Today’s post shares the amazing resilience of the Palestinian people and their supporters around the world. . Although I sometimes find myself turning away from the incessant slaughter by the Israeli and U.S. governments I remember that it is a privilege to do so and I turn back to the brave young journalists who bring us the news the mainstream media and its zionist agenda, deny us. All around the world people continue to demonstrate love for the oppressed, the Palestinian people, and the fundamental values of human decency and compassion. The poets and artists below are no exception. Honour them we must, for it is only through acts of sharing we can keep an oppositional culture alive, a culture of peace and negotiation, not of genocide, child-murder, and sadism. As we end 2023, let us look forward to an end of this dark night of the soul.

Dialogic

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

However broken the sentences 
you

believe them preferable to silence
the kind that crowned
the remains of the villag

Kabri was without a fight

or the park now at its entrance,
past the foundation stones beneath the picnic benches
to the fig trees huddled over headstones.
Kabri looms large over heavy branches,
the name a contraband clutched in throats.


Homeland of water, the guide said that
Reshef, who was together with his brother
got hold of a few youngsters,
lined them up

the springs of Kabri quenched all the villages

of Akka, moistened the lips of morning.
He recounted their names
عين مفشوح عين فنارة عين العسل

fired at them with a machine gun. He was a
brave fighter.

songs of plenty their syllables cascading


over us in light soft as apricot skins.

I wonder at these park benches
 perched above the ruins of another woman’s home.

our friend urged us to proceed, it was not too long before
they took us and a few others.

You unsheathe your fear when the body count rises.


You calibrate majorities, try to mitigate the distance
from doorstep to checkpoint. I hear
 the language of sunbirds

trilling in the carob trees,

There a Jewish officer put a gun to my husband’s neck, “You are from Kabri?”

Someone had to choose
to position a park bench with a view of the village
took away my husband, Ibrahim, Hussain, Khalil al-Tamlawi, Uthman, and Raja.

cemetery, of the monument to the conquering
brigade. Your fears demand fortification and I’m left to exhume
An officer asked me not to cry. We slept in the orchards that night. Next morning
the names beneath your settlements, to dust
time off their letters. Find me

on the way to the village courtyard I saw Um Taha. She cried and said,
a language for us to grieve those whose children 
wait

precious few kilometres from the park benches, relegated

“You had better go see your dead husband.” I found him. He was shot in the back of the head.

to a camp’s sewage-filled alleys, to half-streets,
shuttered beneath a net of refuse, the thorn-strewn path. Enough
for each of us, let this language be enough
or let silence
                     final, diluvial.
 
*with italicized excerpts from The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948 by Nafez Nazzal and Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 by Meron Benvenisti.