I didn’t let missing out on the top 10 detract from the thrill of having sold so many.

There were some issues with the supply chain - so some people didn’t get their copies. If that was you, rest assured that the publishers had it re-printed so the supply chain should be sorted out and Waterstones, as well as Indies are all stocked up and we’ve now sold almost 2000 copies!

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EVER LAND is resonating with readers beyond my wildest dreams: I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the widespread love for my novel. Elif Shafak hailed it in last week’s Independent as a remarkable debut and The Nerve’s Lucia Osborne-Crowly chose it as a Hot Pick, saying: ‘powerful, emotional and exquisitely observed novel about grief, dispossession and occupation, told with such delicate grace that it will leave you reeling. Everybody should read it.’

All of this alongside the incredible endorsements EVER LAND received before it even hit the shelves from such esteemed writers and commentators as Owen Jones, Juliet Stevenson, Louise Kennedy, Tadgh Hickey, Priscilla Morris and more. I was absolutely thrilled that all of these people - all people I admire so much - loved it so much.

I wrote EVER LAND to bring people to a place they are unlikely to be able to visit in person - and it feels like it’s doing just that, with readers remarking on how evocative it is of this place I love so much. At at time of such hopelessness and a feeling of such powerlessness, the one thing I feel I can do is to write… and I am so happy that my writing is finding a home with readers far and wide - both those who are already connected to Palestine and readers who have been blown away by the story.

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I’ve loved slipping into bookshops in London and beyond, spotting EVER LAND on the shelves - or even better on the front table of shops such as Foyles on Charing Cross Road! - and stopping to sign with the signature bespoke stamp I had made. So if you’ve not yet got your copy, be sure to nip into a bookshop when you pass to see if I’ve been there before you. If you spot EVER LAND, do take a pic and share on socials and tag me!

I’ve done festivals and bookshops in Bristol, Stroud, Bradford, London and Essex and have many more planned around the country. I love meeting readers, so come and find me if you’re near my tour stops!

June 2026

Writing Home Roundtable - Brighton Book Festival

SATURDAY 20th JUNE

Essex Book Festival, Hot Box Live - in conversation with Rachel Holmes

THURSDAY 25th JUNE – 7 pm

July 2026

Maldon Books, Essex

THURSDAY 16th JULY

Book Haus, Bristol - in conversation with Sabrin Hasbun, author of Crossing

MONDAY 20th JULY- 6.15 pm

Borderless Books, Stroud - in conversation with Nikesh Shukla, author of The Good Immigrant

TUESDAY 21st JULY

August 2026

The Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh

MONDAY 24th AUGUST, 1 pm

Far From Madding Crowd, Linlithgow

MONDAY 24th AUGUST, 6 pm

September 2026

Southwold Books, Southwold - in conversation with Esther Freud

THURSDAY 10th SEPTEMBER

October Festivals coming soon

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Well, getting Louise Kennedy’s endorsement was a pretty exciting moment, I can tell you. It was followed by other exciting moments - endorsements from and and among them. You can check out responses to Ever Land here.

Ever Land is my debut novel, set in modern Palestine and drawing on my experiences living and working in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in Ramallah during the second intifada. It’s being published by Hutchinson Heinemann, Penguin Random House on 9 July and you can pre-order your copy here (or any other bookselling outlet). I’m sure you will agree the cover is absolutely beautiful - definitely one to have adorning your much-loved bookshelves!

Ever Land is described by award-winning writer , editor of the as ‘Compassionate and beautifully observed’, he continues, ‘Abdelnoor writes about the histories that shape our present with unsparing humanity.’ Well - that was also a very lovely endorsement to receive and high point of the last few months.

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It is the year 2000 when Dinah, a Jewish teenager from London, arrives in Israel with her family. Still reeling from the death of her beloved dad, the idea of having to start all over again daunts her. Dinah isn’t quite sure what to make of this seemingly pristine place: her new life seems soulless and suffocating.

Another teenager, Safa, watches Dinah settle in. A fourteen-year-old Palestinian who was shot and killed decades ago in the Six Day War, Safa is caught in a limbo which she calls the ‘In-Between’. She is unable to fully pass on without knowing what happened to her younger sister, Nur, who is still alive somewhere. After thirty-three years, the possibility of finding her sister is suddenly within reach – but Safa needs Dinah’s help.

Ever Land is a powerful story of devastation, displacement and exile. It’s a story that is timeless and timely. It’s a story for now, for the decades past and for the future. It’s a story that brings readers to the beating heart of occupied Palestine.

It’s a story to read and to share. Pre-order today!

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I’m pleased to report that I’ve had some success!

No fewer than four final year students (the gristly 17- to 18-year-old age group) have asked to borrow books; as well as a sprinkling of boys from the lower years. We have to count our successes in the singular in teaching. It’s another sort of parenthood really: we are destined to attempt on a daily basis to nudge recalcitrant teens into a programme to which their bodies seem to be biologically resistant.

I was very pleased, therefore, when an A Level student – one about to leave the school to study at arguably one of the most prestigious universities – stopped by my desk after registration the other day. Said student – who is unfailingly polite and has been happy to engage in various conversations about the society in which we live nationally and globally over the last few years – handed back a book he’d borrowed Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.

‘It’s not really my kind of thing, Miss.’

That’s fine, I said – what is your kind of thing?

He’s recently started reading more, he admitted, but he likes books that he ‘can learn things from’ – he cited some examples: non-fiction books focusing on the economy and environmental concerns, by and large. Now, I’m very happy to read non-fiction. In fact, I’m currently mid-way through two fantastic examples (the newly-released Herlands by Megha Mohan and Rafia Zakari’s Against White Feminism since you’re asking).

But his next question surprised me. ‘What’s the point in reading novels, really, Miss?’

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We had a chat then.

Well, I talked and he listened.

Where do I start? Perhaps I’ll begin with one of the most wonderful students I’ve ever taught: a polymath who could have studied anything, English was his ‘extra’ subject, alongside the Sciences and Maths at A Level. He found me straight after his interview to study Medicine at Oxford, delighted to report that the very first question asked was what is empathy? ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I was perfectly place to answer – because that’s what English and your lessons are all about.’

The inclusion – and clear importance – of this question in medical interviews nowadays is particularly interesting to me, recalling as I do with clarity the very lack of empathy practised by an old-school consultant at the hospital bed of my father.

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Dad, after suffering with ‘bad’ backache, misdiagnosed as mild arthritis for several months, one sunny May morning mysteriously broke his arm while picking up a bag of shopping outside Tesco. The pathological break led to a hospital stay and a chipped hip bone, and from that to a series of scans which revealed cancerous tumours. So widespread were these tumours that, when the kindly paramedics transporting him from the hospital to the hospice a few weeks later and just days before he passed away, asked, chattily, ‘where his cancer was,’ dad replied that it was quicker to ask where it wasn’t.

