Nida Liftawiya
بنت فلسطين
Daughter of Palestine
Source: PFLP Bulletin Number 49 – Back Cover. Marc Rudin/Jihad Mansour, 1981, https://www.palestineposterproject.org/posters/pflp-bulletin-number-49-back-cover.
This essay is part of a robust tradition of Palestinians writing about Revolutionary Love, including the work of Devin Atallah, Sarah Ihmoud, and Eman Ghanayem. It is a depiction of two parts of my life. The first part references my childhood during the 1980’s and 1990’s; at that time, I was growing up in the West Bank and spending summers at my grandmother’s house in a refugee camp. The second part represents my interpretation of the current genocide of my people in occupied Palestine. This piece is thus written to highlight how, in response to the occupation, Palestinians have created a revolutionary love and steadfast dedication to our homeland and liberation. Therefore, the past and present parts are not separate stories. Rather, they are two parts of one story that stem from the same root, planted deep, deep in Falasteen.
When I came to the United States at nineteen, someone I had known for a few months, a roommate, told me they loved me. That was odd for me. I wondered what they meant by it. How did they love me? In Palestine, I’d never heard anyone tell someone “I love you” so casually. I’d rarely heard my own parents say that to us or their own families. There are no empty words, مافيش كلام فاضي. Maybe Palestinians were just forced to love differently.
On a quiet day in mukhayem shu’fat {shu’fat refugee camp}, peaceful and sweet, with the warm aromas of my sity’s {grandmother} cooking, my khalo {uncle} working outside, my cousins and I are watching TV. Imagine. Too soon the tear gas stabs through the sweetness of the day. Instinctively — my sity, cousins and I run to close the windows — then too late, we realize the canister is inside the house. The canister is inside the house! Out of nowhere, my khalo appeared, opened a window – grabbed me and my three cousins. He carried us, hanging from his neck, arms, and back, outside, so we could breathe and my sity held onto his waist to weigh us all down. Palestinian love looks like this.
For almost a century, our bodies, our culture, our labor, our loves, our children, and our land have been under constant attack by our occupiers. Due to the killing of goodness that consequently comes with occupation and colonization, our love has evolved. We love in a way that centers integrity, commitment, and solidarity as driving forces in the Palestinian struggle for liberation and justice, whether it’s shown within our own communities or globally, as we are seeing today.
Mukhayem {Refugee camp} kids, playing in front of my aunt’s house. Dust everywhere. Scrappy clothes. Barefoot cousins. Imagine. The screams sharply stop our play. We watch in horror as a veiled mother runs barefoot after an Israeli jeep, yelling Wakfu! Wakfu! Walad izgheer! {Stop. Stop. He’s a little boy} Imagine, the jeep stops and she’s able to grab onto it, only for them to keep going and drag her along with them, all the while… wailing for her son. Palestinian love looks like this.
We show love in deeds: we witness, we act, we support, we write, we perform, we uplift, we fight, we embody. This concept is exemplified and can be seen in everyday actions in Palestine. I saw it myself in Ramallah in the 1980’s as a child of the Intifada. My mother would give us pots of food to hide on street corners for freedom fighters — this was an act of revolutionary love. She was part of a network nourishing our resistance. We loved our freedom fighters then, as we do now: unconditionally and with all confidence. And, we know without any doubts that they love us just as strongly. We are experiencing their love, for they fight and literally die for Palestine and Palestinians!
My mother was the best cook I had ever known, then and now. I’d watch her chop vegetables and chicken into simmering pots all day. Smelling the goodness I would inherit in just a few hours. Imagine. She gives each one of us a pot to take to the street corners up above our home, to cover them with cardboard and hide them well. It would be nourishment for our freedom fighters. She would send us along and say, it was akel lal shabab {food for the young folks}, so we had to khabee emneeh {hide it good}. Palestinian love looks like this.
