On the anniversary of Operation al-Aqsa Flood
Why we should commemorate October 7 as an uprising and continue the fight for freedom
Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of October 7, the day in which the Palestinian resistance executed Operation al-Aqsa Flood.
I’ve seen October 7 generally framed as a day of mourning. For those who associate it with the events that sparked two years of genocide and attempted annihilation of the Palestinian people, then that’s completely understandable.
Many of my fellow Jews frame the day as the anniversary of what they refer to as “the Hamas terrorist attacks.” It feels to them like an attack of the Jewish people, and our historical traumas, which have been exploited by the Zionist entity, invade our collective nervous system yet again.
For those who lost family members on October 7, including a distant cousin of mine who lost her cousin, grieving your family is completely understandable.
As for the rest of us who haven’t…..we have to understand the accurate framing of what happened on October 7.
Operation al-Aqsa flood, which took place on October 7, was an uprising.
The Palestinian people have lived under unbearable conditions since 1948 and even before that. No matter how they resist, whether very violently (taking up arms), slightly violently (throwing rocks at Israeli tanks), or not violently at all, they are met with violence which oppresses, maims, and kills them.
If you were oppressed by Zionists the way that Palestinians are, you would fight for your freedom by any means necessary. White people inherently know that they would do this, and their freedom to do it is codified in “stand your ground” laws.
Operation al-Aqsa Flood is not widely considered as an uprising because of how events were reported that day and ever since. The US/Israeli/Western media spin machine went into incredibly high gear and spun it as a brutal, barbaric attack on Jews, the worst one since the Holocaust.
The spin machine also purposely omitted the Israeli military’s use of their Hannibal Directive on October 7, which meant that they fired at everything that moved and killed scores of their own people. Israeli firepower greatly dwarfed that of Hamas’s comparatively rudimentary weaponry, yet Hamas was blamed for all of the Israeli deaths.
The reality of Operation al-Aqsa Flood is that the Palestinian resistance brilliantly executed a jail break. They managed to break through apartheid fences, take out some Israeli military, and take people prisoner to negotiate an exchange of Palestinian prisoners. Mind you, Palestinian prisoners suffer unbelievably inhumane conditions, and many of these prisoners are children.
This was an uprising. This was fighting back. Violence of the oppressed should never be equated with violence of the oppressor.
The oppressor has all the heavy machinery, financing, and general superiority of arms. The oppressed has lesser firepower in comparison but also hope, brains, hearts, souls, and an undying will to live and resist.
Operation al-Aqsa Flood started the largest global uprising of the oppressed against oppressors in human history. We are living in that global uprising right now. The Palestinian resistance has showed us how to fight for our freedom. They continue to fight for our freedom.
The Palestinian people are telling us what they need. They don’t need saving. They are actually going to save us all. They need us to stop harming them.
They need us to interrupt and dismantle the systems that are harming them. They need us to summon the courage, heart, love, and organization that it takes to do that.
Their struggle is our collective struggle. Our struggles are connected.
The Black struggle is connected to the queer struggle is connected to the trans struggle is connected to the disabled struggle is connected to the immigrant struggle is connected to the women’s struggle. The same people who uphold systems of white supremacy are trying to keep us all under their control. Operation al-Aqsa Flood showed us how to fight back, and the Palestinian people are showing us what we need to do.
This is how I remember October 7, as the two-year anniversary of the start of the largest global uprising against systems of oppression in human history.
If you’re still unsure of how to move forward in the fight for all of our freedom, leave a comment and I can help you with that.