But back to the early days of those brief six weeks, before we knew how bad it was: I remember with acute outrage on the part of my unfailingly polite father the arrogance of the orthopaedic surgeon who discussed his tumours and chipped hip bone dismissively over the top of his head, without acknowledging the presence and humanity of a very compos mentis patient festering on the hospital sheets below him.

Clearly, intelligence and a precision skill with a scalpel did not equate to anything remotely resembling patient relations, let alone empathy for said patients or their distraught families.

Empathy – I told my student when he asked me what the point of reading actually is – is the ability to appreciate situations from the point of view of others, whose life experience might be vastly different from our own. As Atticus tells Scout and Jem in To Kill A Mockingbird, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.’

For many of the students I teach across the whole school, the Sciences and Maths are priority subjects. The Arts get a poor look in, and in English we often have a hard task persuading students to continue at A Level. After all, who would take a subject in which it is arguably one of the hardest to guarantee a top grade? Who would take a subject for which there is no single right answer that can be learned, a subject which requires reflecting on seemingly endless reams of information (how many times can we read a book and continue to learn from and about it, before we even move to criticism?); a subject that requires potentially hours of dedicated thinking and reflecting to hone analytical arguments and present them cogently?

In a world dominated by data and assessed on results, the value of ‘The Arts’ and culture has been systematically eroded: the so-called soft skills nurtured by literature simply don’t tally quite so easily to Excel spreadsheet and quarter end targets.

In such a climate, I know that the idea of hard graft and application being nearly sure to guarantee a top grade in Maths (I’ve been told this by students on more than one occasion – it’s not my conjecture!) is more appealing than hoping an examiner will take the time to read carefully responses to nineteenth century texts produced under considerable time pressure.

But.

The bigger picture of the effects of the lack of nurturing of empathic responses is playing out right in front of us now. Not only has the UK’s divide between rich and poor increased by 50% in eight years1, but the rise of rightwing populism across the world, including here in the UK, is leading to deeply damaging divides.

Our communities are increasingly polarised and hatred is fuelled all too often by misinformation, inaccurately blaming a tiny minority of the population for a whole range of problems in society which are more accurately linked to the exploitative nature of big business and the billionaire classes.

There are many causes of destabilisation in society (on which I could write more than one separate article), from propaganda and manipulation, from the all-too-tight relationship between mainstream media and politicians, from the existence of lobby groups and the terrifying relationship between big tech and politics. In the face of such divisive and powerful systems and tools, it’s crucial that we are able to think critically and judge independently.

If we are going to stand even a chance of healing ruptures and of moving towards anything like a better society – a better world, indeed – we have to be able to listen to those whom we might perceive, with unconscious bias as ‘other’. We have to be able to empathise: we have to be able to identify, intellectually, with the thoughts or feelings of those whose experiences differ from our own; we have to be able to imagine ourselves in their place.

Over the last 15 years – arguably since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 – this country has witnessed an erosion of arts and culture2. Over the same period, perhaps most specifically since the Brexit referendum, we’ve also seen a rise of rightwing populism3. The correlation of the two is unsurprising to me. The arts and culture bring us to places of understanding – it’s the old cliché of the mirror they hold up to society. They give us space to stop and reflect and think. They give us the space and wherewithal to nurture empathy.

My student – and he’s not alone among young people – apparently only 10% of boys aged 14-16 read daily for pleasure4 – wanted to know, why, when he can read an article with facts on the economy and the environment, would he read a book?

Well, there are lots of extremely good quick answers: we all fundamentally like stories (films are types of stories, after all, and most teens like films; gossip is another type of story, and most people – for better or worse – are happy to gossip); for escapism, for entertainment, to laugh or to cry. I would love to think we all enjoy the chance to take a break by reading, but I’m too old now to be that naïve.

There are lots of other very worthy reasons: for example, that fiction readers show – as well as better empathy – better verbal abilities and cognitive function than non readers.5

But if I’m not going to get my students to read because they love it; if I’m not even going to be able to convince them that reading will actually make them cleverer, I want to encourage them to read to understand the people around us – as individuals, as couples, as families, as groups, as societies.

I want my students to read because in this broken world, the importance of reading cannot be measured in exam results or data; it can’t be reduced to outcomes and league tables.

The empathy that is inherently, subliminally and unconsciously developed through stepping into someone else’s skin and walking round it, exceeds any of these boundaries. Books affect us at a core level, at an intangible place within. Whether we seek out stories that are fantastical or historical, outrageously funny or heartbreakingly sad, books allow us, often without even realising it, to reflect on who we are, what our place is in this world and what kind of a society we value. And surely, that has to be a good thing?

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I’ve been pretty quiet on here recently. Given the onslaught of news: Gaza, Venezuela, the hunger strikers, Greenland, Gaza, Iran, Gaza, ICE, Gaza, the so-called Board of Peace, Gaza, ICE again, the hunger strikers… you could be forgiven for wondering why I’ve not been writing.

In fact, I’ve had plenty to say. About hypocrisy and double standards and the wholesale decimation of any pretence of international law. About power and corruption and double-think. About colonialism and history and the deliberate distortion and misuse of language. But, in the way of many of us in the community of thinkers who have been questioning the status quo for decades now, I’ve been searching around for hope.

And even this searching, I know, is a privilege. As Edward Said told us, to lose hope is a luxury that Palestinians cannot afford.

Today, I’ve a reason to write, but I first have to walk you through two things: a film and a piece of news.

Last week, I went to see The Voice of Hind Rajab. I had to prepare myself psychologically for the screening. Like many, I had already listened to the voice recording: once at the time it happened, when, in desperation the PRCS uploaded it to social media, and several times since. The recording alone had broken me as it surely must break anyone who listens to Hind’s truth. The pain of this understanding is paired with anger at the vile distortion of her truth and the horror that we know Hind’s story because it is one of the few stories that we have, and perhaps the only one that we have so fully. A terrible, debilitating void exists inside me: that there are hundreds of thousands of stories of children killed by Israel who have died without us knowing their stories. That they very likely died alone and in fear and in the knowledge of what was about to happen to them.

At the end of the film, I wanted nothing but silence. What could I or anyone possibly say? Hind’s story is utterly, utterly annihilating.

Hind Rajab’s truth - her innocence and yet her knowledge, her fear and her isolation – and the brutal reality of her slaughter at the hands of a sadistic, vicious regime exposes the absolute worst of humanity. Hind symbolises the sacrifice of truth, and everything that humanity might have been, at the altar of power at its most corrupting and corrupted.

To understand Hind’s vulnerability and to watch it framed within the love and attention and pain of those working at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society call centre exemplifies precisely the dissonance that I have long-said defines the deliberate misrepresentation of Palestinians in the western world.

To put it bluntly: when it comes to Israeli propaganda about Palestinians, every accusation is an admission of guilt.

Shortly after I watched the film, I read Carole Cadwalladr’s article Peter Thiel’s New Model Army. The principal take away (for these purposes) from this is that ‘The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir’. Palentir – the company which is responsible for the surveillance technology which has profiled kill targets for the IDF in Gaza – and which has already been awarded a £300 million contract with the NHS - is now embedded into the UK MOD. To understand quite how terrifying this is, read Cadwalladr’s article and follow what she says.

