Try as it might, Israel could not destroy Palestinian culture and joy in Gaza

Try as it might, Israel could not destroy Palestinian culture and joy in Gaza Gregory Shupak on Tue, 09/01/2026 - 20:00 Victims of the Gaza genocide include countless artists, poets, filmmakers, educators and musicians - but the enclave's collective spirit will never die Children dance in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees, in the central Gaza Strip, on 1 October 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP) Off 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. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); In July, Israel killed Mohamed al-Wahidi, a Palestinian aid worker who organised World Cup watch parties. He was, according to his family, on his way to watch Egypt play Argentina at a screening of the game he helped make accessible to large numbers of people in Gaza City.  The Israeli air strike killed at least three other people, including brothers Fari and Hamza al-Deri, aged eight and 10, who were on their way home from playing