‘During this week of Eid, I want to honour my friends in Palestine for what they taught and continue to teach, to me and to others. In “Letter from Gaza” by the Palestinian revolutionary and novelist Ghassan Kanafani, a young man writes to his friend Mustafa to explain his broken promise that they would start their lives anew in the United States, and his decision instead to stay behind in Gaza. In “this Gaza [that is] like the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughter-house. This Gaza [that] was more cramped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare…” In the amputation of his 13-year-old niece’s leg – Israel’s sadistic gifts from the skies are indiscriminating – he comes to discover that the “long, long road to Safad,” a city in the occupied upper Galilee, starts from his home in Gaza. He concludes the letter to his friend: “I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.”
Has that future of return arrived? Are we inhabiting that moment of a dream that seemed impossible? It is difficult to even write these words, given the harrowing images coming from Gaza: of entire families wiped out by Israel’s continuous bombardment over these last days. Yet, as bombs crack open the earth in Gaza, we are feeling the rumble across the world.
In the air, there appears the possibility of an awakening of political consciousness, the moral force of resistance from all corners of the world screaming for an end to this brutality.’ More here.