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To say that the juxtaposition of these two events left me feeling pretty hopeless – fully aware that this was a feeling that is privileged – is an understatement.

I’ve long harped on about the implications of technology on our lives: I’ve been concerned about it as a mother (observing and experiencing very clearly its divisive effects on family life to say nothing of its mental health implications) and as a teacher (observing the effects very clearly on young people’s reading and writing skills and their concentration spans). I’ve been concerned by it as a citizen (how irrevocably will society have changed - and to what end - when human interactions in shops and post offices and libraries – so vital for all of us, but especially to the old, the isolated and the vulnerable – have been wholly replaced by automated machines), and I’ve been terrified by it on the world scene – the ‘techbroligarchy’, as Cadwalladr documents, has a far greater influence on the state of the world today than politicians and this should concern - and scare - all of us.

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But just this week I had a glimmer of hope which came – as these things so often do – in another very dark moment.

The horrible news yesterday of another murder in cold blood of a US citizen at the hands of ICE sent shock waves again round the world. It was, of course, a replay of the same language used of Renee Good just a few weeks ago. But for those of of us who have been screaming ourselves hoarse about Palestine (for its freedom and for the importance of recognising it as the centre of everything precisely because – as Anthony Loewenstein has noted so often – what is done to Gaza does not stay in Gaza) it was the inevitable consequences of all the red flags to which we have been alerting people for almost 2.5 years (and 7 decades…). We were not wholly surprised that ICE targeted in turn a mother and an ICU nurse and that the MAGA crew tried to represent each as a homegrown terrorist. We have been saying this of the doctors and nurses, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, babies and children of Palestine… What we are seeing in America now is the natural extension of a so-called rules based order which hasn’t just been ripped apart but has been thrown into the rages of the might-is-right fires of rule by thuggery.

But herein lies the hope: we are seeing it. Quite literally seeing it. When Renee Good was shot in the head and Trump came out with some half-baked story about her being a threat that was taken out, the videos told a different story: the truth. We could all see that the party was telling us, in Orwell’s words, ‘to reject the evidence of [our] eyes and ears’. The eyes and ears of our devices – the smartphones that we carry with us at all times because it’s virtually impossible to conduct life in the 21^st century without them – are recording a truth that the powers that be have tried to repress. And that same technology is allowing that truth to be disseminated around the entire world in milliseconds.

This pattern – attack by power-holding elite on unarmed civilians, video of attack, dissemination to mobile phone screens across the world, state propaganda released by power-holding elite perpetrating a story which is blatantly a lie – is of course one with which we are now very familiar. In fact, we are 2 years and 4 months familiar with it at the very least. At some points in the last 2 years and 4 months mainstream media has even occasionally picked up on the double think – do we remember the attack on Al Ahliya hospital… or the murder of the international aid workers .. or Hind Rajab?

It is, as always, excruciatingly painful to recognise that the masses in America (and possibly in the UK) are waking up now only because it is being done to one of their own. In the same way as it is excruciatingly painful to see so clearly, as many commentators, including Peter Oborne, have the racism inherent in Mark Carney taking the proverbial sign out of the shop window only when the fallacy of international law threatens to affect a western state.

There is no doubt that the power imbalance under which Palestinians have lived for seven decades is founded on western racism.

But is is possible now that – just as water will always find its way through – the truth will out. And it might just be rather satisfying if the outage of the truth is made possible through the very technology which is facilitating current supremacy of the power hungry thugs who have dominated the world for far too long.

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Nour Alsaqqa said that to her, ‘Gaza is everything.’

And it should be to all of us, too.

Because Gaza has exposed everyone regardless of whether they realise it yet or not.

(This was the super moon this week… I watched it rise over the trees behind my house, thinking of the photo I’d seen on a friend’s feed of the same moon in the West Bank, thinking of the same moon over Gaza.)

Not to have spoken/acted/reached out reveals each and every one of us to our core.

The hard truth is that Gaza is the ultimate moral litmus test.

No other genocide - Rwanda, Bosnia, Bengal, Congolese, Irish or Holocaust - has ever been live streamed all around the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

The atrocities unleashed by this US-backed terror state on the people of Gaza are truly horrific. Each death (whether by forced starvation, drone, shelling, shrapnel, fire, gun shot, untreatable wounds, infectious diseases caused by the wholesale decimation of the healthcare system... the list goes on) and each injury (amputation, shrapnel, bullet wounds, white phosphorous whole-body burns... the list also goes on) would individually cause absolute global outrage if it had happened to someone in the white so-called ‘western' world. (Australia and New Zealand being globally south but politically west and, coincidentally, populated by the descendants of settler colonists.)

Collectively they produce a compilation of horrors which defy our humanity.

Of course, it is absolutely unbearable to bear witness to what Israel is doing. No one wants to wake up and look at pictures of decapitated children, macerated bodies, people being consumed by raging man-made fires. No one wants to finish their working day, as I did yesterday and break down in tears at the first two reels they see. The first was of a boy looking at the dead body of his father: whose head was half blown off. The second hit me in a different way. It was a girl, about the age and size of my youngest daughter, face dusty, clothes worn, crouching by what remained of her tent, wailing, ‘they’ve destroyed our tent. What will we do now? What will we do now that they have destroyed our tent.’ A girl of about eleven. The pity of it. The cruelty of them.

The “bearing witness” we are doing challenges our human faculties in a manner never before encountered.

Centuries ago, the greatest calamities with which we had to cope were stories of a child in the next village drowning in a well; tales of the plague wiping out the local town; maybe stories of hangings in the city. Even in the Great Wars that affected the West, the stories of soldiers – the sons of mothers, the brothers of sisters - were not seen visually, live.

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Our psyches aren't meant to deal with a multi-million pound industry hauling in unspeakably gross profits from a sadistic government and armed force unleashing so-called 'cutting-edge technologies'* on an unarmed, occupied, subjugated people.

And it's the response to this which is the moral litmus test of each of us: to turn away reveals to the core the modus-operandi of many privileged in the white, or as Dr Raj Thamotheram noted in his comments on the LinkedIn post I was reading, the ‘white-adjacent’ world.

The honest truth is that nothing in our lives in the global north (and Australia and New Zealand) is possible without the oppression of the global south.

This computer I'm typing on, the clothes I buy, much of the food I eat, the car I drive - all of it at some point requires exploitation of the resources (people or product) in the global south. The global south feeds the monster of capitalism at the core of the global north.

Of course, Gaza has also proved - as Nour so painfully notes - that even those of us who have spoken/marched/acted/lobbied government – have not managed to stop the genocide. Instead, our actions have served to highlight quite how intransigent and sadistic is the need for global capitalism to keep entrenched the status quo.

But to not even have been moved to try to do something, in some capacity, even by reaching out and asking someone in your community what you might do; worse, to have wilfully turned away, to have wilfully, stubbornly maintained that this is not happening: that silence speaks volumes.

