Try as it might, Israel could not destroy Palestinian culture and joy in Gaza
Gregory Shupak writes in Middle East Eye on 25 September 2026 :
In 2012, the United Nations warned that the Gaza Strip might not be a “a liveable place” by 2020. As scholar Norman Finkelstein often commented, the UN meant physically uninhabitable, not unliveable in a “poetic sense”.
But the genocide that Israel began in 2023 is different. The extermination campaign is not only about pulverising the Gaza Strip and killing Palestinians en masse. It can also be understood as a war on joy and love – one seemingly designed to make Gaza unliveable in a poetic sense.
Genocide is defined in part as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Israel has been shown over and over again to be imposing that biological destruction on Palestinians in Gaza. Yet it is also inflicting “conditions of life” clearly calculated to bring about Palestinians’ cultural destruction – to make the enclave spiritually dead, soulless. The aim, it seems, is to make life in Gaza so barren and atomised that the Palestinians living there will leave, submit or die.
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Despite Israel’s ferocious assault on all facets of Palestinian life, Gaza’s residents continue to find ways to create art, to make music, to perform theatre, and to play football.
While Palestinians endure mass funerals, they also have mass weddings: in Deir al-Balah this past April, 300 couples were married in a joint celebration.
Amid the carnage, Palestinians preserve books and heritage sites, restore houses of worship, and find ways to teach and learn. They have babies. They write literature, produce films, perform Dabke and breakdance, refusing to give up the struggle to create their own conditions of life – to make their world poetically liveable..