By Rima Najjar
I. The Refusal of Delay
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, is right: judgment of Israel’s atrocities cannot be deferred. History is not a sanctuary — it is a graveyard, and the living will not lie down in it. To defer justice to history is to abandon the living to annihilation and hope that memory will suffice. Albanese dismantles this deferral with precision: “I am not someone who says, ‘history will judge them’ — they will have to be judged before then.” Her refusal is not rhetorical flourish — it is a demand. A demand for immediacy, for moral reckoning in the present tense. Because history, if it ever arrives, will not be enough. And the living cannot afford to wait.
And yes, some will ask — what does it matter if Albanese speaks clearly, if the UN itself is structurally incapable of enforcement? What good is documentation when people are being killed and expelled in real time? But this framing misses the point. Albanese’s role is not to enact change through institutional power; it is to produce legal and rhetorical clarity within a system designed to obscure. Her reports do not liberate, but they do indict. They name apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide — not as metaphors, but as legal realities. That naming reverberates. It arms movements, scholars, and survivors with language that refuses euphemism. It builds precedent. It unsettles the comfort of “both sides” diplomacy. And it legitimizes testimony from the ground in a forum that, for all its limitations, still shapes global discourse. To dismiss this as distraction is to misunderstand the mechanics of narrative warfare. Albanese’s work is not heroic for saying what we already know — it is necessary because she says it where silence is the norm.
- It refuses delay, euphemism, and diplomatic choreography
- It insists that justice must be rendered while the crime is still unfolding
To archive in real time is to indict in real time. It is to say, with Fanon and with Albanese: they must be judged before then. Because the present is not a waiting room — it is the courtroom. And the people are the judges.
II. The Lullaby of Accomplices
“History will judge,” they say. But history has not been a neutral witness. It has been a weapon of the victors, a ledger of conquest, a narrative shaped by those who hold the pen and the power.
History has been on the side of empire. It has canonized colonizers, sanitized massacres, and reframed resistance as chaos. The Nakba was not merely erased, it was overwritten. The Naksa was not just denied, it was reinterpreted as strategic necessity. From Algeria to Palestine, from Congo to Kashmir, the archive has often served the architecture of domination.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, exposes this asymmetry. He writes not of military might, but of the psychic and existential power of the oppressed — their capacity to rupture colonial order through refusal, rage, and revolutionary imagination. Fanon insists that the colonized are not passive victims but agents of historical transformation. Their power lies not in tanks or treaties, but in the will to reclaim narrative, land, and dignity.
This is the power that terrifies empire:
- The peasant who joins the liberation front
- The child who remembers the name of the village erased from the map
- The writer who refuses euphemism
- The mourner who testifies without permission
Fanon reminds us that the oppressed do not wait for history to vindicate them; they make history by refusing erasure. Their resistance is not deferred — it is immediate, embodied, and uncontainable.
And yet, the lullaby persists. It is sung by Washington, Brussels, London, Berlin — those who bankroll and arm Israel while pretending to mourn Palestinian dead. It is echoed by the United Nations, issuing statements while vetoes choke action. It is the chorus of liberal commentators who watch genocide unfold and assure us that someday the record will be corrected.
But the record is already being written — by the living, in real time, in blood and rubble and refusal. And it does not wait for the victors to lose their pen.
III. History’s Inadequacy
History does not rescue the starving child in Gaza. It does not rebuild bombed hospitals or pull families from the rubble of Khan Younis. It does not stop snipers from executing teenagers in Jenin. History is written after the bodies are buried — and more often than not, by the perpetrators.
Even when the oppressed win, their victories are neutered: rage polished into resilience, revolution reduced to reconciliation. Waiting for history is surrender.
We’ve waited before. The Nakba of 1948 — the mass expulsion and destruction of Palestinian life — was archived but never redressed. The Naksa of 1967 — the second wave of displacement and occupation — was documented but never reversed. Each catastrophe was recorded, debated, footnoted. But the dispossession continued. The settlements expanded. The siege deepened. And the world moved on.
These events were not aberrations, they were precedents. And the lesson they offer is brutal: history may remember, but it rarely rescues. It may mourn, but it does not intervene. The archive grows, but the injustice persists.
IV. The Present as Archive
This is not an archive of memory — it is an arsenal of indictment. Each record is not a relic but a weapon, forged in the present to pierce impunity before it calcifies.
The Palestinian cause is not merely just. It is unignorable. No person tethered to their humanity can witness the systematic destruction of Gaza — the detention of children, the starvation of civilians, the criminalization of testimony — and remain neutral. And yet neutrality is the global default. Obfuscation is policy. Containment is strategy.
Grief itself becomes suspect. Survivors are interrogated, not consoled. Their mourning is reframed as incitement. Their memories are redacted before they can be archived.
The Zionist media apparatus — amplified by Western outlets, sanitized by diplomatic euphemisms — manufactures ambiguity where there is none. It reframes genocide as conflict, starvation as collateral, resistance as terrorism. It weaponizes language to flatten asymmetry, to erase context, to make the unbearable seem debatable.
But we know better. We have the records:
- Forensic evidence
- Satellite imagery
- Survivor testimonies
- Legal filings
- Burned schools, bombed hospitals, sanctioned human rights groups
This archive is not retrospective — it is insurgent. It is built in the present tense, against the machinery of erasure. And it carries the weight Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth: the colonized subject does not wait for history to validate their humanity. They assert it through refusal, through documentation, through the reclamation of voice.
Fanon understood that the colonized are forced into a perpetual present — a present of surveillance, dispossession, and threat. But he also insisted that this present is the site of rupture. The oppressed do not inherit history; they interrupt it. They do not appeal to the future; they indict the now.
In Gaza, the archive is not a memorial-in-the-making — it is a weapon of resistance. Every image of rubble, every censored report, every smuggled testimony is a refusal to be buried in the footnotes of empire. It is what Fanon called the moment of becoming, when the colonized subject ceases to be an object of pity and becomes a force of reckoning.
This is the weight of the present:
- It demands action, not abstraction
- It refuses delay, euphemism, and diplomatic choreography
- It insists that justice must be rendered while the crime is still unfolding
To archive in real time is to indict in real time. It is to say, with Fanon and with Albanese: they must be judged before then. Because the present is not a waiting room — it is the courtroom. And the people are the judges.
V. Naming the Executioners
We do not wait. We indict.
We name the executioners: Israel, the Jewish settler state built on erasure. We name the enablers: the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia — the colonial bloc that arms and shields it.
We name the collaborators: Arab regimes that normalize with apartheid, trading Palestinian blood for diplomatic scraps.
They must be judged now — not by history, but by the living.
VI. Judgment Before History
To say they will have to be judged before then is to refuse the quiet violence of delay.
Accountability must pierce the present — while the crime is still unfolding — before impunity becomes irreversible.
Judgment takes place in multiple registers:
- In the streets where millions march
- In boycotts that choke profiteering
- In solidarity networks that break sieges
- In courts forced to confront their own paralysis
- In urgent petitions filed at The Hague
- In sanctions won against complicit states
The people are the court when institutions collapse into collaboration.
The archive built in real time — images of rubble, testimonies of survivors, evidence smuggled past censors — is not a memorial-in-the-making but the foundation of prosecution.
Justice is not the privilege of future historians — it is the duty of the living.
To wait is to abandon the living to annihilation.
To act is to judge.
And to judge now is the only way history will not become an epitaph of our failure, but a record of our refusal.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
17 September 2025
Source: globalresearch.ca