I am pasting here Nour Alsaqqa’s words^[2]. Read them. It’s likely, I feel, if you have read this far, that you are one of the ones who is already acting. But we have to be steadfast in the hope that if we share something with someone who has not yet acted – Nour’s words, this post, a poem, a single atom of truth – we will, little by little fracture the maelstrom of manufactured lies being bandied around mainstream media. And in doing so and striving for real freedom for Palestine, we will ultimately rupture the extremist powers threatening the fundamental freedom of all of us.

Nour’s words:

"A white person living in Europe is able to say they don't care about politics, because they’re not exposed to the firsthand effects. But if even one of the things that happen on a daily basis in Gaza, was to happen in the West, it would move nations. In political science class we used to learn about things like ethics, and human rights, and international law. But life in Gaza will teach you that these things are just propaganda. Propaganda that fooled us into believing that if only people knew what was going on, they'd stop it. It was this naive notion that led us, at least me and all of my friends, to film and document and speak and share on our stupid Instagrams. But I’ve lost the will. It’s too exhausting. Everyone has disassociated from our reality. We have nothing to eat, but we have these phones. We get to watch our international friends going about their days normally. Who are we even talking to? You cannot rely on the conscience and moral compass of those in power. We’ve tried for so long. It doesn’t work. You have to put pressure on them. You have to disrupt their systems. You have to move and mobilize and obstruct and protest and cost them things. It’s the only thing they listen to. Life in Gaza does teach you. For the longest time I wanted to leave, but now I don’t feel like I could bear living anywhere else in this world. Gaza feels like the only real place left on earth.”

Nour Alsaqqa, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Gaza

(if these words moved you and you are unsure as to how you can act - there are plenty of small things you can do: the most effective, arguably, is making a decision about where to spend your money. Join the rapidly growing global movement to boycott Israeli goods and services. Reach out for more info or look up https://bdsmovement.net)

^[1] I could not find Nour al Saqqa on instagram or Substack to ask her for permission to reproduce her words, but would welcome connection to her if anyone is able to help me out.

^[2] The original LinkedIn post I read is here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7369236992628404226/?c

I’m putting together a collection of poetry.

It being impossible to create art that isn’t political during a time of abject crisis - that is, a genocide, to say nothing of a genocide which is being bragged about, openly and indulgently, by those perpetrating it - my work is, necessarily, unavoidably and deliberately, a response to what it is to bear witness to unbearable cruelty and man-made suffering.

As part of the writing process for one poem, I made myself type out, one by one, the numbers from one to 335. Anyone following events in Gaza will understand precisely the significance of this number.

As I did so, I thought of an earlier poem I had written in response to the incident to which each of these now-heavy numbers pertains. This atrocity, at the time that it happened, had just about made it to the headlines of mainstream media. The terms in which it arrived on outlets such as the BBC (as usual) blurred realities, obfuscated responsibilities and failed to apportion blame.

According to the BBC, the girl to whom this number will now forever be linked was, ‘found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help’.^[1]

As with other instances (before and after) on which the BBC has failed in its duty to report with impartiality, I complained to the Corporation about their use of language, (the passivity of the phrase ‘found dead’, the deliberate decision not to describe the death as the killing that it was or to name the aggressor, the lack of significant context etc., etc.,). The standard response (to which I was accustomed by this point), infuriated me anew and, led, eventually to my poem, ‘Polarising Matters’, in which I noted, cynically:

‘It’s Polarising that there were

335

opportunities

not to pull the trigger.’

This week, working on another poem, I looked again at the list of numbers I had typed out from one to three hundred and thirty five. And I wondered about Zero.

There should of course, have been the possibility of zero.

But the number Zero has no position in the list of the number of bullets being fired by Israeli soldiers from the protection of a military vehicle (likely an Israeli Merkava tank^[2]) at six-year-old Hind Rajab on 29 January 2024 when she was trapped in car surrounded by the dead bodies of her relatives.

And the significance of this seems apt, if incredibly painful.

That is: to not fire bullets was a non-option for colonisers intent on destroying a six-year-old Palestinian child.

There is a cruel irony in this.

When the Crusaders pillaged Western Asia back in the Eleventh Century they were introduced to the concept of Zero, which had been in use mathematically in India and West Asia for millennia. Naturally, as xenophobes who just wanted to exploit the lands to which they travelled, they rejected the concept outright, along with pretty much any Arab or Muslim ideas. At its most extreme, this meant that Zero was banned in Florence in 1299 and it was not until the fifteenth century that the mathematical concept of Zero was finally accepted.

Poor Zero: the circle that exists not around nothing but around everything: the ring that represents eternity, the circle of life. The Western Colonisers of the early second millennia AD rejected it outright – the possibility it introduced of negative numbers and therefore debt – was too complicated. So they continued clunking around with Roman Numerals for a couple of hundred years until they realised they could not manage without it and – in true colonial style – realising it was pretty much fundamental to higher level Mathematics, adopted it as their own without much recognition of its original conception.

And just like in the study of Mathematics, the possibility of Nothing would very definitely have been Something for Hind Rajab. It would have been Something not to pull the trigger once. It would have been Something for the Israeli soldiers not to pull the trigger twice. It would have been Something multiplied by 335 not to have pulled the trigger 335 times.

Just as in the thousands upon thousands of instances in which Israeli soldiers have picked up a gun, Zero really would have been Something on 29 January 2014: Zero bullets would have been the life of a child.

^[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68261286

^[2] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab

I was given 
one hundred names
and one hundred ages. 

An age for every name.

Every age had been my child.
A child of mine had passed through every age.


Severed then, 
her mouth had sought my swollen breast.
Then, she’d stroked the soft cheek of her baby brother.
Later, she was teetering on a newly-gifted bike
and in each chubby fist he clutched a well-loved toy.
Two became three 
and I learned again
the infinite love of a mother 
that is not divided
but multiplies.

love without end

clustered names
memorialising family groups;
siblings entombed 
in black lines on white screen;
brothers and sisters
interred in my early-morning, 
rough-throated
recitations
rhythmic readings

broken

by three children
whose ages matched my own.

I brought my hands together then,
whispering to the God 
in whom I can no longer believe
that She was spared 
grief without end

and that their bullets or their missiles or their shells or their drones or their fires or their starvation 

took Her also.

image credit: my mother’s beautiful embroidery for Nour, aged 6 years, created for the Each Child A Light quilting project honouring the children killed in Gaza.

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Video credit: Momen Sameer.

I watched you race against your classmates,

in the heat of the day,

watched you push

damp hair from your eyes

felt the sweat beading your forehead,

watched you

running your heart out

and over the finish line.

I watched you race against your father,

in the passage by our home.

Watched him feign a stumble,

winking at me,

as you pulled to a lead

and into the finish—

—ing embrace

of my arms.

I watched you run with your brothers,

racing the shoreline,

racing with the sounds of the waves,

racing against everything,

despite everything,

as far as the world would allow.

It’s a cruel race

this one.

This race

the world has hurled at you.

