Al-Aqsa Flood: Turning the World Right Side Up
- By Willow Naomi Curry

On October 7, 2023, a group of Palestinian freedom fighters from the military wing of Hamas, the de facto government of Gaza, changed the world forever. In Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a prison break and hostage-taking mission turned into a spectacle of carnage—after an exchange of gunfire between Hamas fighters and the Israeli Occupation Forces, the IOF employed Israel’s “Hannibal Directive,” using Apache helicopters and tanks to shoot and shell Israeli citizens and residents indiscriminately, along with the Hamas combatants. In total, 695 civilians, 373 active-duty soldiers, and 71 foreign nationals were murdered, according to Israeli Social Security data. That’s what we know for now, and probably all that we will know for many years. Amidst the state-sanctioned massacre, a narrative was being constructed, one that extensive forensic evidence would surely inconvenience.
I am reminded of 9/11, the fire, the smoke, the haze.
Crimes committed by fire leave little for investigation.
As such, they are the preferred method of the West and its offshoots.
The above is not the story the West, and especially the United States of America, wants to immortalize. I won’t dignify their story by repeating it. I’ll just refer readers to the commemorative statements of two war criminals, former U.S. President Barack Obama, and sitting Vice President/2024 presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. They contain some of the foulest mockeries of truth I’ve ever read.
In her Black Liturgies project, Cole Arthur Riley wrote:
“Today we will be asked to remember a
very insular story, a memory fragmented
and contorted and systematically purged of
Palestinian voice. Grief manipulated in
order to justify the brutalities we’ve
witnessed for the past year.”
Remember instead, more than anything else, that the unfathomably brave actions of Hamas fighters that day opened a portal through which Palestinian citizen journalists surged, documenting everything for the eyes of the world. They successfully countered the dominant narrative in real time, revealing the true face of the West—vicious, bloodthirsty, soulless—in a way we can never unsee. I knew immediately when I heard Benjamin Netanyahu call the operation “Israel’s 9/11 moment” that the story would be used to justify extermination of Palestinians. I knew because that was what the U.S. did in the wake of 9/11, for reasons much more cynical than racial hatred.
Sim Kern, anti-Zionist Jewish author-turned-influencer-turned-famed Palestine liberation advocate, said this in a video posted to TikTok and Instagram today:
“The amount that our minds have been freed
from colonial lies and imperialist lies
is impossible to quantify.”
Before October 7, the oppression of Palestinians under Israel’s illegal occupation was the extent of my knowledge. Before October 7, that knowledge was the extent of my feeling of responsibility. I had not considered that it was my duty to act on that knowledge. Now, after a year of genocide, I understand that knowledge without action is complicity. I understand now, from all the Palestinians who’ve taught life, that the liberation of Palestine and all the peoples being strangled to death by U.S. imperialism (including the underclass here in the U.S., the prisoners and the migrant farm workers and the refugees and the asylum seekers) is my responsibility. It is the responsibility of everyone who is able, in some way, to fight. I think more of the world understands this now than ever did before Al-Aqsa Flood, the rebellion that has been met with the extinguishing of lives and worlds literally beyond count.
I, we, will never be able to repay the cost of our collective ignorance,
Our blissful sleep.
We will forever be in debt—
We must spend our lives working toward Jubilee.
Hamas took the false world, the snow globe of glass, and shook it, turned it upside down. For a year, like the sands, we have been whirling. Still that false, constraining, unfree world has not shattered. We cannot, we must not, we will not settle till it does.
WILLOW NAOMI CURRY is an artist, critic, curator, and design researcher based in Houston, Texas. Her art and curatorial work have appeared in exhibitions by Photoville NYC, DiverseWorks, Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the Houston Climate Justice Museum. Curry has held fellowships in art and political commentary and criticism with the Boston Review and the National Book Critics Circle, and her essays have appeared in or are forthcoming with Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Literary Hub, Southwest Contemporary, and the National Gallery of Art. Her short lyric film The Killing Fields is on view through November 16 at the DiverseWorks exhibition River on Fire: Artist Activism in the Wake of Environmental Disaster.
Sean Eren, "Liberation," courtesy of Artists Against Apartheid