The Normalization of the Abnormal

ByNadya Rasheed

This article by Nadya Rasheed, Ambassador of the State of Palestine, originally appeared in the August 30, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left-wing daily newspaper.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, what has happened in Palestine has been accompanied by an indoctrination that normalizes the distortion of human rights and values around the world. An amputated Palestinian child, or the tens of thousands maimed in Gaza, are daily news. Is it normal that more than 21,600 children have been murdered before our eyes? Faced with the annihilation of my people, to speak of a humanitarian crisis is an insult: what exists are war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the systematic destruction of a people.

We face a slaughter intensified since 2023, a genocide that, from the Israeli logic, must continue. The demand for a true ceasefire must be urgent and global. The end of the occupation is not a whim: it is not only about Palestine, it is about resisting the normalization of genocide.

Gaza is the great experiment of a selection process that goes beyond our borders: a warning for the future. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, publicly states that all Israelis share his view on killing Palestinians. The chief rabbi David Yoseff celebrates the destruction of Gaza and maintains that Palestinians do not exist as a people and have no rights. Thus the circle between politics and religion is closed.

The Israeli army bombs Gaza in the middle of the ceasefire. Meanwhile, an Israeli singer goes viral by asking the crowd, “Who has no water?”, and the crowd answers, “Gaza.” Israel destroyed most of the water infrastructure and deliberately contaminated the underground aquifers. It sells its water technology to the world while settlers steal water from Palestinian communities to fill their swimming pools in the West Bank. One must ask about the foreign investments that grow its economy while they celebrate the annihilation of Palestinians. We must demand that Israel’s acts be called by their name, without yielding to blackmail or to its narrative.

Two million people suffer: more than 90 percent of homes are destroyed, 80 percent of schools are rubble, 100 percent of Gaza’s hospitals have been damaged and only half of them remain partially operational. The rubble, far from the propaganda of collateral damage, is designed. Nothing, from the Zionist vision, is by chance. Now, even children’s kites are attacked with drones.

The impact on reproductive health is devastating: the rate of miscarriages in Gaza more than tripled between January and June of 2026, compared to the previous six months. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reports that more than 74,000 children will require treatment for acute malnutrition and 24,600 pregnant and breastfeeding women will suffer from it, with projections through April 2027. Doctors warn of permanent aftereffects in the survivors: part of an ethnic cleansing that seeks to tear out by the root the continuity of the Palestinian people.

More than 73,000 Palestinians have been murdered. The West Bank is about to be split in half. The “E1” settlement project contemplates 1,234 new Israeli colonial units between occupied Jerusalem and the illegal Israeli settlement of “Ma’ale Adumim,” and cuts off the continuity between Palestinian communities from north to south. Is there still anyone who trusts that Israel ever believed in the two-state solution? The death sentence for the Palestinian State is literal. Since 1967 the occupation has been defined as “temporary”: today more than 780,000 settlers live illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Are we witnessing the death of international law? Let us not silence our voices in the face of injustice, which for almost a century has been consolidated at various levels of terror, facilitated, among others, by the Zionist lobby. Each one of us, with our language, with the honor of our identity, has the right to exist also in the mirror of our neighbor. The true superiority of the human being lies in the joint will to say no to the daily terrorism of the settlers and of the Israeli army.

We can refuse to justify the murder of a five-year-old girl whose car received 335 bullet impacts in Gaza; her name is, in the present and the future, Hind Rajab. We can reject the absolute cynicism of Israel having acknowledged the crime, knowing that there will be no consequences. The world has its own and collective memory, precisely because of our capacity to think, to see patterns, to say enough.

We can take part in the dignified boycott that closes doors to products, institutions, businesses, and companies that today feed and economically nourish the occupation, the settlements, and the genocide against the Palestinian people. We can break the complicit silence that reduces the human being to a number. Palestine has become an immense field of siege, dispossession, and extermination. The worst part is that it is no longer hidden: it is proclaimed out loud, with the voice of hatred, of the irrational, and of that which has departed from all humanity.