Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

I saw the audacity of evil and how it can be rationalized.

Solidarity is a feeling and a doing. It is a series of choices we make with one another. It can only be felt. It cannot be contrived or manipulated. Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an energetic force and a resounding love.

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

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.

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

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

Sometimeshe becamea thirty-something-year-old widow homed half a dozen hungers denied hers She worked, worked, and worked until survival was a funny story to tell on eveningswith what remains of the family.

If I were a stupid flower, I’d wither under the rain. They asked her, What’s wrong with the flower? not What’s wrong with the rain?

It’s the same killing everywhere. Seventy-some years later we haven’t lived a day.

We’re literate in peeling off our own skin to sleep.

My grandmother taught me everything I know about dignity. She taught me how to launch my sentences like missiles, how to be resilient. Even in the face of displacement, monetary punishment, tens of trials, and threats of imprisonment, she persisted. I will only agree to leave Sheikh Jarrah to go back to my Haifa house that I was forced to flee in 1948, she famously said, demanding her right of return.

Above all, although this book isn’t an attempt to free Palestine, its central thesis is that Palestine, in its historical entirety, must be liberated by any means necessary. Accelerated normalization of Zionism and Nakba denial has made it imperative to sit stubbornly in my political convictions. There isn’t a more urgent statement to make. There isn’t a cause more critical.