palestinecommunity on Nostr: If Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, ...

If Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, killing, raping them;

If Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists;

If Palestinians made their children wander barefoot with empty pots, made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags, bury their siblings, their cousins, their friends, made them sneak out from their tents at night, to sleep on their parents graves, made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world.

If we terrorize them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds;

If the world were watching the live streamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.

You will never understand the sacredness of the olive trees, which you've been cutting down and burning for decades, just to spite us, just to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. The mythos and the folklore of the land will always be alien to you.

You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, which sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries. Every motif. Every design and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.

What your real estate agents call in their high priced listings, "old Arab home charm," will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them.

The ancient paintings and photos of the land will never contain you.

You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom.

And it is not because you are Jewish as you want everyone to believe. But because you are violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on land that had been in our family for centuries.

You can change your names to sound relevant to the region and you can pretend that falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines.

But in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery.

You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill all day, every day.

We are not the rocks that Qayim wise men thought you could clear from the land.

We are its very soil.

We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters.

The fabled tumultuous stories of the land are quite literally in our DNA.

You cannot kill or propagandize that away no matter what death technology you use.

Someday your impunity and your arrogance will end.

Palestine will be free.

She will be restored to her multi religious, multi ethnic pluralistic glory.

And you will either leave or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.

—Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian writer and activist