The Netherlands, Circa 1942. Hiding in rooms discreetly concealed behind a bookcase, 13-year old Anne Frank and her family communicate in hushed tones, treading about cautiously. Isolated from ordinary life, the young girl takes to jotting down the miseries of that confined hardscrabble into her diary. Meanwhile, the Nazis are rounding up Jewish people like animals, routinely carting them off to isolated locations in cattle cars.
Those who’ve not heard the rumours believe they are being taken away to safe zones where they will work and hold out until the war is over. What they do not know is that the Nazis harbour motives unimaginably dark of heart.
Frank and her family are finally caught, put away into concentration camps where the young girl eventually dies. Another casualty, just one in over 6 million Jews who paid the ultimate price in Hitler’s sadism and his quest for the final solution to the bizarre Jewish question during the Holocaust.
To this day, the hearts and memories of Jewish people carry the anguish and scars of that period which also remains a dark stain on the world’s conscience. What kind of men could be so heartless, so savage as to mete out such cruelty on other human beings? Russian and Allied Forces – who’d confronted the depravity of war first-hand – were not prepared for the gruesome scenes that awaited them at these grim camps and spoke of a barbarity that left them utterly mortified.
Row upon row of emaciated, starved and sick, traumatised men, women and children. The gas chambers, wanton executions and mass graves were ultimately laid bare at the Nuremberg Trials leaving the entire world recoiling in shame and disgust. The world’s refrain to wash itself of those sins was to simply say; ‘we did not know!’ Numerous books and movies have since attempted to tell the ghastly stories over the years but none can ever come close to the nightmare of those who’d spent time in Auschwitz, Berger-Belsen or Sobibor.
Fast forward to 2025, seemingly in a refugee camp somewhere on the Gaza Strip. Meet Leen Al Farra, 3 years old. In between the internal displacement, bombardment and mayhem, she is about to prepare a meal. Palestinian musaffan today. With childish adorability, she tosses the ingredients: black seeds, turmeric, yeast, sugar, cinnamon and sesame seeds into a bowl with flour and water. She kneads, playfully, as though everything is normal.
One of little Leen Al Farra’s popular social media clips. Source: YouTube.
But since the events of October 7, 2023, when the militant fundamentalist Hamas (declared a terrorist organisation in 1993 by the US) broke into Israel, indiscriminately murdering up to 1400 people, injuring around 7000 and taking some 250 hostages, nothing would ever be normal in that part of the world again. Israel’s response was immediate, and from the onset it was clear they sought to bring devastating vengeance on their neighbours.
The initial government statements around turning off the water, power and recking amalek on the ‘eternally irreconcilable enemy’ struck panic on those who are familiar with the history and context of the enduring hostilities between Israeli and Palestinian. For the rest of the world, the retaliatory punishment seemed to fit the crime.
As brutal as those initial scenes of violence and ‘mowing the lawn’ were, many were quick to chalk it up to a matter of an eye for an eye. With negligible exceptions, this was largely the framing put forth by Western media and its pundits and – as cut and dry as it sounded – it seemed deliberately manufactured to ignore the rough and tumble of the enduring realities of that region. Al Jazeera was one of the big networks whose raw reportage on the bombing of hospitals, schools and the killing of medical personnel brought the carnage to the world as it unfolded.
With international media barred from reporting inside Gaza, the world soon looked to social media and its alternative cousin who notoriously do not subscribe to the traditional playbook of scripts, segments, or towing a particular framing. These are streamed, often live, and are as raw as an old man’s knees buckling right there from beneath him as he awaits his next ration at the overburdened aid sites. It is hordes of soot-stained, haggard people surrounded by tents, machine guns going off, and a journalist breaking down at the horrors and death happening all around her.
These came with overwhelming condemnation over Israel’s bombing of hospitals, schools, universities and killing of Palestinian journalists. But, went the defence, Hamas were operating from within these buildings, they’d embedded their operations amongst the civilian population, so the Israel Defence Force (IDF) really had no choice if they wanted to weed out the enemy. They were not the bloodthirsty murderers that Hamas propaganda painted them out to be but the ‘most moral army in the world’ which made every effort to at least give notice to civilians before dropping massive bombs on them.
Then came the ever-rising tallies. Fifty thousand children reportedly dead or injured by this August. As of March 2024, 53 schools had been totally destroyed according to the UN. Images coming out of Gaza today show something that resembles a parking lot. Everyday, scores of civilians are killed. Starvation is allegedly being used as a weapon. Ditto crucial humanitarian aid is being denied, including baby formula. The genocidal rhetoric from some Israeli officials around the cleansing the strip of all Palestinians, annexing the West Bank so as to make way for Greater Israel – which at its Zenith would see the seizure of parts of Syria, Lebanon and the Sinai Peninsula – have all but helped the Tel Aviv PR.
The recent killing of four Al Jazeera journalists has tipped the scales even further, filling up the internet with voices calling out accusations of anti-Semitism as nothing but an attempt to distract from Israeli jingoism. Anti-Zionism, is not necessarily anti-Semitism they say. Are Hamas really a terrorist organisation or simply a resistance movement no different to the ANC? ‘Free Palestine’ protests are popping up everywhere, including here at home. It’s been around 18 months since the International Court of Justice found that there was a ‘plausible case for genocide’ in SA’s case against Israel.
Back then, much of the local protests against the war were black or brown but this killing of reporters saw different hues taking part in the recent action in Cape Town. But even our own Calvinistic right-wing finger waggers are beginning to think: if black and white could hold hands (even if it was for a while) in SA, would a one state with equal opportunity for both Arab and Jew be such a bad idea?Through her diary, first published in 1947, Anne Frank shared her sad experiences with all of humanity. Through her clips, Leen Al Farra brings the world to her tent inside Gaza. The question is: what were you doing when people were dying? Or did you not know?
Featured image: Kids playing at a township in Colesberg, Northern Cape. Image: eParkeni.