“To the inhabitants of Gaza: a beautiful future is waiting, but not if you hold hostages. If you do, you are dead! Make an intelligent decision. Release the hostages now where there will be hell to pay later! »»
It was not the words of a far -right provocateur who hides in a dark corner of the Internet. They were not shouted by an unleashed warlord seeking revenge. No, these are the words of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. A man who with a signature, a speech or a single sentence can shape the fate of whole nations. And yet, with all this power, all this influence, their words to the people of Gaza were not peace, no diplomacy, no relief – but of death.
I read them and I feel sick.
Because I know exactly to whom he is talking to. He speaks to my family. To my parents, who have lost parents and their house. To my brothers and sisters, who no longer have a place to come back. For hungry children from Gaza, who have only been born from a people that the world has deemed unworthy of existence. To bereaved mothers who buried their children. To fathers who can do nothing other than watch their babies die in their arms. To people who have lost everything and who should still bear more.
Trump talks about a “bright future” for the inhabitants of Gaza. But there is no future where the houses have disappeared, where entire families have been erased, where the children were massacred.
I read these words and I ask: What kind of people do we live in?
A world where the head of the so -called “free world” can pronounce a condemnation to general death to an entire population – two million people, most of whom are moved, hungry and barely hung on life. A world where a man who commands the most powerful army can sit in his office, isolated from cries, blood, unbearable stench of death, and declares that if the inhabitants of Gaza do not comply with his request – if they do not find as if by magic and free hostages, they have no control – so they are simply “dead”. A world where the survivors of the genocide receive an ultimatum of mass death by a man who claims to defend peace.
It is not only absurd. It’s bad.
Trump’s words are criminal. They are direct approval of the genocide. The inhabitants of Gaza are not responsible for what is going on. They do not hold the hostages. It was the hostages – trapped by an Israeli war machine that has stolen from them. The hostages of a brutal siege that strengthened them, bombed them, moved them, left them with nowhere to go.
And now they have become hostages of the most powerful man on the earth, which threatens them with more suffering, more death, unless they meet a request that they are unable to make.
The most cynically, Trump knows that his words will not be welcomed with a significant perspective. Who in the American political establishment will he be responsible for threatening the genocide? The Democratic Party, which allowed the genocidal war of Israel against Gaza? The congress, which massively supports the sending of American military aid to Israel without conditions? The consumer media, who systematically erased Palestinian sufferings? There is no political cost in Trump to make such declarations. If anything, they strengthen its position.
This is the world in which we live. A world where Palestinian life is so disposable that the President of the United States can threaten mass death without fear of any consequence.
I write this because I refuse to leave it is only another declaration of scandalous Trump according to which people make fun, that the media transform into a spectacle, that the world forgets. I write this because Gaza is not a subject of discussion. This is not a title. It’s my house. My family. My story. My heart. My everything.
And I refuse to accept that the President of the United States can pronounce death threats to my people with impunity.
The inhabitants of Gaza do not control their own fate. They never had this luxury. Their fate has always been dictated by the bombs falling on them, by the siege that displays them, by the governments which abandon them. And now their fate is dictated by a man in Washington, DC, who sees no problem threatening the annihilation of an entire population.
So I ask again: what kind of people do we live in?
And how long will we allow him to stay this way?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