It’s a faceless race

sent from mutant metal skies.

Was she your age once—

—the one who pressed the button?

Did her mother watch her,

racing her heart out

as if her life

might

depend on it—

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And this is the original instagram link I watched:

(video credit, Middle East Eye)

I want your silence to crash against the cries of this child.

I want your silence to reverberate against this girl's hunger.

I want your silence to scream through this daughter's desperation.

I want your echo chambers to implode

and white apathy

to grow red until it is hot as the fires

that shred their tents.

I need your cheeks to blush

with a shame that

Burns

Louder and Stronger

than the wails of children

wanting

food

and water,

wanting

quiet

and shelter,

calling for the arms of their mothers,

to wrap them in the love that would shield them from

the indignity

of this silent, violent

world.

(AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

On Father’s Day, I would like to pause to pay tribute to the fathers of Gaza, Palestine.

To the fathers who have clawed through the rubble with bare hands searching for their sons and daughters.

To the fathers who have braved raging flames to try to rescue their babies.

To the fathers who have pieced together the dead body parts of their loved ones.

To the fathers who have searched for scraps of food to try to keep their families alive.

To the fathers who have been forced to stand and beg for food aid only to be shot at and maimed or killed.

To the fathers who have been held hostage and tortured.

To the fathers who cannot hold their children in their arms because those children have been slaughtered.

And to the children who can no longer turn to their fathers and say, Baba, I love you.

Dissonance is

The look on your face when you hear me speak.

You are making an internal, silent comparison, doing white-man’s maths:

how many brown bodies is one white body worth?

Dissonance is

Watching a video of starved and starving people begging for food

and writhing as they are shot.

And opening the fridge to shelves stacked full.

Dissonance is

Teaching a poem about apartheid South Africa.

And waiting for questions that are never asked.

Dissonance is

Watching a little girl whose name is Ward,

a name which means flower,

trying to escape the Israeli-made fire burning down her shelter.

And looking out of my window at orange roses blooming in the sun.

Dissonance is

A lecture on the root of the word Holocaust.

In the midst of a live-streamed genocide.

Dissonance is

Sanctions against Russia.

Arms for Israel.

Dissonance is

The words that come out of the mouths of politicians in the so-called free world.

Boomeranging against the images I am seeing on my phone.

Dissonance is

Land seizure and ethnic cleansing and apartheid walls and road closures and

checkpoints and ID cards and house demolitions and permits.

Bombarding their patient endurance for seventy-seven years.

Dissonance is

The PR stunt of your terrorist, your animal, your cockroach.

Rebounding against my person, my human, my freedom-lover.

Dissonance is

Everything you’ve ever been told about these people,

all the synonyms you reel off

thoughtlessly, callously, dismissively.

Ricocheting against everything I know and have known,

everything I feel and have felt.

Dissonance is

your barbarian.

Dissolving in the face

of their quiet humility,

their endless hospitality,

their boundless generosity.

Dissonance is

your hatred.

Exposed by their infinite capacity for love.

Dissonance is

the injustice that twists my heart

knowing all that I know

and all that you are determined

not to see.

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Nine of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s ten children will never again need her to fold their clothes,

they will never again need her to comb their hair,

never again need her to wipe food from their faces.

Nine of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s ten children will never again draw pictures especially for her.

Nine of her ten children will never again gather wild flowers for her.

Nine of her ten children will never again call for her at night,

they will never again ask her to rub their sore legs,

never again need her to soothe their hurting tummies.

Nine of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s ten children will never again wake and run to her,

they will never again stretch out their arms to her,

they will never again burrow their heads in her stomach

and fall asleep at her breast.

Nine of her ten children will never again make her laugh with their idiosyncrasies.

Nine of her ten children will never again drive her to distraction with those same idiosyncrasies.

Nine of her ten children will never again whisper their secrets in her ear.

Nine of her ten children will never again pull her close and say, bahibik ya mama.

Nine of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s ten children

are burned

and charred.

Never Again.

And the BBC did not even say their names.

Yahya Hamdi al-Najjar, 12 years old.

Rakan Hamdi al-Najjar, 10 years old.

Eve Hamdi al-Najjar, 9 years old.

Jibran Hamdi al-Najjar, 8 years old.

Raslan Hamdi al-Najjar, 7 years old.

Rifan Hamdi al-Najjar, 5 years old.

Sadeen Hamdi al-Najjar, 3 years old.

Luqman Hamdi al-Najjar, 2 years old.

Sidra Hamdi al-Najjar, 7 months old.

Read more poetry

The Sabaar cactus plants mark the remains of Suhmata village, historic Palestine, 1948.

I was about to message a friend this morning but I stopped in my tracks: I wonder what the correct greeting is today?

On 11 November, the people of Britain stand silent for one minute at 11 am. On VE day, flags adorn windows and cars. On Holocaust Memorial Day, school children across the country are brought into assemblies to be taught Never Again. Never Again will we allow racism to dominate and control. Never Again will we close our eyes and turn our backs on injustice and oppression. Never Again will we stay silent in the face of unspeakable violence. Never Again will we fail in our humanity.

So I wonder what the correct greeting is today, a day which marks 77 years of loss, of mourning, of violence, of terror and of dispossession? A day on which we remember 15,000 civilians slaughtered by Zionist militia groups; a day on which we remember countless girls and women raped; a day on which we think of the 750,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes and forced into exile to live in refugee camps; a day on which we mark the destruction and erasure of over 530 villages.

I wonder what to say to friends whom I know will be holding in their hands the keys of houses that have been reduced to rubble. I wonder what to say to the family who pressed on me the fading title deed of their land, asking me if I could bring it back to my country, as proof of decades of dispossession. I wonder what to say to Palestinians whose homes have been reduced to rubble once again.

I wonder how to speak today, a day on which we should be saying the names Deir Yassin and Tantura and honouring the dead of these villages. A day on which we should remember Al Dawayima, Lydda and Ramla and Safsaf. A day on which we should remember the villages razed in the wake of the impunity of 1948 and yoke to these names the names of the villages of 1967: Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nuba. A day in which we should think of the crimes of the last decades and remember in particular the ongoing destruction of the villages of Masafer Yatta. A day on which we think of Deir el Balah, of Jabalia, of Gaza City, of North Gaza, Nuseirat, Rafah and Khan Younis.

I wonder who will stand with me today for a single minute, in silence, to mark the Palestinians killed in 1948. I wonder who will bear witness to the Palestinians killed in the decades of violence inflicted by the occupying state since? I wonder who will join the dots of violence and understand that the current genocide being committed by Israel on the people of Gaza and the West Bank has been enabled by the decades of violence and political and diplomatic impunity of that state in the last 77 years.

I wonder how to try to give meaning to words like displacement and ethnic cleansing? This anodyne, distanced, clinical terminology which deliberately dilutes the reality of the boys and girls, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents on whom these violent practices are meted out.

