I wrote this article, with a change in few words, some years ago when Israel had done something similar to what it is doing today to Gaza. Strangely I realized that nothing fundamentally changed. This is only to emphasize the pathetic condition of the Palestinians under colonial occupation. "The Palestinians must defy the Israelis and live their freedom not as a possibility but as a reality."

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In his poem "Since I was thrown into this hole" the Turkish Communist poet Nazim Hikmet poignantly speaks of how time is frozen for him in prison whereas life is pretty much going on outside it.

"The children conceived

the day I was thrown into this hole

are now celebrating their tenth year.

The foals born on that very day

trembling on their thin, long legs

Must by now have become

lazy mares shaking their wide rumps.

But the young olive shoots are still young,

still growing.

"..

The year I was thrown into this hole

the Second World War had not started;

in the concentration camps of Dachau

the gas ovens had not been built;

the atom had not exploded in Hiroshima,

Oh, the time has just flowed

like the blood of a massacred baby.

Now that's all over

but the American dollar

is already talking

of a Third World War"

Strangely, the life outside is not particularly different from the one in prison. The difference is that it's a time that flows unlike the frozen time in prison. "The time has just flowed/ like the blood of a massacred baby." Such a terrible image for such terrible times!

That's the situation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Children conceived during the Six-Day War in June of 1967 are today forty-seven years old. Forty-seven long years of occupation by the vindictive state of Israel, the Palestinians continue to be what Edward Said terms, the "victims of victims" of the Holocaust -- the genocide that the Nazis conducted against the Jews.

Time has frozen for Palestinians as it did for those in the "concentration camps of Dachau" with the "gas ovens" and Hiroshima following suit. It's like they're living a nightmare in which events happen against your will. There is only one thing you can be in a nightmare; i.e., a witness to the unending fear and pain that you intend to wake up from. The Palestinians are witnesses to the death, humiliation and pain under Israeli occupation on a daily basis.

Israel is a fruit of European guilt for having persecuted the Jews in combination with the racist and exclusivist ideology of Zionism, which traces the so-called homeland of the Jews to Palestine based on Biblical evidence as preposterous as Lord Ram being born in the Babri Mosque site. Why were the Jews not given a separate state in one of the Western countries if Europeans cared so much for the Jews? The answer is obvious. Why should they entertain a minority that they persecuted for centuries! They made their "problem" somebody else's problem and today when Europeans and Americans befriend the state of Israel against its so-called Arab enemies, it's nothing but a case of opportunism wedded to hypocrisy.

In Iraq and in Afghanistan and across the third world where the "poor" are the victims of globalization -- time flows "like the blood of a massacred baby." How different can things be for the Palestinians locked up without a future except for blurred recollections that prisoners or the visually challenged experience of a distant world -- a world that seemed to have existed once upon a time.

Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984 has such "dreams" -- a time before "Big Brother" became the order of the day. Imagine a nation of Winston Smiths and that would be the Occupied Territories for you. Imagine a globalized world of Winston Smiths trapped in situations from which there is no escape and that would be the poor and downtrodden of the earth.

Israel is the Big Brother and every Palestinian in the Occupied Territories experiences the making of a memory that can only mean death, cruelty and infinite suffering. The "American dollar" continues to colonize the world. Western media will do its share of state-based corporate reporting on behalf of rich elites in the US and the pro-Israeli lobby that has everything to gain in the occupation of Palestinian Territories.

The irony is that children continue to be born in the refugee camps of West Bank and Gaza not knowing that they've come into a prison, not knowing that their parents are the colonized of the earth, not knowing that their fragile existence is made even more fragile with the possibility that they could be maimed or dead before they fully attain consciousness thanks to a relentless enemy called Israel backed by an evil American empire and not knowing that they're lambs to be massacred at the altar of a peace whose price they're born to pay. Time is flowing in Gaza like "the blood of a massacred baby" with Israel raining ammunition on the defenseless.

The oppressor fears time but the oppressed embrace it because it brings with it the hope of a new world. Both Israel and its master the United States are buying the "time" they do not possess in fact. Time does not belong to colonizer. To him it's an objective fact that exists independent of the person. To the colonized and the oppressed, time is a subjective fact of daily life. It is inscribed on his or her body and mind as wound and scar. That is the time of the Palestinians in the Occupation-resisting Territories. It's a time that'll redeem itself through resistance. It's a time without an end.

Should Israel stop this assault on Gaza is the not the question any longer! The question that needs to be asked is: when does Israel get out of Palestinian Territories? A deeply immoral and colonizing state no different from the European colonizers of the East, Israel needs to be defeated politically, militarily and diplomatically. Defeating Israel means defeating the United States. The Vietnam War conclusively demonstrated that the United States is anything but invincible when resisted by a population that has given form to the vision of a free nation. The Palestinians must defy the Israelis and live their freedom not as a possibility but as a reality.

Authors Bio:

Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.