A reflection of writing through the genocide of my people in 2025, and how we get to freedom in 2026

There is something unbearable about sitting down to write a year-end reflection when it seems the last few years have not ended, when the dying continues, when the siege persists in slower motion but with the same murderous logic intact. I kept waiting for the right moment to sit with this grief, to process what we witnessed, to find language that could hold the weight of thousands upon thousands of my people dead, of children speaking English into cameras because they thought the colonizer’s language might save them, of fathers collecting pieces of their babies in plastic bags, of children cleaning their parents blood off the floor. But grief this large has no container. It spills into every morning, seeps into every quiet moment, transforms every celebration into something that tastes like ash. So perhaps the only honest thing to do is stop waiting for grief to become manageable and instead learn to write while drowning in it.

I have spent this year learning. I know now the difference between a white phosphorus burn and an airstrike wound. I understand how bodies crumble under buildings, how children can be shot 355 times and their death still interrogated for justification, how the world can watch Palestinian testimony livestreamed in real time and still demand more proof before believing our eyes deserve mercy. I have memorized the ways Israel violates ceasefires it orchestrates, the patterns of provocation followed by manufactured victimhood, the slow modulation between active slaughter and calculated starvation. I learned that “self-defense” is what colonizers call genocide when they think no one will challenge the lie. I learned that international law exists primarily as decoration, invoked only when it serves imperial interests, discarded the moment it might constrain Western violence or protect colonized peoples. Most devastatingly, I learned that the world can watch children plead in languages not their own and still find reasons why their deaths were somehow inevitable, proportional, justified.

But here is what else I learned: Palestinians refuse to be made into ghosts. Every child born in Gaza is an act of cosmic defiance. Every olive tree planted in the West Bank knowing it may be uprooted tomorrow is faith. Every grandmother teaching her grandchildren the names of the villages they were exiled from is their inheritance. Every Palestinian who survives genocide and still wakes up Palestinian proves that you cannot kill an idea whose time has come. The only thing Israel accomplished was the murder of innocents, and even that could not break Palestinian will.

So when I think about what 2026 must hold, I return to this: freedom is for us. Not freedom as the West defines it, not the performance of democracy without its substance, not the reservations and bantustans they call states while stealing more land each day. Freedom means the complete dismantling of apartheid, the return of refugees to land that remembers their names, reparations determined and distributed by Palestinians ourselves, prosecution of every war criminal regardless of which nation objects. The end of occupation in every form it takes. This is not negotiable. This is not radical. This is what international law requires, what human dignity demands, what justice looks like when it stops being filtered through the interests of empires built on stolen land and colonized bodies.

I refuse to let this year end with the comfortable lie that a temporary pause in bombing equals peace, that a ceasefire violated more than one thousand times represents progress, that we should be grateful for crumbs while the siege continues its slow work of making Gaza unlivable. The hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians will not go unanswered. Their blood cries out not for revenge but for a world fundamentally transformed, where no people can be caged, starved, and bombed for resisting their own erasure.

So yes, I carry grief that refuses to end. I carry the weight of every child who will never learn to read, every mother who will never hold her baby again, every father who died shielding his family from American-funded missiles. I carry the knowledge that this was preventable, that every single death could have been avoided if the world had simply stopped funding genocide, stopped arming apartheid, stopped pretending neutrality while Palestinian blood pooled for cameras. But alongside that grief, I carry something Israel has tried for seventy-seven years to destroy and failed: hope. Not the cheap hope that mistakes itself for optimism, not the naive hope that imagines oppressors will develop consciences without being forced. I carry the stubborn, unmovable hope that lives in Palestinian existence itself. The hope that says our return is inevitable not because they will permit it but because we embody it every day we refuse to disappear. The hope that understands liberation is not something we will achieve when conditions are right but something we practice in every act of steadfastness, every refusal to accept the world as it is, every insistence that another world is possible and necessary and ours by right.

