Vijay Prashad
Dear friends,
Greetings from
the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Pain shudders
through the arteries of global society. Day after day passes by as the genocide
against the Palestinian people continues and the conflicts in the Great Lakes
region of Africa and Sudan escalate. More and more people slip into absolute
poverty as arms companies’ profits soar. These realities have hardened society,
allowing people to bury their heads and ignore the horrors unfolding across the
world. Ferocious disregard for the pain of others has become a way to protect
oneself from the inflation of suffering. What can one do with the wretchedness
that has come to define life across the planet? What can I do? What can you do?
In 2015, the
Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour wrote Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum(Resist, My
People, Resist Them), for which she was arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli
state. A poem that can send you to prison is a powerful poem. A state
threatened by a poem is an immoral state.
Resist, my people, resist them.
In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and
breathed my sorrows to God.
I carried the soul in my palm
for an Arab Palestine.
I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful
solution’,
never lower my flags
until I evict them from my homeland
and make them kneel for a time to come.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the settler’s robbery
and follow the caravan of martyrs.
Shred the disgraceful constitution
that has imposed relentless humiliation
and stopped us from restoring our rights.
They burned blameless children;
As for Hadeel, they sniped her in public,
killed her in broad daylight.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.
Pay no mind to his agents among us
who shackle us with illusions of peace.
Do not fear the Merkava [Israeli army
tanks];
the truth in your heart is stronger,
as long as you resist in a land
that has lived through raids and victory.
Ali called from his grave:
resist, my rebellious people,
write me as prose on the agarwood,
for you have become the answer to my
remains.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist, my people, resist them.
‘Hadeel’ in the
poem refers to Hadeel al-Hashlamoun (age 18), who was shot dead by an Israeli
soldier on 22 September 2015. This murder took place alongside a wave of
shootings—many fatal—against Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in
the West Bank. On that day, Hadeel came to Checkpoint 56 on al-Shuhada Street
in Hebron (Occupied Palestinian Territory). The metal detector beeped, and the
soldiers told her to open her bag, which she did. Inside was a phone, a blue
Pilot pen, a brown pencil case, and other personal belongings. A soldier yelled
at her in Hebrew, which she did not understand. Thirty-four-year-old Fawaz Abu
Aisheh, who was nearby, intervened and told her what was being said. More
soldiers arrived and aimed their guns at both Hadeel and Fawaz. One soldier
fired a warning shot and then shot Hadeel in the left leg.
At this point, a
soldier, claiming he saw a knife, fired several shots into Hadeel’s chest, who
was photographed standing still moments before. After being left on the ground
for some time, she was taken to a hospital, where she died of blood loss and multi-system
failure resulting from the gunshot wounds. Human rights organisations such as
Amnesty International and B’Tselem said that the question of the knife was moot
since Hadeel had been the subject of an ‘extrajudicial execution’ (let alone
the fact that testimonies about the knife were inconsistent). Tatour’s
depiction of Hadeel’s execution in broad daylight is a powerful reminder of the
waves of violence that structure the daily lives of Palestinians.
A month after
Hadeel was killed, I met a group of teenagers in a refugee camp near Ramallah.
They told me that they see no outlet for their frustrations and anger. What
they do see is the daily humiliation of their families and friends by the
Occupation, which drives them to desperation. ‘We have to do something’, Nabil
says. His eyes are tired. He looks older than his teenage years. He has lost
friends to Israeli violence. ‘We marched to Qalandiya last year in a peaceful
protest’, Nabil tells me. ‘They fired at us. My friend died’. Colonial violence
bears down on his spirit. Around him young children are executed with impunity
by the Israeli military. Nabil’s body twitches with anxiety and fear.
I have thought
about those teenagers often, especially over the last year, which has been
defined by the escalation of the U.S.-Israeli genocide against Palestinians. I
think of them because of the barrage of stories about young people like Hadeel
and Nabil’s friend being killed by Israeli troops not just in Gaza, but in the
West Bank.
On 3 November
2024, fourteen-year-old Naji al-Baba from Halhul, north of Hebron, came home
from school with his father Nidal Abdel Moti al-Baba. They ate molokhia, his
favourite, for lunch, and then Naji told his father he was going to play
football. Naji and his friends played next to his grandfather’s shop. Israeli
soldiers arrived and shot at the boys, hitting Naji in the pelvis, foot, heart,
and shoulder. After the funeral, Nasser Merib, the manager of the Halhul Sports
Club, where Naji practised, said that he had a strong right foot. ‘He was
ambitious and dreamed of becoming international like Ronaldo’. That dream was
destroyed by the Israeli occupation.
The death of a
young person is an unforgivable act. The death of a child is particularly hard
to fathom. Naji could have captained the Palestinian football team. Hadeel
could have become an extraordinary scientist. Their families look at the
photographs that remain and weep. In Gaza, other families sit in tents with no
way to remember their lost children, their bodies obliterated or missing and
their pictures turned to ash in the rubble. So much death. So much inhumanity.
If time and
struggle allow us, we will be able to properly awaken the dreams of humanity.
But the night before dawn will be long and hard. We crave humanity, but we do
not expect it to arrive easily. Small voices call out for a new world, and many
feet march to build it. To get there will require putting an end to war and
occupation and to the ugliness of capitalism and imperialism. We know that we
live in pre-history, in the era before true human history will begin. How we
long for that socialist world, where Naji and Hadeel will have a future before
them and not just a brief interlude in our world.
Happy New Year.
May it bring us closer to humanity.
Warmly,
Vijay
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