[Pictured: A mural by Emmalene Blake in Dublin expresses solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]
By Eyad Alkurabi
Last month, as the state of Israel continued to starve and exterminate the people of the Gaza strip, massacre Palestinians in the west bank, and gaslight and delegitimize Palestinians in the diaspora and our friends and allies worldwide, Palestinians marked the 77th commemoration of the Nakba – our catastrophe, the founding of Zionist state. But the Nakba has never ended. In fact, it has been ongoing.
It has been 77 years of ongoing agony. With every step we take, Palestinians remind ourselves that we stand on the shoulders of giants. In my own family, we have been freedom fighters on both sides since the 1920’s – because our people’s catastrophe did not begin in 1948, it began decades before with the arrival of Zionism, bringing many massacres even before the time we commemorate as Nakba. Beginning in the 1920’s entire villages were ethnically cleansed, sometimes entire family lines wiped out. The Zionist settlers and militias did to us exactly what had once been done to indigenous Americans. Untold thousands were killed between the 1920’s and the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ultimately and forcibly expelled from their lands. Today, we carry our parents’ and grandparents’ keys, and we carry their hopes that the next generation can one day return home. Until then, we as their descendants must continue showing up for our people wherever we are and whoever we are, no matter how high the personal cost or how difficult the work may be for us.
Every Palestinian family has its stories. On my mother’s side, they tell of sheltering a family of Jewish Holocaust refugees who eventually intermarried with our family. And when the Nakba came, those Holocaust survivors had to flee again to Syria, where many of our family then died in the Syrian civil war. One of my father’s earliest memories is from the age of four, when he was playing on the floor of his home while his mother made rice pudding. When a bomb suddenly landed next door, he fell into the pot of rice pudding and scalded his arms.
And our Nakba, our mass catastrophe that we were forced to swallow, reared its ugly head again in 2023. But it never actually ended, because Israel is addicted to killing Palestinians. Every year, they need a refill on the script — a refill that is perpetually funded by the United States of America with seemingly no limits. We need to take the corrupt doctor’s license away and achieve an arms embargo now!
I hope you will educate yourselves about places like Al-Tira ’Haifa and Dar Yasin to better understand how the genocide of our people began. I ask you to visit the website Palestine Remembered where Nakba survivors document the stories of their lands, their homes, and their families.
Palestinians are so often asked to condemn violence and terrorism, perhaps because we are assumed to be violent and terroristic people. So, I also hope that you will also ask yourself what you would do in our shoes?
What would you do if your entire family had been killed by the time you were 18 years old?
What would you do if you’d been blockaded your entire life?
What would you do if you were just a fisherman trying to catch something to eat only to be shot at for fishing? Or if the only food you could get had to be approved, had to be allowed in, had to be given to you by the calorie?
What if you had no clean water for yourself or your family, and it was deemed illegal for you to even collect rainwater from your own rooftop?
If your political leaders, even the most peaceful among them, were in constant danger of being imprisoned, often with no charges, for years on end? And what would you do if every form of peaceful resistance that you tried was met with violent suppression?
The best time to get involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation was before October 7th. But the second best time is now. We hope you will join us by showing up and getting involved in the Palestinian Rights Committee and/or the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and by educating yourself about the facts of our struggle so that you can educate others.
Being a Neurodivergent Palestinian Gay man is a journey. However, through the amazing sumud and love of my communities, we are steadfast and pushing through. Although we carry our own individual trauma and our collective trauma, we as Palestinians and our friends love each other so much that we carry on and through.
If you wish to push for change, I ask that you consider the following steps:
-
Persuade your local city and county to have binding BDS resolutions.
-
Encourage your representative in congress to demand that AIPAC gets audited and gets labeled as a foreign entity.
-
Demand an end to the siege, genocide, and blockade.
-
Demand an immediate release of all Palestinian hostages, which are in the thousands.
-
Write letters to editors to combat propaganda and provide a differing viewpoint.
-
Bring up the Palestinian struggle and story at the kitchen table! Talk to your friends and loved ones.
-
Get involved, protest, agitate, educate, and organize
We have the ability to make an impact — big and small and in between. Let’s utilize our abilities and, since we are in the belly of the beast, let’s get together and bring more peace and justice on this earth.
No boots on the ground, no bombs in the air, US out of everywhere.
This post has been syndicated from Read - Hampton Institute, where it was published under this address.