today is not a war zone. It is a graveyard of a people suffocated before the eyes of a world that lost its humanity.
Two years, 24 months, and 730 days more than that one October 7 day. However measured, life since October 2023 has been an eternity of suffering for the people of Gaza. A chronicle of genocide streamed live on TV. The most fundamental measure of this holocaust is the destruction and staggering loss of life. Gaza today stands as the most ruthlessly bombarded place in history: measured by explosives per square meter, Israel has dropped nearly 70 times more bombs on Gaza than the Allies did on Germany in World War II, and 100 times more than the US dropped on North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder.
This genocide isn’t Israel’s alone; it’s the collective moral failure of the so-called Western civilization. By enabling indicted war criminals, providing them with the genocide tools, and diplomatic protection, Western governments have exposed the selective value system they uphold. Their conspicuous silence, even as a war minister labels 250,000 civilians “terrorists,” reveals “Western values” as nothing but a cynical façade masking their hypocrisy and racial hierarchy.
The article first appeared on CounterPunch.