I share two poems centering my Palestinian identity and experience. As a Palestinian Christian, I aspire to walk in Jesus’ footsteps in challenging oppression, empire, and occupation. I provide an introduction to Palestine for readers to better understand the context of the poems. I first provide a brief introduction to the beginning of Israeli settler-colonialism and then highlight two elements of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I focus on the West Bank, as I am from Bethlehem in the West Bank and thus the setting, I’m familiar with. I then discuss Sumud as a Palestinian response to oppression that emphasizes resistance, resilience, and existence; emphasizing that the experience of joy is not mutually exclusive to the experience of oppression.
Palestine has been struggling against Israeli settler-colonialism since 1948 when European Jewish militias removed 90 percent of the Palestinians living in the area that became Israel.1 This is known as the Nakba or catastrophe. Since then, Israel has continued to displace, arrest, murder, and erase Palestinians. Although a comprehensive history of Israeli settler-colonialism is beyond this paper, I will highlight a few topics that can ground an understanding of the Palestinian experience and illustrate the systematic nature of Israeli occupation. I will primarily focus on the West Bank.
The West Bank is made up of a web of Israeli walls, roads, barriers, and checkpoints. There are 64 permanent Israeli military checkpoints, and more than 705 permanent obstacles to Palestinian movement.2 These obstacles are within the West Bank, which is meant to be a part of an independent Palestinian state. These obstacles to movement separate Palestinian villages and cities and have a significant negative impact on Palestinian life and safety. For example, an examination of checkpoints and childbirth found that 10% of pregnant Palestinian women were delayed at checkpoints between 2000 and 2007, resulting in 69 births at checkpoints, where 35 infants and 5 mothers died.3
Israeli restriction on movement and freedom is not only through the web of checkpoints, roadblocks, and walls, but also through political imprisonment. More than 800,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israeli military orders in the Palestinian territories since 1967. About 20% of the Palestinian population has been detained and up to 40% of the total male Palestinian population. Including more than 10,000 women since 1967 and more than 8,000 children imprisoned since 2000.4 The political imprisonment of Palestinians is without due process and unjust, so much so that “pouring coffee for a member of a declared illegal association can be seen as support for a terrorist organization.” This is the case, especially for Palestinian university students, where some have been imprisoned for alleged membership in the “Progressive Student Front – an unlawful association according to Israeli military orders— and that he attended meetings and participated in student activities organized by the association.”.5
Above, I’ve highlighted the systematic nature of Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism. The two forms of oppression I discussed are political imprisonment and restricted freedom of movement for Palestinians. With these two forms of oppression highlighted, I hope that the absurdity and injustice of the Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism are clear. With this in mind, it’s important to recognize that Palestinian life is not only marked by oppression, trauma, and pain but that there is also joy and resistance. Alice Walker’s (1992) novel Possessing the Secret of Joy finds that the secret of joy is found in resistance.6 This rings true to my experience as a Palestinian, where joy is found in the hope and courage of resistance. One of the foundations of Palestinian resistance to oppression is the concept of sumud, which roughly translates to perseverance, resilience, and steadfastness. Sumud leads me to work towards a future without occupation, to recognize that my ancestors faced occupiers and their lineage and life continued. Palestine has endured dozens of occupations and empires since Jesus’ time, and Palestinian culture, life, and heritage survived, and so we will also survive Israeli settler-colonialism. That is the core of sumud. I was born under occupation, and I refuse to die under occupation; that means I will do my part to advance the struggle for justice in Palestine and elsewhere.
To that end, my family and I have been engaged in sumud for as long as I can remember. We protested through nonviolent direct action when they began building the apartheid wall. Unfortunately, the wall continued to be built, but the wall hasn’t stopped us from accessing the rest of Palestine, and part of the resistance is in risking the consequences of detainment by finding ways to circumvent the wall and checkpoints to visit our family and friends on the other side. In a landscape riddled with settlements, military checkpoints, and apartheid walls, even the simple task of walking through the hills is resistance. I imagine that if Jesus were here today, he would not be stopped by the checkpoints and the walls, and so I don’t intend to be stopped either.
Sumud
They have removed us from our roots.
They destroyed the land that embraced us.
They erased any sign of our previous lives.
They cut the lineage and expelled our ancestors.
Yet, we exist.
They break our bones,
Murder our voice,
Silence our lips,
And the four walls meant to protect us
Are transformed into our graves.
Yet, we resist.
They have made us prisoners in our land,
They have terrorized us,
Both with their violence and with their propaganda.
Our bravest are our youngest.
And so, they imprison them.
12,000 and counting.
Yet, we resist.
They have spoken to the land in a language it does not know.
We have spoken the language for centuries.
We belong to the land.
We are its people.
