Israel Has Buried Gaza in Rubble, But Our Love for the Land Will Always Survive |
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
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I have never chosen to adopt the title of “refugee,” yet it keeps haunting me. It is scribbled on my Palestinian national identification card and follows my name in human rights conferences. It serves as a cruel mark to be treated as marginalized and homeless. It is a word I have unconsciously repeated in my head as I sat through history lectures, summing up the root of the dystopia we are living in. Each time, I feel a lingering urge to uproot it from my own identity.
I asked my history teacher once: “Until when will I be labeled a refugee?” Steadily, she said, until “we return to our homeland again.”
My roots trace back to Beersheba, a town in southern Palestine. Although I have never stepped foot there, I have imagined it after hearing my grandmother’s stories. I felt its sand slipping through my fingers when I touched her wrinkles, and I believed that our return was inevitable because she continued to hold on to the key to our home there — the home we were expelled from during the 1948 Nakba.
And tragically, my grandmother was killed — but her lingering belief was not: The land never dies.
The Zionist project continued to expand after 1948, seizing more swaths of land and stripping its Indigenous people of their property while attempting to drain every means they had to resist. On March 30, 1976, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories rose up against Israeli policies of a new order of land confiscation in al-Jalil. It was the first unarmed mass uprising and protest after years of intimidation following the Nakba, yet it was met with the deadliest violence — six Palestinians were killed, and hundreds were injured, along with others arrested. The sacrifice was too costly. But it was still a turning point in Palestinian history, as Israeli military forces retreated from the expropriation campaign.
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Ever since, Palestinians — inside, across the diaspora, and beyond — have commemorated this day in honor of those who stood so unflinchingly, refusing to abandon their homes and renewing their unbreakable commitment to the land and to its people.
Five decades later, Land Day in Gaza resonated heavily. After two years of genocide drenched the land in blood and buried it in rubble, over 93 percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been flattened, and its Indigenous people have been displaced, turned into refugees on their own lands. More than 53 percent of Gaza’s territory is now out of reach, sitting under complete Israeli control, while the remaining population of nearly 2 million — those of us who have survived annihilation — are crammed into less than half of Gaza’s 141 square miles.
Yet, this year, Land Day coincided with Israel’s Knesset approving a new death penalty bill to execute Palestinian prisoners convicted of “terrorist acts” by hanging. The timing of the law was never accidental; it was deeply meant to shatter the collective pride that sweeps through this day every year, and to trap Palestinians in endless atrocities,........