Two years since the genocide started, where do we go from here?

The violence made a permanent home my body: I became withdrawn, depressed, unable to eat without thinking of those who starved; I carried an anxiety that rattled my bones and left me sleepless; I felt guilty each time I placed food in my mouth or allowed myself to laugh, guilty for every small comfort I still possessed. I still struggle today. I process things more slowly. I find fewer moments of happiness, or humor. Israel’s genocide has altered the DNA of every Palestinian, changing how our bloodlines will carry and respond to trauma for generations to come. Every word I write feels like an indulgence, a privilege I should not allow myself, especially when I think of the messages I receive from friends in Gaza who are displaced again and again, forced southward, or north, or to the middle, or back south again, with no destination but what seems like death, who answer my concerns with simple sentences like “Ahmadullah. How are you?” What can my struggles mean in the shadow of that? In truth, they mean nothing and debating otherwise is a disservice to those deserve a world that does not yet exist.

And yet I know that guilt is not what my people need me to carry. Guilt is what they want from us, the colonizer’s final demand: that we apologize for surviving, that we shrink ourselves into gratitude for merely breathing. But to be Palestinian is to refuse that diminishment. It is to understand that my grief and their genocide are not separate realities, but the same open wound expressed.

My role, then, is not to drown in guilt. What I, what we, must carry is the responsibility to save Palestine, the obligation to speak what they lived, to make sure their names are not swallowed into the bowels of history. Because history loves to count our corpses but forgets to write down who we were.

I haven’t been home in many years, but I still remember the way the sun feels on my skin there, how the warmth somehow feels warmer, how the scent of olive trees and yansoon makes every corner store and outside market feel like Palestine. I remember the specific shade of blue the sky turned over my grandfather’s land, the way dust settled on everything by midday, how the call to prayer echoed differently depending on which part of the city you stood in. I remember my cousins’ laughter, the taste of my teta’s cooking, the weight of history in every stone of every street. And now, watching Gaza burn and the West Bank suffocate under checkpoints and settlements, Palestine feels closer than it ever did when I could visit. It lives in my heart, my mind, and my soul, and I feel it every single day.

And when I think of home, when I think of Palestine, I above all think of life. That is what Israel has tried to destroy. Life itself.

But Palestinians have never surrendered. There is a word for what keeps us alive, sumud (steadfastness). Sumud goes to the very core of Palestinian dignity, a loud endurance. Sumud is planting olive trees knowing the settlers may burn them. Sumud is rebuilding what they demolish before the dust has settled. Sumud is teaching your children the names of villages that no longer appear on any map because to forget is to grant them the erasure they seek.

In the diaspora, I had always understood sumud as something that belonged to those who remained on the land, to the farmers in Jenin and the fishermen in Gaza and the families in Jerusalem clinging to homes surrounded by settlements. I saw myself as removed from that struggle, my American passport a betrayal. But what I have learned in these two years of watching my people massacred in real time is that sumud is as much a part of our identity as anything else. It is what makes Palestinian distinct from “Arab”. Sumud is carried in our relationships we maintain in our community, the pride in our people, and in the way we say Falasteen with our whole body even when the word itself becomes a target on our backs. Sumud comes from the undying belief that Palestinians will one day be free because we are a people rooted in resilience, culture, language, and one another.

When I watch videos of children in Gaza playing in the rubble, kicking a deflated ball between bombed-out buildings, making prosthetics from pieces of plastic, or bread from makeshift ovens, I see sumud. When I see Gazans making music with the background noise of drones, I hear sumud. When I read the words of journalists who document their own genocide even as their families are murdered, I understand sumud. But they shouldn’t have to be steadfast. Resistance is not the edifice in which to die.

To be Palestinian is to carry the words of our martyrs forward, to remember not just their deaths but what they said while they lived, what they wrote, what they screamed into cameras before the bombs found them. We are a people of poets and journalists and fathers who recited the names of their children as they searched through rubble. Their words do not die with them. They live in us, in the way we speak, in how we fight.

I do not know what liberation looks like. I do not know if I will see it in my lifetime. But I know what it feels like to believe in it anyways, to know it will one day come as a fact and not idyllic hope, to understand that our freedom is a reality to be seized. Liberation is not something we achieve when conditions are right. Liberation is something we embody every day.

There are days when the weight feels unbearable, when I scroll through my phone and see another school bombed, another hospital destroyed, another family erased, and I think: how much more can they endure? How many more children must die before the world admits what it has always known? But then I remember that these questions themselves are reliant on their nonexistent mercy. The better questions are: what does it say about this world that Palestinian life has been made so cheap? What does it mean that we have watched children starve on our phones and still the bombs keep falling? When did we decide that some people’s deaths are simply the cost of doing business, and why are those people always us? And how do we build a world where this present becomes impossible?

Because something has shifted. I feel it in the protests that fill streets across the world, in the students who risk their futures to demand divestment, in the language that is finally being spoken aloud: genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. I feel it in the way my generation refuses to accept the lies that placated our parents, in the way we have learned to name our oppressors without flinching.

I think of Darwish’s words again, how he wrote that “the homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveler.” I understand that Palestine is a condition I must create, not a destination nor a memory, but a future being born in every act of resistance. When I cook makloubeh in my American kitchen, I am making Palestine. When I teach my future children to say jiddo and siti, I am making Palestine. When I write these words, knowing they will be read as a threat to national security, I am making Palestine.

The Zionist project depends on our despair. It needs us to believe that liberation is impossible, that we are too few, too scattered, too broken. It needs us to accept that some peoples have homelands and others have only grief, that some lives matter and others are merely regrettable casualties of necessary violence. But every Palestinian is proof that their project has failed.

We are still here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

I know that the Palestinian people have survived every attempt to erase us, we have outlasted empires and occupations and genocides, we have persisted because we are simply human, because we refuse to grant our killers the satisfaction of our disappearance.

Palestine will be free. Not because justice is inevitable or because the world will suddenly grow a conscience, but because we have decided it will be so, because liberation lives in our bodies and our memories and our stubborn refusal to accept anything less. Because some truths are so fundamental that no amount of violence can erase them, and this is one: Palestine is ours, has always been ours, will always be ours.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. A fact written in the blood of those who came before and the hope of those yet to come. This is what it means to be Palestinian now: to carry that certainty as an unbreakable thread connecting us to everyone who resisted.

This is not the end. This is only the beginning of the beginning. And I hope you will be there when we are finally free.

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