2026 will demand more from us than grief alone. It will require that we fundamentally change the ways we protest and organize. We cannot return to normalcy or the fiction that our city-street protests and large conferences are doing anything. We cannot accept the comfortable illusion that a pause in airstrikes while occupation continues represents anything close to justice. The cost of genocide must become unbearable. Arms embargoes that actually stop weapons shipments. Economic sanctions that hurt. Cultural and academic boycotts that isolate Israel. Legal accountability that sees every genocider and their supporter locked up. We must build the world we need rather than accepting the one they offer. And if Palestinians can survive genocide and still plant olive trees, still teach children their names, still carry return in their bodies like sacred inheritance, then those of us watching from positions of relative safety can manage the considerably easier work of refusing complicity and demanding liberation.

So I enter 2026 holding both truths at once: that this year carved permanent wounds into my soul, and that those wounds have not destroyed my capacity to imagine freedom. I have learned more about death than anyone should know, and this knowledge has only strengthened my commitment to life. I carry grief that will never fully heal, and hope that refuses to die no matter how many times they try to kill it. Freedom is for us. It always has been. No amount of violence, no number of broken treaties, no depth of Western complicity can change that fundamental fact. We will be free because we were never truly conquered.

Why support State of Siege?

Over the last two years, I have published over 200 pieces on this platform, as well as writing for Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Nation, and other international outlets, averaging two pieces a week throughout the genocide. I have uplifted writers in Gaza to share their stories here, writers whose words arrive between airstrikes, whose testimony comes at risk to their own lives. I have worked with legal organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights to become more of an expert on domestic suppression of our First Amendment Rights and international humanitarian law, translating complex legal frameworks into accessible analysis that serves the movement. I have published my own scholarship, developing legal arguments that other advocates and litigators can use. And I have donated over $4,000 from State of Siege funds directly to various organizations and Palestinians on the ground, your support makes a material impact and also allows me to pay the Gazan writers for their labor in sharing with us what is happening on the ground.

When you upgrade your subscription, you are funding the principle that Palestinians deserve to tell our own stories, analyze our own conditions, define our own liberation without filtering truth through institutions that profit from our oppression. You are rejecting the model where Palestinian voices are only valuable when sanitized for Western consumption, when we speak in the colonizer’s language about “peace” and “coexistence” rather than justice and liberation. You are funding work that refuses to make genocide palatable, that will not soften resistance to accommodate comfort, that insists international law must apply equally or it means nothing at all.

So if anything I wrote this year made you think differently, challenged narratives you thought were settled, helped you see what the world tried to obscure, consider upgrading. 2026 will require more writing, more analysis, more refusal. That work depends on people who recognize that Palestinian liberation is the most important political project of our time, not a charity case to fund when convenient.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Some of my favorite pieces from this year:

If you found this reflection worth reading, here are some pieces from the year that shaped how I understand what we witnessed, what we survived, and what we refuse to accept:

What do you do after watching a child die on your feed? – The most important to read!

Gaza Did Not Need Saving – On how Gaza needed the world to stop killing it, not to celebrate itself as savior after two years of funding its destruction

No Excuse for Genocide – On why “But Hamas” is genocidally dangerous, and why international law provides no justification for what Israel has done

The Right of Return is Not a Dream We Defer – On why Palestinian return is not subject to Israeli approval, and why our refusal to disappear proves that return is inevitable.

What’s ahead for 2026

I plan to continue publishing one to two pieces a week, including more poetry. My poetry has been published in Diode, Poetry Northwest, Los Angeles Review, Dazed MENA, and others. I have another externship set up specifically working to prosecute war crimes, which means the legal analysis here will deepen, will sharpen, will contribute directly to accountability efforts. I will continue publishing Gazan writers because they are the primary narrators of their own survival and resistance. And I plan to collaborate with experts in the field, bringing together legal scholars, historians, activists, organizers, to create work that serves the movement in concrete ways.

I also plan to use my legal and narrative knowledge to write about more domestic and global issues, connecting the dots. We are not free until we are all free! Thank you for being part of the State of Siege community.

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