Olfa

“As a child of four, I found myself burdened by the adult problems of life and death, right and wrong. I, as a dreamer, living on the bare subsistence provided by a UN blue ration card, in a crowded room, on a side street in Sour, stand as a witness to Zionist inhumanity. I charge the world for its acquiescence in my destruction.”
― Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary as Told to George Hajjar

“لم يرغمني أحد على شيء حقاً ،لكنني بمعنى ما أشعرأنني أكاد أكون مرغمة على كل شيء وبإرادتي ،خوفاً أو جبناً أو حبأ ..... أنا لست أنا ، ولست حقيقية إلا حين أكون وهمية .....أعيش حياتي الخيالية داخل الكتب التى أطالعها والحكايا التي أتوهم أنني أعيشها كأنني أكتبها داخل رأسي وأبنيها حجراً حجراً لأعيش داخلها إذ لا بيت لي
سواها ....كأنني أعالج الخوف بالحلم .”
― غادة السمان

“I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conqured, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiary in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.”
― Germany Kent