Three years of genocide… What has Gaza taught me?
Today, the seventh of October, three years are completed of the war of genocide in Gaza; three years that did not pass over our ages, but passed through our bodies and hearts, and tore from every home some of its soul, and from every family something that cannot be replaced.
It was the worst of a person’s nightmares, yet we did not wake from it; because it was our life. We saw what we thought the soul could not bear to see, and we lived what words are unable to carry: killing and displacement and forced migration and famine and thirst, and massacres and collective death and epidemics, and patients searching for medicine, and children waiting for bread, and mothers looking for shelter, and fathers gathering what remained of their children.
We lost our homes, then we lost those who made them homes. And we lost the dearest of our hearts and our loved ones, until every name we utter became a lump in the throat, and every place we pass a missing one, and every memory a door that opens onto pain.
And above all this, we tasted a betrayal we never imagined the world could hold; the betrayal of the near one and the brother and the friend, and of a nation we were raised on the stories of its aid, only to find ourselves screaming until our voices grew tired, while its closed doors never tired. Three years, and we are still swallowing the bitterness of waiting for a loaf of bread and a drink of water and a roof to shelter our children; as if our right to life requires, every morning, a new act of begging.
The whirlwind of death passed over our homes, and left no family without wounding it, and no heart without tearing a dear one from it. And the world watches us as we bleed, and are killed in homes and buildings and hospitals and tents; until our dwellings became temporary graves, and our tents postponed shrouds, that neither protect our frail bodies from the heat of summer, nor the cold of winter, nor the fire of rockets.
What has this war taught me?
It taught me that the homeland is the face of a son we fear for, and the hand of a mother we cling to, and a house whose path we know even if it has become rubble. And that the loss of loved ones does not end with the end of the mourning; rather it begins when the place grows quiet, and we search for their voices and find only a silence that resembles them.
It taught me that a father may carry what remains of his child, then stand with what remains of his heart to console another father. And that a doctor may bury his loved ones, and return to a wounded person waiting for his hands. And that a human being can be drained to the last of his strength, then find in his faith a remainder with which to support others.
And it taught me that patience is a tear that falls while we say: Praise be to God, and a heart that cracks yet whose hope in God is not cut off. Three years, and in every farewell the world heard from us “Praise be to God”; we said it with the pain in our throats, and the tears on our faces, because we believe that God sees, and that what is with Him is better and more lasting.
It also taught me that betrayal wounds, but it does not have the power to decide who we are. We are a people who want to live with dignity, and to raise their children in safety, and to see their homeland free and its sacred places protected. Whenever they uprooted a tree, we preserved its place so we could plant it again; and whenever they demolished a school, we taught our children among the tents; and whenever they sought to extinguish life, they found someone supporting a wounded person, or sharing a loaf of bread, or lifting a stone from the rubble.
Three years, and we still carry the names of our martyrs in our prayers, and the dreams of our children in our chests, and search in this ruin for the first path to recovery. We will build with what strength remains to us, and preserve the stories of those who departed, and restore to life whatever of its features we can.
We will not repent of our dreams, and we will not surrender our remaining children to despair. We will go forward toward freedom and victory, with those we lost in our hearts, and in our hands what we will build a tomorrow worthy of their sacrifices.
O Lord, as You helped us endure this pain, help us to rise; and have mercy on our martyrs, and heal our wounded, and free our captives, and grant us after this night a dawn in which we see our people safe, and our homeland free.