Over the previous yr, Israel’s genocidal violence has formally killed practically 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Estimates put the precise loss of life toll at greater than 180,000. On the identical time, Israeli occupation forces have repeatedly carried out bloody assaults within the West Financial institution, massacring greater than 740 Palestinians. Final month, the colonial regime expanded its violence to Lebanon, the place greater than 500 folks died on September 23. In two weeks, Israel has killed greater than 2,000 Lebanese.
The Israeli military has razed whole neighborhoods in Gaza, bulldozing roads, bombing infrastructure and public service services, and pulverizing residential buildings. Well being and academic services have been destroyed: water stations, energy vegetation and photo voltaic panels destroyed. In brief, Israel has sought to get rid of every part that sustains life in Gaza.
Palestinians have been ordered to “evacuate” the overwhelming majority of the strip and are being crowded into 16 p.c of its territory. This identical technique of emptying the land has been utilized in some areas of the West Financial institution and now in Lebanon.
Individuals are informed they will return as soon as Israel’s “navy operations” finish. However everyone knows that the slaughter is meant to clear the land for colonization. It occurred earlier than – through the Nakba of 1948 – and Palestinians had been by no means allowed to return to their properties regardless of a United Nations decision requiring it. That’s the reason the Palestinians won’t depart.
For some foreigners, the enduring Palestinian attachment to their land could appear obscure. It’s particularly incomprehensible to the Zionists who expelled so many people, hoping that we might merely transfer to a different a part of the Arab world and assimilate. However the Palestinian folks haven’t renounced their reliable declare to their land for greater than seven many years.
The query of why Palestinians refuse to desert their ancestral properties and lands, even within the face of relentless bombings, raids, settler invasions, and financial dispossession, is deeply private and elementary to Palestinian id. It’s not merely a query of geography or possession, however of a deep connection to the land that’s woven into the material of Palestinian historical past, tradition and collective reminiscence. There’s stubbornness on this resolution, sure, but in addition a deep understanding that leaving can be breaking a connection that has existed for generations.
As an agrarian society, Palestinians have a particular place for land of their tradition and collective consciousness. The olive tree is the proper image of this. The olive bushes are historical, resilient and deeply rooted, identical to the Palestinian folks. Households look after these bushes the identical means they care for his or her heritage. The act of harvesting olives, urgent them for oil, and sharing that oil with family members is an act of cultural preservation.
That is why the Israeli military and settlers like to assault Palestinian olive groves. Destroying an olive tree is greater than an assault on Palestinian livelihoods. It’s an assault on Palestinian id. Israel’s try and get rid of it’s mirrored in its incessant struggle towards Palestinian olive bushes. From 1967 to 2013, it uprooted about 800,000 of them.
Attachment to the homeland exists even amongst us Palestinians within the diaspora. I actually was born in Nablus, within the occupied West Financial institution, however grew up outdoors Palestine. Even once I was far-off, I by no means stopped feeling a connection to the Palestinian land.
My household was compelled to flee through the second Intifada. My father had seen the Israeli military steal his father’s land and switch it right into a navy checkpoint, and the settlers had been capturing at my mom on her strategy to work. Theirs was not a call to to migrate voluntarily; It was an act of survival.
Over the previous twenty years, I’ve returned to Palestine frequently and seen settlers always encroach on Palestinian lands, making an attempt to displace extra Palestinians from their properties. What I remembered as a toddler as clusters of illegally constructed homes grew into whole cities, besieging Palestinian cities and villages on all sides.
However as I watched Palestinian olive bushes burn, Palestinian water diverted and stolen, and Palestinian properties demolished, I additionally witnessed resistance and defiance. Palestinians had been putting in water tanks to outlive durations of water cuts by the Israelis. They had been rebuilding their homes at evening after a demolition and had been speeding to assist communities like Huwara when a settler incursion occurred.
Within the final yr, Israeli violence has turned genocidal, however Palestinian “sumud” (firmness) has not diminished. From Jenin to Gaza, Palestinians – below incessant Israeli assaults and bombing – have continued to withstand colonial onslaught by the straightforward act of residing and surviving.
The extra the occupier tries to make Palestinian life unattainable, the extra Palestinians provide you with improvised options to make it doable, whether or not it’s a bicycle-powered washer, a clay oven fabricated from mud and straw for baking bread, or an electrical energy generator. assembled from random machine components. They’re only a few acts of cussed perseverance, of crystallized sumud.
In the meantime, within the diaspora, our hearts and minds have by no means left Palestine. We’ve watched with ache and terror because the genocide unfolded and because the leaders of the international locations the place we have now sought refuge turned a blind eye. Many within the West don’t consider that Palestinian life has worth. They do not see us as human beings.
This relentless dehumanization of Palestinians has sown desperation and hopelessness amongst our communities. However we have now no proper to surrender when the folks of Gaza stay within the midst of the horrors of genocide. We’ve to awaken the Palestinian sumud inside us and mobilize to inform different societies that we’re right here, we exist and we are going to persevere in a world bent on erasing us.
The metaphor of “we’re the earth” just isn’t solely poetic. It’s a actuality skilled by the Palestinian folks. When Palestinians are requested, “Why do not you allow?” they reply with “Why ought to we?” That is Palestinian land, cultivated with the blood and tears of generations of Palestinians. Leaving him would imply dropping every part. It might imply permitting the erasure of our historical past, our tradition, our collective soul. A yr after this genocide, Palestinians stay as a result of they have to.
The views expressed on this article are these of the writer and don’t essentially replicate the editorial place of Al Jazeera.
