Palestine, Our Homeland

We are grateful and thankful to God for this opportunity to share the story of Palestine as we see it, and our perspective of the world as we live it. Whether in our ancestral homeland of Filastin or in diaspora, our history, experiences, perspectives, lives, humanity and rights continue to be denied. In response, the world continues to witness the indomitable spirit, resilience, gracefulness and strength of Palestinians and their refusal to be simply erased.

For over 76 years, Palestinians have borne the brunt of Zionism’s extremist and racist ideology, living in a perpetual state of Nakba (catastrophe) from one generation to the next. The human experience of being a Palestinian remains widely unknown, mainly because our humanity is negotiated by others and rules are set in which we are only allowed to be victims that hold no opinion about their oppressor.

Today’s reality is that we have generations of Palestinians that are born in diaspora, learning about their lands and history through stories from their families, land deeds proving where they are from, through keys to their homes, through Palestinian literature, arts and culture.

Other Palestinians are born as Israeli citizens, enjoying more rights than other Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories but treated as second class citizens in comparison to other Israeli citizens.

When Edward Said wrote his book the Question of Palestine that was originally published in 1979, he thought that no serious attention has been paid to the full human reality of the Palestinian as a citizen with human rights. One can see today that people do see the utter injustice happening against the Palestinian people. Yet, in the heart of the democratic world, this does not seem to make a difference.

The real question is, is any of this surprising? Is the denial of the plight of the Palestinian people, the denial of their right to self-determination and the denial of their basic human right to freedom surprising? Is it because people are unaware or is there something more at play?

We aim to tell the story of Palestine and Palestinians in different ways and in the best way we can. We don’t promise to be objective because we speak from the roots of the land that God created us from, the same land we are deprived of. Our mission is to use the Olive Branch as our pen, and the Olive Oil as our ink that will serve to communicate to you our stories, thoughts, hopes, dreams and aspirations.

We now have generations of people born and raised into Nakba with the sole dream of seeing freedom and being able to reunite with their land and people. Unfortunately, we also now have generations of Palestinians living and dying without ever knowing freedom. A year like the one we just witnessed is a reminder of the pain our people share and the magnitude of the apparent, yet unacknowledged scars of the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people since 1948.

Yet, despite the pain of losing more and more of our children, despite having 2.2 million people live in a concentration camp in Gaza where they have been trying to survive a barbaric genocide, despite having people in West Bank and Jerusalem live under an unlawful Apartheid Regime and illegal military Occupation, despite having generations of Palestinians living in refugee camps outside their ancestral homeland, we remain defiant in the face of injustice.

Palestine is our homeland and Palestinians are our people. The pain of the people of Gaza is the pain of Palestinians everywhere and the loss of the men, women and children of Gaza is the loss of our own.

There is something we share as a people that is stronger than the failed attempt at erasure. We share a deep-rooted connection with our land, a connection that does not allow us to ever lose hope. For nearly eight decades, the occupation has made a continuous attempt to eliminate any connection we have with our lands by physically separating us from each other and by trying to convince us to give up our inalienable rights to our homeland, to our lives, to our freedom.

However, our hope is one that is deeply rooted and that is built on the basis of truth and justice. Our hope cannot be destroyed by tanks, walls, bombs and deception. Our hope is our shield that remains impenetrable even when faced with the worst of catastrophes.

Our hope is only matched by our efforts to keep learning, to keep moving and to keep working, in trying to build a stronger and brighter future for our people. Palestinians are not the ones calling for the dehumanization of the other, Palestinians believe in equal rights between people of all faiths and racial backgrounds and we do not call for death, erasure and exclusivity.

Mahmoud Darwish once said that Palestinians have a “disease of hope”:

We have an incurable malady: hope. Hope in liberation and independence. Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims. Hope that our children will go safely to their schools. Hope that a pregnant woman will give birth to a living baby at the hospital, and not a dead child in front of a military checkpoint; hope that our poets will see the beauty of the colour red in roses rather than in blood; hope that this land will take up its original name: the land of love and peace

Where daily massacres against Palestinians have become norm and where the dream of freedom in Palestine is referred to as a myth, our disease of hope has become terminal.