Opinion | ‘We Palestinians Are Not Going to Give Up’

We’ve been speaking a couple of days ago with some friends and policy experts in D.C. and one of them who is Egyptian, Egyptian American. We’ve been speaking about Gaza. And he brought actually an Arabic word to describe what all of us feel and felt while watching the second Nakba, the genocide, 24/7 on our screens. The word that doesn’t exist in the English language. Qahr, qahr. It’s a combination of being angry and humiliation of your humanity and existence and who you are. Helpless that you don’t have anything to do. And yeah. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, because if there is something to save in our souls as Palestinians, and if there is something to save in terms of dreaming about Palestine, even in part of historic Palestine, this is something that I’m committed to do after what happened in Gaza. Gaza is gone. And we are involved with a lot of people who are involved with what’s going on in Gaza. The Board of Peace, the executive committee and so on. And the many actors in the international community, the amount of helplessness and lack of orientation and ability to make decisions and to do things on the ground is just insane. And I don’t want to see that in the coming years when it comes to the whole Palestinian situation because what is threatened now, in a very direct, intensive way since Oct. 7, is the collective political national being of the Palestinians in Palestine. And I’m doing this work in order to just maybe save what is to save there. If we don’t offer a new arrangement, new political vision, if we don’t see this very bad situation as an opportunity to start. I don’t have any illusion. I cannot promise anybody that this solution, or any other solution, similar or different, is going to be implemented tomorrow or next year, or I don’t know when. But history is not static, and we cannot know now when this opening is going to come. We Palestinians are not going to give up. We are there and we insist to be there. This is our place and we are going to continue to struggle.