Rawan Yaghi: “The opening ceremony of the embassy, as well as the nauseating tweets of Trump and Netanyahu, confirm and conclude Israel and the US view Palestinians as unworthy of the basic right to live, let alone speak. For Gaza, it was a sad day from which people woke up in shock. Our lives only too real, not science fiction.”
“In this God forsaken place, Tension clings to everything, doors, windows, stair steps, people’s eyes and mouths, their hands and their necks. Tension roams the streets at night praying on young men and women’s dreams. Licking his fingers as the sun rises in the east, it sinks into the soil, into the water, and into the skins of those whose dreams it devoured.”
Why did Rawan Yaghi not see her family in Gaza for four years as she studied at Oxford? Why did she miss her brother’s wedding? Because of Israeli borders that turn Palestinian territories into prisons. “Qalandia checkpoint looks like a slaughterhouse. As soon as the bus moved, I could then see the wall, the massive wall that now stood between me and my sister. The grey force pressed down on my chest and I burst into tears. I haven’t seen my sister since then,” she writes. kpoints.
Rawan Yaghi meets an Israeli student at Oxford University and is amazed how little she knows about Gaza: “This girl may not deserve my direct sentiments of disgust and anger. But since her comfortable life and her plans in life are made possible by the sheer misery of myself and everyone I know from Gaza and in Gaza at the moment, I could not walk away without feeling like I’ve just met a human that disregards other human beings as less worthy creatures, less worthy of the mere knowledge of their/our existence.”
I looked into her eyes / Smiled / And I said / We are free. “Faith,” a poem by Rawan Yaghi.