still thinking about refaat alareer. we know now that refaat was assassinated by israel for a joke he made about the false (and ridiculous) israeli claim that a "baby was baked in an oven" on oct 7th
i can't stop thinking about how he was targeted for this joke. on the one hand you could argue, as many fascists and genocidal freaks have, that israelis wanted him dead out of grief or righteous anger that he was mocking their dead children—but the thing is by the time the order was given to kill him (we know he received a call informing him that he was a target around two days prior to his assassination) it was already well-known that this claim was false. no babies were baked in ovens on october 7th. there was a child thrown into a bakery fire in front of his father during the nakba in 1948, but that's besides the point.
what i can't stop thinking about is that refaat was then targeted not for mocking a dead baby, but for his disrespect. he refused to patronize israeli victimhood. and why should he? by the time he made that joke, on october 29th, over 7000 palestinians (including 3000 children) had already been killed by israel. israel had already burned, suffocated, crushed and decapitated 3000 palestinian children, hundreds of whom were under one year old.
its kind of crazy to me that people think this joke was off-color or inappropriate. it wasn't. there was no baked baby. it was simply propaganda. the children killed on october 7th would not be enough to justify the palestinian children who had already been and would be killed, and therefore the story needed embellishment to explain the horror to the israeli psyche. no baby was baked but perhaps it felt like a baby was baked. the important thing is that everyone needed to feel like a baby was baked because they need to get rid of palestinians, so whatever it takes to convince people that that is necessary, then it must be said and respected and repeated ad nauseam. people more generous than i have suggested that israelis who made these claims had first responder trauma. sure. but airing that first responder trauma, paying for ads to prominently display it across social media, editing videos and infographics with these claims, and reprinting them into magazines turns this trauma into industrialized propaganda that is incitement to genocide. that is not only worthy of criticism but necessary to criticize.
refaat refused to entertain that. he called bullshit on a bullshit claim. if anyone has a right to do that, it is palestinians who cannot afford to entertain the pearl-clutching of israelis who say they fear genocide so they can perpetuate genocide. israel demanded sympathy for their hypothetical baby, while by then they had already killed eight NICU babies and left four more to slowly die abandoned in their hospital beds. and they knew this. the idf knew it was slowly and swiftly killing palestinian babies, they knew the hypothetical baby wasn't real, they knew refaat was joking, and they just wanted him dead anyway. they would've likely killed him with or without the joke, but without the joke maybe it would have been in an airstrike on a whole building, or an airstrike on an entire refugee camp, or an errant sniper, instead of a targeted strike on his sister's apartment.
in truth refaat wasn't killed for his ridicule, nor for his disrespect. he was killed because he was a palestinian who dared to ridicule and disrespect israel. israel strives to isolate palestinians in this, to make ridiculing and disrespecting israel an unacceptable, 'palestinian' trait. but if palestinians are killed for ridiculing israel, then ridiculing israel is honoring these victims. it is israel that makes a mockery of itself by instituting a land grab in the name of its victims. in ridiculing israel, we honor those victims too. some of them deserved a better country, one that did not seize their death as a gleeful opportunity to murder ten thousand children. it might be said that israel can't take a joke about its useless propaganda, but it mostly just can't take the idea of a palestinian existing. it's oversensitive like that.
refaat had already lost his home and his family to israeli bombing in 2014. they could not take disrespect from someone whose family they had killed, whose childhood they had ruined, whose freedom they had limited, and who—for two months before his death—they had starved, terrorized and beseiged. in this aspect, refaat was no different to any other palestinian.
above all, israel can't take the existence of palestinians who never forget that it is a colonizer, a villain, and a tyrant to those it has dispossessed, and can so clearly and succinctly declare it to the world. and so israel finds it easy and correct to kill them. to many israelis, this too is "israel defending itself." israel is only defending its reputation—an honor killing, if you will.
ironically, of course, killing a poet is so pathetic it becomes its own joke. a nuclear superpower got ratio'd on twitter so it deployed an airstrike and killed his entire family, including his sister's children. haha! next time we'll make sure to dutifully repeat the propaganda of the only democracy in the middle east with sufficient respect.
refaat's body, along with his family's, are still under the rubble. they cannot be retrieved due to the siege on fuel, the sniper fire on emergency rescuers and the lack of heavy machinery.
but in the end, the pedestrian predictability of military regimes, colonizers and fascists who love killing poets, artists, satirists, academics always loses. they forget that in doing so they have granted each poet immortality, and given every word they have written eternal life. that includes "with or without baking powder?"