Where are the words to convey pain and anguish and loss? Where are the words to describe deliberate, pre-meditated slaughter, torture and rape? Where are the words to explain forced starvation? How to imbue with visceral meaning the black and white marks on a page? How to make you hear the sounds of explosions and bombs, the screams of pain, the plaintive, pitiful pain of a starved and starving child? How to create in you, viscerally, to the depths of your being, endless trauma?

I wonder who will stand with me today and say the word Genocide.

And I wonder how to greet my Palestinian friends.

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19 April 2025 speech

On this Easter Saturday, a day on which Christians believe Mary, mother of Christ, was mourning her martyred son’s death and holding on to the hope of his resurrection, I stand before you first as a mother who has experienced the blossoming of pregnancies, the pain of childbirth, the joy of the first weeks of my new-born babies. And I think of the mothers of Palestine, in the throes of labour, detained for hours at Israeli checkpoints. I imagine the humiliation of giving birth in front of soldiers or the untold pain of my baby dying before he is even born because a soldier decided not to let me pass to reach the hospital in time. I think of the mothers of Gaza whose premature babies were placed six or nine to a bed, covered in foil in an attempt to keep them warm when Israel cut off electricity. I think of what it must have been like for those mothers when the decomposed bodies of their premature babies were found amid the destruction of Al Shifa hospital in November 2023 after the Israeli army had finished that particular assault. I think of the hundreds of thousands of mothers who, because of the forced starvation imposed by Israel, are unable to fulfil the most basic of our maternal responsibilities: to feed our children. Seared in my mind is a photograph from the mass graves uncovered in March this year: of zip ties taken from around the wrists of babies, and also photographs from this week of the charred bodies of children burned alive in their tents. And I ask myself, how far has the collective public conscience fallen, how far have our political leaders fallen, how far has our media fallen that this evidence of crimes against humanity is ignored and the general public is gaslight once again and the reality of the pain and trauma meted out on Palestinians by Israel is ignored.

I stand before you today as a mother whose babies have blossomed now into teens and pre-teens. I stand before you as a mother with a 15 year old son who whizzes out on his bike on an errand to pick up bread for lunch and I think of Muhammad Yasser Washah, 17 years old, who rushed out to Gaza City on 29 February 2024 when he heard aid trucks were coming and managed to collect a bag of flour^[1]. I think of how happy he must have been, to be able to help his mother, to help to feed his family. Muhammad was shot by a bullet which hit the flour and lodged in his jacket. He was lucky. Israel killed at least 112 people trying to collect flour that day: the victims were first shot and then pounded by Israeli tanks.

I stand before you as a mother of three children whose freedom has only ever been curtailed by school fences, put there to protect them from harm; children whose young walks to school were protected by a friendly lollipop lady in fluorescent clothing or the gentle beeps of the green man. And I think of the children of Palestine who carry school bags through checkpoints with the barrels of guns trained on their tiny backs. Worse, I think of the children who never make it to school. I think of 13 year old Iman al-Hams, just two years older than my youngest daughter, who was shot on her way to school in Rafah in October 2004. After the Israeli soldier shot her, he riddled her body with 15 to 20 bullets to make sure she was dead.^[2]

I think of 17 year old Mahmoud Abduljaleel Hud al-Sadi, a boy the same age as my oldest daughter, who was on his way to school on 21 November 2022 when the Israeli military incursion into the refugee camp in which he lived prevented him from passing. He turned to go home and was shot by an Israeli soldier from 140 metres away. He was dead by the time his classmates managed to get him to hospital. I could go on and on. I could tell you about the two year old shot in the head in June 2023, I could tell you about the 50 children killed by Israel in 2022 or of the 78 children killed by Israel in 2021. We could mark each year by the number of children Israel killed in each.

(article continues after video)

I stand before you today as a wife with a husband, a husband whose body is whole and complete. A husband who has demonstrated peacefully through his life against war and for human rights and I think of Mohammad, aged 35 and a father of three, like my husband. Mohammad was shot with a live bullet in the leg during the Great March of Return of 2018. I think of Mohammad^[3] and the thousands of Palestinian husbands who, together with other men, women and children, engaged in this sustained act of mass non-violent resistance and for 18 months, marched every Friday to the walls built by Israel around Gaza. During this period Israeli snipers deliberately targeted the protestors’ knees, wounding over 30,000 demonstrators and killing 266^[4].

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I stand before you today as a daughter who buried my own father at a relatively young age. I think about all the conversations I’ve never been able to have with my dad, of all the experiences I’ve wished I could have shared with him over the last 17 years, when I see things he would have loved, when I want to pick up the phone to call him. And I think that despite this grief, I was able to say goodbye; I think that despite this grief, he died with dignity and was buried with love. And I think of the daughters of Palestine, thousands of them so much younger than I was when my father died: kissing the dead faces of their fathers or collecting their body parts from amid the rubble or never finding their dads at all. One picture returns at night to my mind: little Meral, aged 4, who every day sits on the steps of a UN shelter in Gaza, waiting for a dad who will never come. A girl who cannot possibly understand why her dad will never lift her in his arms again, will never swing her round and tell her he loves her. My heart breaks for the lost fathers of Palestine. My heart breaks for the children who are wishing they were not left behind, the wounded children with no surviving family.

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I stand before you today as a sister with brothers, brothers with whom I have squabbled and quibbled, brothers with whom I’ve commiserated and worried, brothers to whom I turned for support during the everyday trials of childhood and to whom I turn for advice during the responsibilities of adulthood. And I think of the brothers and sisters of Gaza. I think of the photograph of two boys, who must have been under the age of ten, their heads sandwiched between slabs of concrete, their heads crushed between a windowsill and a ceiling that became the two sides of an exposed grave. The older boy has his arm around the neck of his brother. The detail haunts me: in that moment of death, the older was looking out for the younger, with the tenderness and love of a protective older sibling that I have known – and continue to know, to this day, decades older than those two poor boys – from my older brother.

I stand before you as a woman with dreams and aspirations, for today, for next week, for next month and for next year, acutely aware that in this world of inequality and injustice, to dream of a future for myself and my family is a privilege denied to those whose suppression feeds the insatiable beast of capitalism.

I stand before you as a woman who still believes that our individual actions matter, who still believes that even while hope for freedom for Palestine feels increasingly fragile, it is more necessary than ever. It is up to us, not only to hope that the world will wake up to the worst oppression and injustice of our life time, but more than that, it is up to us, each one of us, individually and collectively, to hold that world accountable. It is up to us not to lose hope, it is up to us not to stay silent, it is up to us not to give up, even at this nadir, this darkest moment of Palestinian history. It is up to us to play our own part in building a world in which might is not right, to build a world in which all men, women and children are truly equal, a world in which freedom is truly free.

^[1] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6207/New-evidence-confirms-Israel’s-full-involvement-in-‘Flour-Massacre’-of-starving-Palestinian-civilians

^[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2004/10/16/israeli-cleared-for-shooting-schoolgirl

^[3] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/two-years-people-injured-and-traumatized-during-great-march-return-are-still-struggling

^[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/30/gazas-great-march-of-return-protests-explained

These numbers are recited by mainstream media at such times as outlets report on Israel’s attacks on the 2.4 million people living in the 25-mile long strip of land by the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

For months, it has astounded me that people continued to cite these figures without further comment. In the summer of last year, the medical journal ‘The Lancet’^[1] confirmed that which those of us bearing witness on a daily – if not hourly – basis had already realised: according to that medical journal, ‘applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death […] it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.’

