We are in the 129th day of genocide and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Israeli state with military, economic and moral backing by the U.S. , Germany, U.K. and Canada to name a few. Nicaragua has joined South Africa in a plea for ceasefire through the ICJ. People around the world continue to walk out and take to social media to document our stance in favour of a free Palestine and an end to the atrocity that is Zionism. As the Nazi survivors and people of justice say, “Never again. For anyone.”

But if one thing this brutal violence is teaching me, it is about the link between white supremacists, whether Aryan / Nazi or Zionist. We live in a world where indigenous and colonized peoples are being shown how little our existence and our rights are valued. Liberal universalism and its hegemonic instruments such as the UN, the WHO, the various governments who lead the way in saving brown and black people from ourselves with their blah-blah-blah of human rights and democracy; how does one even take such platitudes seriously?

As the world teeters on the brink of political, economic, and nuclear, abyss, we must not lose sight of hope and resistance . Art and poetry are part of that resistance and play a part in helping us to envision a post-Zionist Palestine, free, from the river to sea. I hope you take the time to hear poets in San Francisco reading with Mosab as they bear witness to his witnessing through poetry. A beautiful evening. “In the thousands, in the billions, we are all Palestinians!”

Reflection

Asmaa Azaizeh —Dabbouria, Lower Galillee

Yesterday, I handed all my poems to my publisher.
I feel like I handed him my head
and the words I speak from now on
will come out of his mouth.
What a disaster!

Disasters don’t show up one at a time.
They arrive in legions like a starving hoard.
A poet said this then died.
For example, half my family died
and after I celebrated the end of that year
my father died.

Since then I’ve let my poems go.
Every night poets get drunk beneath my window
and dictate wise poems to me.
I loathe wisdom.
I invite them in, slaughter them like fattened sheep
and dine on them,
but I still can’t get my voice back.
I glimpse it through the window, crucified
at the top of the mountain.

I’ve become a mere reflection
of a tree stripped naked in a puddle on the road.
Don’t step over me, shade me
from a sun that might pass overhead
and vaporize my trunk.
Maybe I will speak my peace.

I’ll tell you disasters might die out
if you stopped feeding them firewood,
but you won’t hear me,
and the mountain is made of kindling.

Mosab Abu Toha, Obit

To the shadow I had left alone before I
crossed the border, my shadow that stayed
lonely and hid in the dark of the night,
freezing where it was, never needing a visa.
To my shadow that’s been waiting for my return,
homeless except when I was walking by its side
in the summer light.
To my shadow that wishes to go to school
with the children of morning, but couldn’t fit
through the classroom doors.
To my shadow that has caught cold now, that’s been
sneezing and coughing, no one there saying to it God bless!
To my shadow that’s been crushed by cars and vans,
its chest pierced by shrapnel and bullets
flying with no wings,
my shadow that no one’s attending to,
       bleeding black blood
       through its memory
       now, and forever.