Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Palestinians are not the only people to suffer at the hands of settler colonialism and Western white terrorism. Yet we cannot afford to stay quiet about what is taking place there. The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are a crimes against all of humanity. The state is the worst of the human spirit manifested into a fully functioning government.

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba. Outside the hospital room: protests, burnt rubber, Kuffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies, stones thrown onto tanks, tanks imprinted with US flags, lands smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with rubber-coated bullets, a few bodies shot, dead—died numbers in a headline.

Birth lasts longer than death. In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

sometimes dipping my bread in indulgence, knowing a child is breadless, in Khan Yunis, dipped in a roof’s rubble …

If hearing about a world other than yours makes you uncomfortable, drink the sea, cut off your ears, blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense. Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.

My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.” Be composed, calm, still—laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk, answer them, educate them.

This is why we dance: If I speak, I’m dangerous.

This is why we dance: Because screaming isn’t free. Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

A soldier as old as a leaf born yesterday pulls a trigger on a woman older than his heritage.

Ramadanvillages retired singing, rifles sang instead,

Invaderscame back once again, claimed the land withfists and fireexcusesbeliefs of the chosen and the promised as if God is a real-estate agent.

Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus. Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it. What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?

Tell them credulous, clueless audiences will strip them of rights without thought or prayer.

I write about Palestinian boys as if they’re older than labor. The boy is eight, which is twenty-two for Americans.

The soldier, blonde and sunburnt, asks her for her permit. My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence.

“How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen-hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons

away, a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyxiation. Crossing back and forth like that,