I am no statistician, so I’ll leave it to the experts to wager that now, seven months on from that report, the gradient of any graph pertaining to figures from Gaza would show a steep incline such that the likely death toll is now considerably more. With even my rudimentary knowledge, however, I can appreciate that with each day, deaths from forced starvation, from lack of clean drinking water, from the decimation of the health care system and from diseases associated with all of these factors, will have increased exponentially.

To state the obvious about these figures is essential, not least because, shamefully, the obvious is rarely stated. However, any attempt to convey the sheer scale of the destruction of life in Gaza, ironically risks minimising what this destruction means.

Quite aside from the fact that, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese makes clear^[2], genocide is not determined by the numbers of people killed, but rather by proving the intention of a state to eradicate a people, in bearing witness to the enormity of the ever-increasing numbers, we risk forgetting the value of each individual life.

Whether 5 or 5000, 50,000 or 500,000 have been killed, those numbers represent people, each one of whom led her or his own life until it was prematurely ended by this chronic and ongoing bloodshed. Each one of those numbers was a single soul. Each one of those numbers was someone’s mother or daughter, brother or son, grandfather or uncle. In the words of Khaled Nabhan, the grandfather who mourned Israel killing his granddaughter Reem in November 2023, only then to be killed himself by Israel in December 2024, each one of those numbers was someone’s ‘soul of souls’.

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There was a moment in the early months of the genocide in which I felt very keenly the paradoxical, painful state in which one is left when bearing witness to these two realities — terrifying numbers of dead and the individuality of each life.

It was a November weekday morning at just the time we parents think our teenage children are getting off their buses and starting school, that my phone buzzed wildly. A van had driven into two children standing at a bus stop in the village. The arrival of an air ambulance indicated the severity of the accident. For about an hour, no one was quite sure which two children had been at that particular bus stop that morning: was it a brother and sister? Two friends? Which year were they in? A few hours later, we found out both who they were and that one of them had been killed. It being a small place, we all knew him. For the next weeks and months, flowers were placed at the bus stop and on benches in the village and the community was, naturally, keen to share their love and empathy with his family.

I played my part in community grief and personal fear: worrying about my own children standing at bus stops, coming home late, walking down unlit streets in the dark. The boy had been the same age as my oldest daughter and the two of them had been in the same class at Primary School. Like every other parent in the village, I was thinking: it could have been me, mourning the loss of my child.

At the same time, I turned my phone on every morning and watched videos of child after child maimed, killed or starving, watched photos of parents holding lifeless bodies and worse — watched mothers and fathers searching desperately for body parts of their children in the rubble, in an attempt to piece their loved ones back together again in death.

It is, F Scott Fitzgerald told us, the mark of intellect to be able to hold two apparently opposing truths in one’s mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And it is true both that the death of a teenage boy standing at a bus stop while waiting to go to school is a tragedy and that the inhumane slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people at the hands of one of the most advanced militaries in the world is also a tragedy.

For me, however, the cognitive dissonance was almost crippling because of the deafening silence with which the latter tragedy was met, not only by governments, but also by vast swathes of society who failed to comment, whether as individuals or even as institutions, to show their solidarity with attacks on their own profession: from schools to universities, from hospitals to the media, from writers to humanitarians.

Over the last week, this painful truth has been thrown into the limelight once again with the raging forest fires in California. Mainstream media has been full of photographs which bear some resemblance to the tsunami of images with which those of us receiving news from Gaza have been struggling for some 15 months. Away from the silencing and complicity of the corporations feeding the masses, activists and independent journalists, people from Gaza and people who stand with humanity, have naturally noted the moral hypocrisies, devastating differences and inherent ironies between the man-made anguish of one and the natural disaster of the other.

Sadly, it is of little comfort that the juxtaposition of the cataclysmic destruction of an entire people in a genocide which must, eventually, go down in history as the moral travesty of our lifetimes, with rampant natural forest fires serves to crystalise — for some of us, at least — the dystopian reality of the societies in which we find ourselves living.

And so we find ourselves struggling, once again, with the moral vacuum in which our societies would like us to operate. We find ourselves struggling to understand, once again, how it is that people are able to empathise with and discuss the tragic deaths of one group of people and yet feel — unqualified, ill-equipped, unable or unwilling? — to show such empathy and understanding of the industrial slaughter of another group of people.

Society will require more than the intellect invoked by Fitzgerald, I feel, in the moral reckoning which must, one day, come.

^[1] https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3.pdf (italics mine).

^[2]https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-calls-david-lammy-genocide-denier

Witnessing the crime of crimes — genocide — unfolding in real time over the last fourteen months on our computers and simultaneously listening to the way in which the reality of the publicly-voiced, Israeli state intention to eradicate the Palestinian people has been misrepresented, obfuscated or — in the case of our current Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary — outright denied, has been profoundly disturbing.

The chasm between what we are witnessing and the silence of politicians and the mainstream media has exposed the deep rooted, colonial racism and moral hypocrisy of most western nations.

For some people, this has become a seminal personal moment: the deafening silence in response to genocide has forced many people to question the fundamental principles of their lives: relationships, friendships, the very foundations of the society in which we live.

But it has also, paradoxically, been crystalising: the intensity of suffering in Gaza and the impunity with which it is met have in turn demanded affirmation both of heritage and of the very values which are being undermined: and so, it is in this nadir that as people seek those with shared humanity and morality, new networks of resilience and resistance are being born.

Many Palestinians, and many of those involved in the struggle for freedom for Palestine, have for years, if not decades, been calling out Israel’s increasingly violent acts against Palestinians and demanding that the country be held to account.

But even for these people, the licence Israel has been given to execute its genocide of the Palestinian people is beyond words.

Indeed, the words to which we turn in our attempt to explain what we are witnessing seem to have lost all meaning.

The word ‘defend’ is used to justify genocide. The actions of a decades-long Israeli campaign of eradication of Palestine and the Palestinian people continue to be framed as ‘responses’. Meanwhile, the right of Palestinians to any kind of defence against their own annihilation has always been and continues to be systematically denied Palestinians by the elite political and media classes.

Palestinians, the victims of the longest running occupation in history, the victims of a campaign of ethnic cleansing which began even before the nakba of 1948 and the victims now of what has been recognised by scholars and experts of genocide as the final stage of this crime against humanity, are denied their humanity even from the moment of birth. Never has this been clearer than in the last year. In the words of UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, ‘This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.’ And according to Save the Children, about 30% of those killed by Israel are children under the age of 5; deaths through forced starvation and disease also disproportionately affects children. A child with acute malnutrition is 11 times more likely to die from common childhood illnesses, including pneumonia and nearly half of deaths among children under 5 years globally are linked to undernutrition.

