How do we make sense of the Israeli massacres in Gaza during the summer of 2014? The searing images of the destruction of Palestinian life and the scenes of an incremental colonial genocide still pulsate, assault, and force one into silence. Words cannot fully describe the aggression that began on July 8, 2014. Gaza, the largest open air prison in the world, where 1.8 million Palestinians are concentrated with nowhere to flee, was bombarded by air, land, and sea for over 50 days. Israeli missiles targeted and murdered children playing on the beach and bombed and annihilated families in their homes.2 Palestinians were murdered while burying their dead. They were sought and killed in the UN schools they had fled to after their coordinates were given to the settler state. All of this because Palestinians in Gaza refuse to submit to a slow death by siege. This genocidal siege waged a relentless war on Palestinans’ bodies, rendered Gaza’s economy “unviable,” contaminated the water, reduced calorie intake, and restricted access to food and essential medicines, keeping Palestinians on the border of life. This siege will render Gaza “unlivable by 2020.” In addition to over 2,300 dead, including more than 500 children and over 10,000 injured, up to 475,000 Palestinians were dispossessed last summer as the Israeli settler colonial regime declared 45 percent of Gaza’s territory a “no-go space” during the onslaught, literally “pushing Palestinians towards the sea.”

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