Image Source: I, Makaristos – CC BY-SA 3.0

Haidar Eid is a Palestinian professor who used to teach postcolonial and postmodern literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. That university no longer exists thanks to the missiles and the Zionist minds that fired and guided those missiles. His book Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind was recently published in Spanish by La Trocha publishing house in Santiago, Chile. I met Haidar earlier this year. His home was completely destroyed, and perhaps we could be ironic and say that he was lucky to have been warned by the criminals who gave him five minutes to evacuate.

Not everyone was so “lucky.” Since 7 October 2023, 60,038 people have been killed, of whom 18,592 are under the age of 18. These figures could be underestimated if we review the assessments reported in the journal The Lancet, which in June 2024 already estimated the death toll at 37,336, to which we should add 14,400 missing persons and so-called indirect deaths, that is, deaths from starvation, which have risen alarmingly in the last month. The aggression carried out by the state of Israel in the Gaza Strip has destroyed more than 70% of homes, displaced some 2.3 million people, and has been openly and selectively directed against the civilian population, attacking and destroying schools, universities, mosques, churches, hospitals, shelters, and even shooting at people at food collection sites. Journalists, health workers, humanitarian workers, UN personnel, and especially children have been killed as part of a plan aimed at wiping out the Palestinian people. This plan unambiguously qualifies as a crime of genocide.

The history of this aggression did not begin on October 7. The Zionist project dates back more than a century. It is a colonialist, racist, and........

© CounterPunch