for my survival

keeping one foot in the present & one foot in the future

Yesterday, I saw a video of a Palestinian father standing in the midst of a flame-engulfed catastrophe. He was holding his child’s body with a look of utter shock on his face. The child’s body was missing its head. This atrocity took place in Rafah—the area where Palestinians were ordered to move as a safe zone—and the scene was an aftermath of an Israeli airstrike that targeted displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents. A reported seven bombs, weighing 2000 pounds each, were dropped onto an area densely populated with humans in tents. The bombs were inscribed with American flags. Many Palestinians burned alive.

I saw these images and then put my phone down and held my face in my hands. A sharp and sudden pain took hold in my chest. No tears came. I got up, I showered. And then I got dressed to get ready for my dear friend’s baby shower. As I put on eyeliner, I could feel tears brewing. Not now, I thought. The tears dried up before falling, but the sharp pain in my chest persisted. I dabbed a shimmery eyeshadow onto my eyelids, curled my lashes with mascara, and hid my anguish beneath beauty. 

The baby shower brimmed with loving energy. Many toddlers were present, playing in the grass, roaring like dinosaurs, chasing balls—just being kids. My 2-year-old friend River approached me and said, Let’s go get chips, and we did just that, a little field trip to the kitchen to eat some chips. I savored the simple luxury of being able to indulge a child’s innocent request, to deliver them immediate joy. What a certain kind of suffering it must be to be denied that ability, let alone the ability to protect one’s own child.

I felt attuned to the presence of children at the baby shower—the sounds of their voices, their adorably clunky way of running around the backyard, soft skin and silky hair. Their aliveness felt sacred.

I sat in the grass and watched the kids play and thought about how earlier in the day, I witnessed such gruesome injustice, and then moments later, I got on with life, got on with fulfilling a social obligation. The heaviness of shame hung over me. I tamped down on tears earlier that day so as not to ruin my makeup, so as not to be too late to the baby shower.

I feel ashamed that the past eight months have made me adept at navigating a recurring dystopian whiplash. I witness massacre after massacre and then swiftly transition to moving through the motions of the mundane. 

Art by @yassindraws

Something shifted within me in the past few weeks. My revolutionary optimism is tinted with jaded disillusionment. A hard shell has coated my soul. I feel less motivated to find the words to make people understand the injustice, to make them feel it in their hearts, and not just perceive it with their minds. The violence has only gotten more vile, and accountability is nowhere in sight.

I don’t want to use my words anymore to make people see. At this point, you either see it or you choose to ignore it. And if you do see it, and it doesn’t move you to think, speak, or act differently, then that is also ignoring it. There is no nuance to genocide, no grey area. The binary of good vs evil, right vs wrong, is on full display—these are the only choices on the menu. In the words of poet and writer Aria Aber:

I am re-routing and fine-tuning my energy. My therapist advised me to think about how I keep one foot in the present to honor my loyalty to my community in Gaza, to be present and supportive to them in the height of their suffering, and to keep one foot in the future, so I can exist in it as fully as possible. I’ve been thinking about that advice for a few weeks and it feels right. The present moment is quicksand. If I keep both feet in it, I will drown. 

So what does this mean for me? What does it mean to keep one foot in the present and one foot in the future? I’ve been reflecting on these past eight months—how I’ve shown up, the way I use my voice and platform. I’ve been thinking about the directions I am pulled in versus the callings I pursue. I’d like to make choices that make my life more reflective of the latter. I don’t care to be perceived as an activist or organizer. I don’t care for conferences and panels, or to intellectualize or philosophize on movement building. I don’t want to convince people to care—that is a moral deficiency I now leave to karma to correct.

I care to be a writer, an artist, a friend, a lover. I care to immortalize the Gaza I knew and loved into stories. I care to practice resistance through the art of remembering, preserving, and affirming. I care to be in community with other artists, writers, musicians, and poets. I care to build in love rather than transact in lust or power or clout. I care to humanize Gaza, to remind people that Palestine is more than a cause or symbol. Palestine is people. Palestine is people. Palestine is people.

My one foot in the present takes the shape of Gaza Champions, an initiative I co-founded with my friend Matt, who was also my co-worker of many years in Gaza. Gaza Champions is a solidarity project that links allies around the world to my friends and community in Gaza as pen pals and champions for their GoFundMe fundraising campaigns.

This project fosters human-to-human connections that materially benefits a family in Gaza through fundraising; spiritually benefits the ally by having an actionable avenue to practice compassion and care for another human being; and emotionally benefits both parties by being blessed with the sweet reciprocity of friendship. By throwing my energy into nurturing this initiative, which has grown from 40 champions to nearly 120 in a few months, I stay loyal to the present. I stay loyal to Gaza not as an abstract cause, but to its people. I stay loyal to my own humanity.

To give you a sense of the depths of these connections, here is a piece written by my friend Sonia in New York who is pen pals with Asala, my former student in Gaza. If this way of participating in the present moment resonates with you, then join us. 

To nurture the future, I have decided I am ready to return to writing my book, a memoir about my years in Gaza, a project I paused when the genocide began. Last summer, I lived in Vermont and birthed the first chapter of my book. It was a true labor of love to arrive at a tone and caliber of storytelling that I felt did justice to my love for Gaza.

When calamity struck, book-writing felt indulgent, useless, and not urgent, so I shelved my work. Now, it feels necessary. The words I will write to form this book are words only I can write, stories only I can tell. Because my life, perspective, love, and sorrow is all and only mine. Working with words in this way electrifies me more than echoing the words of academics and intellectuals in conference rooms, panel discussions, and social media posts. 

I am a writer. Before any other label that gets used in social justice movements, I am a writer. I am re-committing myself to my craft for the sake of Palestine. And for the sake of me—my healing and coping. For my survival. Returning to my book allows me put one foot in the future, a future where we will need documented affirmations of what Gaza was, the devastation of it being violently snatched away, and how the stolen land of Palestine will rise and return to its rightful stewards. A documentation of how we will never forget.

To further commit to my writer self, I owe it to myself to no longer see writing as a side project or an aspirational hope. Writing is who I am. My words are how I contribute value to the Palestinian struggle and to the world. My words are my calling and career. Writing is my devotion, my present and future.

To that end, I am pushing through the discomfort of vulnerability and putting out this request — If you are a reader who finds value in my writing, who believes in my vision as a writer, then I invite you to upgrade your subscription to my Substack to a paid version. This kind of support helps me create a future where writing sustains my life in more ways than one. I never intend to paywall my Substack—my meditations and reflections on Palestine are for sharing, not profit. At the same time, I deserve reciprocity for my emotional and creative labor, and there is something powerful about that reciprocity coming directly from my readers—an affirmative nod to keep going.

However you decide to interact with my writing, thank you for being a reader. For being a witness to me and my inner world. 

I leave you for now with a poem by Gazan poet Mosab Abu-Toha: