After the Al Ahli hospital massacre in Gaza this feels like the last essay I am ever going to write. There is nothing more to say and no other way to say it. I will never be the same and neither should you.
The Palestine Writes Literature Festival was a liberated space for Palestinians to speak and dream freely. It was an unequivocal display of love for a land and her people, their history and their future.
The production of silence is a concerted colonial tool of domination. The only way for Zionism’s violence to continue is to destroy the truth.
The author Rob Nixon uses the phrase “slow violence” to refer to “the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many…crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.” Slow violence is the defining condition of living as Palestinians: in between the sharp escalations of protracted conflict, the ongoing trauma of an existence under apartheid is typically not viewed as violence at all. When we demand freedom for Palestine we are not just demanding an end to military assaults on Gaza, we are demanding Palestinians to have a right to life, dignity, and freedom.
Electoral politics, while a potential means for harm reduction, will not save Palestine.
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar’s delegation proves that Israel’s borders are not just physical, they are political. They transcend lines on a map and constitute ideological values that stretch to the United States as well.