It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: lots of hubbub over Time magazine’s annual “Person of the Year,” a tradition that began in 1928 as “Man of the Year.” the year”, but which now honors a “man, a woman”. , group or concept.
Given how horrific 2023 is going to be, it seems obvious that the choice for “Person of the Year” would be the Palestinian doctors and medical staff who are currently risking their lives to save others from Israel’s genocidal efforts in the Gaza strip.
Since October 7, the Israeli army has massacred more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including at least 8,663 children. According to Surveillance of healthcare workers – Palestinean independent monitoring initiative co-launched by Texas doctor Osaid Alser, as many as 340 medical professionals were killed by the Israelis between October 7 and December 19, including 118 doctors and 104 nurses.
Take for example the case of a 36-year-old nephrologist. Dr Hammam Alloh, father of two young children, who was killed along with his own father in an Israeli airstrike on their home in November. In an October interview with Democracy Now!, Alloh responded as follows to the question of why he refused to abandon Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and move south in accordance with orders from Israeli evacuation: “You think I studied medicine and my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so that I could only think about my life and not my patients?
And it is this kind of relentless altruism that has been continually displayed by Palestinian doctors as Israel sets out to eradicate the very concept of humanity by bombing civilians and targeting hospitals and ambulances. The assault on medical infrastructure and personnel was actively encouraged by a cohort of Israeli doctors who jumped on the military bandwagon to encourage the bombing of Palestinian hospitals.
Not only were Palestinian doctors turned into military targets, but they also faced crippling shortages of fuel, medicine and basic supplies – shortages that were bad enough in so-called “peacetime” . Watching family members and colleagues die has indeed become part of his job, and the Israeli army has taken care of that too. kidnapping and torture Palestinian health workers.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah – who volunteered with medical teams in Gaza during numerous Israeli attacks over the years and spent 43 days in the enclave under siege this time – described having to make “peace with the idea” that he was not going to survive. Among his patients was a young girl, the only surviving daughter of an obstetrician at Al-Shifa Hospital who was killed along with her other child in an Israeli missile strike. Abu Sittah remembers the girl: “Half of her face was missing. Half of his nose and his eyelids had been torn to the bone.
Despite the all-consuming horror, Abu Sittah reported witnessing great “acts of love” and resistance, such as with a three-year-old boy who had lost his family and whose arm Abu Sittah was forced to amputate and the leg: “When I went to see him, the woman whose son was injured in the bed next to him was holding him on her lap and feeding him and his son.
In short, Gaza’s doctors are not the only heroes.
Speaking of heroes, Palestinian journalists have also come under increasingly deadly Israeli fire for witnessing the increasingly deadly savagery perpetrated in the Gaza Strip. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) notes that this war was “the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began collecting data in 1992”; between October 7 and December 23, sixty-nine journalists and media workers were confirmed dead. Among these victims, 62 were Palestinian, four Israeli and three Lebanese.
On November 20, a Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in northern Gaza – just two weeks after sharing a “final message to the world” in which she said: “We had big dreams, but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so that we are killed in one piece. they know who we are.
In another deadly episode documented by CPJ, Palestinian journalist Mohamed Abu Hassira was “killed in a strike on his home in Gaza along with 42 members of his family” on November 7. And yet, in the eyes of Western mainstream media, the massacre of journalists and their extended families in Gaza was obviously not deemed newsworthy.
On December 15, Tel Aviv Tribune’s Arab cameraman, Samer Abudaqa, was killed in an Israeli attack in southern Gaza, where he bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from arriving. ‘reach for more than five hours. Abudaqa’s colleague, Tel Aviv Tribune bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was also injured. In a previous Israeli attack in October, he lost his wife, son, daughter, grandson and various other family members.
Despite indescribable trauma, Dahdouh continues to report.
Despite the abundance of real-world heroism, Time magazine has selected American billionaire singer-songwriter and pop culture opium of the masses Taylor Swift as its “Person of the Year” for 2023. According to Time article, Swift is actually the “Person of the Year” for 2023. main character in the world. (Previous recipients of the honor include Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris duo, and Elon Musk – the “wealthiest private citizen in history” who apparently charmed the Time team by “tweeting direct his poops.”)
But while Swift may indeed be the current protagonist of a superficial world that is quickly igniting into self-centered banality, one wishes more credit were given to real-world heroes. And as 2023 draws to a close with no end to the genocide in sight, give me the people of Gaza any day as “Person of the Year.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.