Yes Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections. That vote was real and internationally monitored, and it was Hamas’s fair win. And yes, since the coup it staged in Gaza in 2007, seizing the territory by force from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas has ruled there and sat inside this building as its parliament. None of that makes the building Hamas’s.
A parliament building isn’t the property of whoever happens to be occupying its seats that decade. The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump or Obama, 10 Downing Street doesn’t belong to whichever British party holds power, and a courthouse doesn’t belong to the judge behind the bench. Administrations come and go the institutions they occupy belong to the people
🧵On the occasion of Palestine’s upcoming parliamentary elections, I’m showing this for the first time 3 years after it happened You can hear them laughing. Last time a parliament was deliberately blown up with explosives like this was 1944 by Nazi Germany squads in Poland->- Not since 1944 had a parliament building been deliberately wired and blown up with explosives. In the brutal aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, Nazi Germany’s specialized demolition squads “the Sprengkommandos” systematically leveled Poland’s entire government quarter, dynamiting
- This building was never Hamas’s. It belonged to us the people. From the Fatah to the Marxists, to the liberals to the Left and the Right and every Palestinian. It’s the building where the first Palestinian Legislative Council was sworn in, in 1996 the same year Yasser Arafat
- Yes Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections. That vote was real and internationally monitored, and it was Hamas’s fair win. And yes, since the coup it staged in Gaza in 2007, seizing the territory by force from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas has ruled there and sat inside this building as its parliament. None of that makes the building Hamas’s. A parliament building isn’t the property of whoever happens to be occupying its seats that decade. The White House doesn’t belong to Donald Trump or Obama, 10 Downing Street doesn’t belong to whichever British party holds power, and a courthouse doesn’t belong to the judge behind the bench. Administrations come and go the institutions they occupy belong to the people
- That building stood as living proof of our existence, our fundamental right to decide for ourselves how we live as a free people in our native homeland. If anything, it was one of our most sacred national landmarks not because of who sat inside its chambers, but because of theIsrael’s 12th battalion rifle company under its commander Major. Gilad took the building. Soldiers photographed themselves inside it, posing with Israeli flags. Then forces from the 7th brigade combat team arrived and blew it up. According to testimony from the 12th BattalionSo what do we do now, after all this? And in light of the elections coming on November (will there be? Idk) what does any of it actually mean for us? For years, we’ve repeated the same sentence at every conference, every factional speech, every official statement: we need reformWe say it when we witness corruption. We say it when the gap between the people and those in power is wide. And we say it every time a reconciliation process, doomed from the start, fails . But we never ask the harder question: reform of whom, by whom, starting where?We tried it from the top down. Reform that starts with a decision from above, moves down to the government, then institutions, then employees, and if it ever arrives finally reaches to you or me. Undoubtedly, the Hamas-Fatah political situation fucked us up, and the war on Gaza,Real reform doesn’t come from a bureaucratic decree or shuffling the same parasitic names into different chairs. It starts when we look an official dead in the eye and make them swallow the truth: You work for me. Whenever elections finally come this November, don't let cynicalAnyone telling you not to bother wants you paralyzed and obedient. Wake up: nobody your family voted for in 2006 is coming to save you. Stop worshiping factions that feed on your misery. Pick Hamas, Fatah, independents, or Israeli-backed militias it doesn't matter to me. If everyThis time, no analyst and no intelligence service can call the outcome in advance. Nobody knows who wins. That’s not something to be embarrassed about. That’s something to be proud of. That pride is exactly why we can’t sit this one out. Every Palestinian in Gaza, the WestListen to this carefully! The ballot will not move the yellow line further away, rebuild your home that Israel blew up, move the armed settler affront of your home or end an occupation on its own. It doesn’t. We vote because the vote itself is defiance. A century ago, the worldFinally, now go back to the beginning. Listen to them laugh. They were resting in the kind of arrogant certainty they thought could erase us, just as the Nazis sought to erase the Warsaw Ghetto. In November, we prove them wrong. This time at the one thing their dynamite can’t
