I took a seat on the coffee table, my knee propped up as I stared at the news on the television screen. It was supposed to be a temporary position, one that I took on my way between grabbing a cup of tea from downstairs and my retreat back into my room. Although I knew that I would stay, my eyes glued to the faces on the screen as the warmth from my tea faded.
The news felt heavier, more personal when I could see the pain in my mother’s eyes. She never stayed for long, a glance at the screen and a few words muttered in Arabic. A story she has heard too many times.
Images of aid trucks passed, Palestinians running towards them, even the pallets weren’t wasted, pulled off the trucks and used for fuel. The aid trucks sloshing through dirt roads overridden with sewage and dirty water. The sheer destruction loomed in the background, a result of two years of constant Israeli bombing. The tears welled up in my eyes, I felt heavy, a sense of utter despair.
Entire neighborhoods erased, homes that held memories and generations of families flattened, hospitals that have treated the sick and wounded reduced to rubble. Schools that harnessed the dreams of young Palestinian children blown out, used as shelter for a population that has traded books for empty pots.
How can a people who have lost everything, who exist in a landscape resembling nuclear fallout, not only find a will to live, but an ever-renewing sense of hope?
A people who are emaciated and tired carry the weight of their remaining belongings on their shoulders and walk miles along a shoreline that has born witness to waves of displacement. They see the piles of rubble that used to be their homes, mosques, churches, farmland, classrooms, and yet, they choose to believe in its redemption.
A young man, underneath the slanted roof of his home, sweeps the debris and praises God for his return home. On top of the rubble that was his home, a man sits on a rug and praises the Lord for his circumstances. Worshippers attend a Friday service in a mosque that barely stands. A man plants a small garden besides his tent, tending to it with the limited water available. A music teacher sings to the hum of the drones. A child creates a prosthetic leg out of a pipe to play soccer with his friends. The journalists, who report on their own people’s erasure, pick up their press vests every day with great risk and broadcast Israeli atrocities to the world. The thousands of Gazans who clutch the maimed bodies of their relatives and still, words of praise and cries for assistance are uttered to their Creator.
Gaza has taught me that faith is not a crutch to lean on in times of struggle, but an enduring trust in God’s goodness even when your world has collapsed. It has taught me to think of my mother’s heritage each time I eat her food – the olives picked and shipped from my grandmother in Palestine, the za’atar that grows on the hills in abundance, the lentils simmering on the stove. It has taught me to hope that my studies can lead me to tell the stories of those whose voices have been buried under rubble and marginalized. It has taught me to cherish the stories of Palestine that my mother tells me, to desire to learn how to one day speak to my grandmother in her language.
Gaza taught me the true meaning of “sumud,” a Palestinian concept of resilience and steadfastness. A word that every Palestinian knows, yet the Gazan people embody – a willingness to survive amidst unimaginable loss, to hope in a better future, a refusal to forgo their humanity when human dignity is not afforded to them and to praise God even in the ruins.
I pray for the moral redemption of a world that allows such suffering to go on, for hearts that have grown numb to the cries of mutilated and starving children, for the murder of journalists, for the destruction of livelihoods and widespread trauma. For lives that have been destroyed forever.
I pray for my own guilt, that I may close out of a video of unspeakable suffering, that I can dream, study, eat, see my family members, and look at a sky and see nothing but the darkness staring back at me.
Gaza is the world’s great moral failing and its people taught me a hope that persists under the weight of the rubble – an unbroken hope of a beautiful people.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
What Gaza has taught Me – an indestructible hope
I took a seat on the coffee table, my knee propped up as I stared at the news on the television screen. It was supposed to be a temporary position, one that I took on my way between grabbing a cup of tea from downstairs and my retreat back into my room. Although I knew that I would stay, my eyes glued to the faces on the screen as the warmth from my tea faded.
The news felt heavier, more personal when I could see the pain in my mother’s eyes. She never stayed for long, a glance at the screen and a few words muttered in Arabic. A story she has heard too many times.
Images of aid trucks passed, Palestinians running towards them, even the pallets weren’t wasted, pulled off the trucks and used for fuel. The aid trucks sloshing through dirt roads overridden with sewage and dirty water. The sheer destruction loomed in the background, a result of two years of constant Israeli bombing. The tears welled up in my eyes, I felt heavy, a sense of utter despair.
Entire neighborhoods erased, homes that held memories and generations of families flattened, hospitals that have treated the sick and wounded reduced to rubble. Schools that harnessed the dreams of young Palestinian children blown out, used as shelter for a population that has traded books for empty pots.
How can a people who have lost everything, who exist in a landscape resembling nuclear fallout, not only find a will to live, but an ever-renewing sense of hope?
A people who are emaciated and tired carry the weight of their remaining belongings on their shoulders and walk miles along a shoreline that has born witness to waves of displacement. They see the piles of rubble that used to be their homes, mosques, churches, farmland, classrooms, and yet, they choose to believe in its redemption.
A young man, underneath the slanted roof of his home, sweeps the debris and praises God for his return home. On top of the rubble that was his home, a man sits on a rug and praises the Lord for his circumstances. Worshippers attend a Friday service in a mosque that barely stands. A man plants a small garden besides his tent, tending to it with the limited water available. A music teacher sings to the hum of the drones. A child creates a prosthetic leg out of a pipe to play soccer with his friends. The journalists, who report on their own people’s erasure, pick up their press vests every day with great risk and broadcast Israeli atrocities to the world. The thousands of Gazans who clutch the maimed bodies of their relatives and still, words of praise and cries for assistance are uttered to their Creator.
Gaza has taught me that faith is not a crutch to lean on in times of struggle, but an enduring trust in God’s goodness even when your world has collapsed. It has taught me to think of my mother’s heritage each time I eat her food – the olives picked and shipped from my grandmother in Palestine, the za’atar that grows on the hills in abundance, the lentils simmering on the stove. It has taught me to hope that my studies can lead me to tell the stories of those whose voices have been buried under rubble and marginalized. It has taught me to cherish the stories of Palestine that my mother tells me, to desire to learn how to one day speak to my grandmother in her language.
Gaza taught me the true meaning of “sumud,” a Palestinian concept of resilience and steadfastness. A word that every Palestinian knows, yet the Gazan people embody – a willingness to survive amidst unimaginable loss, to hope in a better future, a refusal to forgo their humanity when human dignity is not afforded to them and to praise God even in the ruins.
A Culture of Complaining
I pray for the moral redemption of a world that allows such suffering to go on, for hearts that have grown numb to the cries of mutilated and starving children, for the murder of journalists, for the destruction of livelihoods and widespread trauma. For lives that have been destroyed forever.
I pray for my own guilt, that I may close out of a video of unspeakable suffering, that I can dream, study, eat, see my family members, and look at a sky and see nothing but the darkness staring back at me.
Gaza is the world’s great moral failing and its people taught me a hope that persists under the weight of the rubble – an unbroken hope of a beautiful people.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.