\n<\/p>\n
If Israel\u2019s genocide<\/span> in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for \u2014 especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country\u2019s own genocide against Indigenous Americans<\/a>.<\/p>\n To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones\u2019 support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview<\/a> that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.<\/p>\n I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It\u2019s painful, and I don\u2019t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be thinking of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I\u2019ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn\u2019t heard from them in over two weeks.<\/p>\n It is for families like my student\u2019s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.<\/p>\n While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead<\/a> of relentless, Israel\u2019s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed<\/a> 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures. <\/p>\n At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble<\/a> sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.<\/p>\n In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it\u2019s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown<\/a> internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized<\/a> Israel\u2019s actions as genocidal<\/a>; that a major wave<\/a> of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine<\/a>. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
Unending Destruction<\/h2>\n