In such contexts, the very existence of Palestinians on the land in which they were born becomes, materially — that is, physically at a very tangible, human level — its own act of resistance.

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And to Palestinians in the diaspora, and those of other heritages and nations advocating for Palestinians, the right to use specific language in and for that advocacy also becomes its own act of resistance.

The recent raids here in the UK on the houses of journalists and activists challenging the western colonial narrative which dominates mainstream discourse about Palestine and Israel is indicative of how threatened the establishment feels by the assertion of the right to advocate for Palestine and Palestinians.

In turn, these raids demonstrate how urgent the need is for us to maintain precisely this assertion and how vital it is that we continue to use the two words which are arguably perceived as most contentious: Palestine and Palestinian.

And so we come to the peculiar irony of this seminal moment in history: at this moment of unfathomable, acute and abject violence and suffering, the words Palestine and Palestinian have found new audiences and been used by new voices.

At the point at which Israel is intent on completing its final stages of the eradication of Palestinians from their homeland; at the point at which the Israeli government attempts to redraw definitively the geography of the region, Palestine has, in fact, been placed firmly on the map of world discourse: articulated with an awareness that this is a word which relates very specifically to a piece of land between the river and the sea.

It seems to me that the importance of this cannot be overstated: that those marching through the streets of cities round the word raise their voices for its people, the word Palestine is vocalised as synonymous with freedom, with justice, with anti-racism and with de-colonisation. It is for this reason that the rallying cry of the marches has found such traction: quite simply, none of us is wholly free until Palestine is free.

A Eulogy to Stolen Lives

I fell in love with Palestine over 25 years ago when I was living and volunteering in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, teaching English in the very south to children who had been born and raised just miles from their ancestral villages. Early encounters remain lodged in my memory. Young Bilal, telling me in our first lesson, ‘I am Bilal and I am Palestinian’, Maha asserting ‘my hobby is to return to Palestine’, and Hamoudy bringing it straight to the point, ‘Your Balfour, he gave away our country.’

When I left Lebanon after my first summer there, the Ajjawi family, with whom I had been staying begged me, ‘please, just go back and tell our story.’

Pressing faded title deeds into my hands — quite literally, giving me papers from 1948 to bring back to the UK, to show to the powers that be that the land now occupied by Israel was taken unlawfully and immorally — they were urging me to tell the story that has been written out of the international narrative. The historical facts and details in which I had, over that first summer, received a fast-track education. The history that has been unequivocally omitted from the text books of the Israelis occupying historic Palestine and has been reconstructed in the historical narrative framed by the west, not only within the education system, but also within the cultural narrative of literature, art and films and, as has been only too clear over the last year, in the narrative promulgated by complicit western media.

But History, of course is, in fact ‘his-story’. Presented under the patriarchal framework of colonialism, it becomes History, masculine, capitalised and authoritative. But what matters — and should matter to us each individually if we are to save the rags of humanity at this excruciating moment in our collective history — is his-story, and her-story and their-story.

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It is his story, her story, their story, the stories of individuals or the individual stories, that are acute and vital. The relaying of facts and figures — be that percentages of land seized, numbers of people injured, percentages of children traumatised — are but black and white marks on a page until they are realised in the details to whom those numbers belong.

Who farmed the olives on the land before it was taken? How did the boy hug his mother the morning before he was stopped on the way to school and taken by the army? Who danced between the houses that now lie buried under the so-called Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem?

For the figures which start to overwhelm us to have meaning, for them to resonate in such a way that those of us receiving them are compelled to take action, we must feel empathy. And empathy comes from listening to stories. Stories are the foundation of what it is to be human. We connect through stories both to those around us and those many, many miles and a lifetime away. When a single story — the History, which, as the saying goes, is written by the victors — dominates, we are denied the empathy that will lead to understanding.

The individual stories of each and every Palestinian, both those who are surviving and those who have been killed, are of course as varied and manifold, as mundane and as expansive as might be your story or my story: they are stories of daily living — walks to school and haircuts, meals and spilt coffee — and stories of hopes and dreams and aspirations — of young, fresh love, of long-standing couples, of babies born and children growing up. In short, they are the stories of life which connect us across thousands of miles.

But the stories of Palestinians have for over seven decades been tethered to stories that the majority of us in the so-called free world expect and hope and pray never to have to endure. They have been over the last century stories of walks to school interrupted by checkpoints, of trips to the doctors prevented by soldiers, of evenings passed with friends against the backdrop of shelling.

And as we are all too aware, over the last 12 months, these daily stories have come to epitomise resistance against a western-backed, Israeli executed campaign to annihilate existence. The ubiquitous to which we, living miles away, can relate, has mutated into a reality that is terrifying, gut-wrenching and extraordinary in the face of what can only be described as the most heinous moral atrocity of our lifetime: genocide.

And at their most tragic, the stories of individual lives and life have warped, in a real-life and live-streamed dystopia, into stories of death. They have done this on a scale so catastrophic that the individual story of each death risks being swept back into the carpet of numbers, the endless reel of statistics which strips each life of its individuality and as it does so risks achieving precisely the aim of those who are intent on genocide: it does that thing which we have come to say so often in these circles: genocide dehumanises.

And from a distance, we watch reel after reel attempt to record ever more terrifying numbers, numbers which are out of control and out of our control: Gaza’s entire infrastructure is devasted by Israeli bombardment to such an extent that there is simply no way to record the onslaught of deaths; entire families wiped out in one strike leave no surviving family members left to record or to commemorate lives taken; and, in the epitome of the dystopian nightmare to which we in the west wake every morning, the military warfare Israel deploys is so dystopian that in many cases it literally obliterates Palestinians to dust. And so, in an attempt not only to salvage humanity — our own, individually and collectively — we try, in our own, small way to honour individual lives whose very existence has been desecrated in life and in death.

We honour those whose names have become synonymous with the death of innocence: little Hind Rijab shot by 335 bullets in January, young Aboud Al Dalou and his brother Shaaban, burned alive in their tents earlier this month; 7 year old Sidra killed by an Israeli missile the impact of which was so strong that her mutilated body was left dangling from the house.

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And we honour also those whose names have not made even our social media feeds, seeking to find the individuals behind the numbers; in doing so, we strive to give dignity in death to each brother and sister, each baby and toddler, each husband and wife, mother and father, aunt, uncle, nephew, niece and grandparent. We remember the street cleaner and the architect; the hairdresser and the plastic surgeon; the fruit seller and the chef; the farmer and the engineer; the bookkeeper and the poet; the secretary and the lawyer; the child drawing and the artist he hoped to become.

We remember that each life is a story that needs to be told.

Palestinians have taught us that the ultimate resistance is insisting on the very right to exist and they will live this resistance to the very end, even and up to the point of dying in the name of that right.

In our bleakest moment, may we continue to look for, share and raise the stories of each and every Palestinian who has died in the ultimate sacrifice: the bid for freedom which is the Palestinian gift to each and every one of us.