Our skills are rusty, our love is tired.
Our hope is faint.
Yet, we persist.
Our persistence will yield pain…
Our acceptance will yield death beyond that of our physical self.
I do not wish to die.
If we are to exist in resistance, then our souls survive.
We all die.
Yes;
Yet, we persist.
Exist. Resist. Persist
A few years ago, I was traveling back home to Palestine. After a long day of flights, and increasing adversity, I channeled my indignation into this poem. I was returning from a conference abroad, and as a Palestinian with West Bank ID, am only permitted one point of international exit from Palestine under Israeli Occupation, through the Allenby/Hing Hussein crossing also known as “the bridge”. This is the only gateway for more than 3 million Palestinians and only one of the countless ways the Israeli occupation targets and harms Palestinians. I arrived at the bridge a bit before noon, where I was forced to wait for hours, to simply be denied entry. There were hundreds of us, waiting. I was traveling during the holy month of Ramadan when our Muslim siblings are fasting. Then, just before breaking fast, we were told that the Israeli authorities closed the border and would not allow anyone else to cross into Palestine that day.
It was sweltering, so much that after dark, the asphalt was still too hot to sit on. Everyone was hungry, thirsty, and understandably upset! After being forced onto the streets, we collectively experienced a long moment of despair. As the air got cooler, the mood lightened and what was a horrible experience turned into an all-night community gathering. We, Palestinians, laughed as we ate and drank, sitting on the side of the road decorated by the heaps of luggage all around. Those who saw us would have thought we were out for a midnight picnic. I found a group to join, and after getting to know each other one of the guys in my group noted a ukulele that I had purchased during my trip and asked me to play. I played the few chords I had learned, and we made the most of a horrible situation. Music has a way of lifting the soul; I was filled with rage just hours before, and at that point found myself feeling joyful and hopeful. Having a community of strangers, united through the same hardship, sharing the night, and garnishing it with stories and ideas was a welcome way to spend the night as we waited for the hope of passage the next day.
I wrote this poem as I rode the bus from the Jordanian border control to the Israeli border control, crossing the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized. I was filled with rage and exhausted. Rage that sacred space has become a space of suffering for millions of Palestinians, but at the same time found solace in the sacred space that we created the long night before. A space, which reminded me of Jesus and the feeding of the crowd of 5,000, where even sleeping on the streets, we were able to feed our souls that were harmed by Israeli settler-colonial occupation.
When the weight of injustice feels too heavy, I recall this and other similar experiences and am reminded that resistance comes in many forms. Resistance to oppression is one way to live into our Christian faith, leaning on Jesus as a foundational example of radical and courageous transformation. I encourage the Church of the Brethren to hold firm to Jesus’ teachings and example and move boldly against injustice wherever it may be, including Palestine.
The River
I’m off. The journey begins,
From the sky to the road.
The river flows.
But people don’t.
Our borders are ours they say,
Yet they are closed.
Then doubt crawls in.
Our freedom is theirs.
Mind your language,
you don’t want your voice taken too.
You contemplate silence.
realize your voice has left.
They grace us with a cage.
We must be thankful.
We respect, thank, and move on.
What remains?
Rage.
You stood in line for six hours?
Sorry.
The border has closed.
Your cousins refuse you.
The streets accept all.
They say misery loves company,
Indeed, in your misery, you found truth in those words
Your feet plastered to your place.
Yet, forward you move.
The crowded bus.
Jericho heat.
Enough to make the Dead Sea.
The rolling hills, that stay in place.
The mines that don’t detonate.
You live. For now.
If you can call it that.
The warm sandy winds
The ground, heated by the sun.
And blood boiled by injustice.
Those responsible, are nowhere to be seen.
You are as angry as you have ever been.
Hope, is in humanity.
Don’t be naive.
There is no hope for justice,
If there is no hope for love.
Anger fuels the revolution,
Love guides it.
Lucas Al-Zoughbi is a researcher, an activist, and a teacher. His works revolve around anti-racism, anti-capitalism, justice, peace, and equality. He is currently a graduate student at Michigan State University’s Department of Psychology where he is active in the school’s Adolescent Diversion Program.
- Masalha, Nur, 2012. The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed Books.
- United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA]: Occupied Palestinian Territories. 2018. “Over 700 road obstacles control Palestinian movement within the West Bank”.https://www.ochaopt.org/content/over-700-road-obstacles-control-palestinian-movement-within-west-bank
- Shoaibi, Halla. 2011. “Childbirth at the checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian Territory”. Lancet.
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association [Addameer]. 2014. Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Prisons.
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association [Addameer]. 2020. “Ameer Hazboun”. https://www.addameer.org/prisoner/3980
- Walker, Alice. 1992. Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel. New York: The New Press.