We see it in other ways, more exaggerated because of the extreme and violent destruction in Gaza. We see teachers offering hope to poor orphans who lost everything, men dressing as clowns to make the children remember smiles, hope, and happiness, people who are not cooks and who are also being starved cooking for the masses, artists sharing stories and art of resilience, men digging under the rubble with their bare hands to help those buried beneath, women nourishing our people in all different ways, journalists who are having their entire families annihilated but still report from the rubble, children, drawing their flags in hopes of freedom. This is what Palestinian Love — revolutionary love — looks like.
Military curfew. Can’t go outside, can’t go outside, can’t go outside. With broken non-brand crayons, we color Palestinian flags on white lined notebook paper. Imagine, our notebook paper flags are done, and we check if the coast is clear. I sneak downstairs, and run out to the sidewalk, hurriedly staple the flags onto the wooden pole, and run back in. Moments later, through the window we watch Israeli soldiers walk down our street. One stops by the pole, takes out a cigarette, lights and inhales. Then sets our flag on fire. Hot angry tears well up in my eyes. I look down at my little brother, who has already started coloring the next flag! Palestinian love looks like this.
Our love is an act of resistance against our occupiers and in the face of the constant abuse, racism, disappearances, checkpoints, land theft, humiliation, erasure. Palestinian love is practiced actively (not only toward ourselves, but also toward our loved ones, our people, and our land). We love and live in the hopes of dismantling the occupation and its oppressive treatment of us, and of returning home one day. We show up for each other tangibly and emotionally, laboring for justice, and healing each other in all aspects of our lives.
My father was a free born Palestinian man, who died occupied. Imagine. I must have been eight or nine when my father took me with him in his blue Peugeot pickup truck. He spoke about his mother on the ride, saying she would have loved us if she was still on this side. He parked off the side of a mountain cliff, with stunning views of an old village, ruins frozen stiff, and then said, “Yallah {come on} let’s look at this” he pointed and said, “That’s where I was born. That house right there… that house is yours” and handed down a big metal key, the key that will be used when we return. Home. Free. Palestinian love looks like this.
In Palestine, the love and connection we have for our history, for our land, for our culture, and for our people, uplifts our struggle and keeps it at the forefront of everything we are. As we are seeing, Palestinian Revolutionary Love now begets international solidarity and action from people around the world: to show up for us in the fight for justice and for an end to this occupation and holocaust of the Palestinians. Because for far too long, we have been on this road alone.
Kids sneak out of school, with rocks in their pockets, to join the older kids, in defense of our country. Imagine. Fifteen year old me, screaming as I threw rocks at the tank up ahead, not knowing if it reached but knowing it was all I had left. The colonial occupation was shooting rubber coated steel bullets at us. My classmate from Deir Dibwan, the one with the golden hazel eyes, pushed me to the ground and laid his body on top of mine. I then felt the vibration of every rubber-coated steel bullet that hit his body. Palestinian love looks like this.
Since this latest stage of the ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestinians in Palestine, there has been a multitude of people who have moved beyond passive observation and have become active participants in the fight for justice in Palestine: that is revolutionary love. It is a love that has not been (and will never be) squashed by the violent, century-long occupation. This fight for justice highlights the interconnectedness of all struggles for liberation and the idea that justice for one group means we must have justice for all. That’s why we chant “Globalize the intifada!” Palestinian love, our revolutionary and active love, has resonated throughout the world. It has now become a call for thawra ثورة revolution, urging all oppressed communities to unite and fight for liberation.
Children playing hide-and-seek, their laughter echoing through Lifta’s lush green valley. They run between the different levels of the mountain’s sanaseel {retaining stone walls}. Imagine. We’ve returned home, almost like no time has passed, almost like we’ve never been gone at all. Once we were strangers on foreign lands, and now just wilad 3ami {my cousins}. Imagine us, strolling beneath the Lifta fig trees, plucking straight from the earth, feeding our sweet teeth. Watching our children run around together, creating shared memories. Dear reader – don’t you worry – Palestine will be liberated, one day, she will be free. One day we will all return, with our families, with our pride and with our dignity. Palestinian love looks like this.
!ثورة ثورة حتى النصر
Revolution Revolution Until Victory!