Every day of the week, we meet people who have the capacity to lay the world bare at our feet. Criminally, it’s not often that we pay enough attention, that we take the time to listen, that we ask the right questions. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the latest war on the Gaza Strip began, I went back to the recording of an interview I had carried out with Shahd Abusalama, an English-based native of Gaza, the year before.
‘This violence is unsustainable,’ Shahd had said of the then 15-year-long blockade of Gaza, ‘I’m living in the middle of contradictions and I’m always struggling in between those structures of power.’
As October turned into November and one year into the next, I thought of those words and of Shahd as she watched, tortured, what was happening from England. When I travelled to London in January this year to talk with Shahd, her father Ismail was still trapped in the Gaza Strip along with her brother Mohammed and her nieces Eliya and Naya. On 15 March, Ismail arrived in Barcelona to join Shahd’s mother Halima. Mohammed and Eliya and Naya and their mother are in Cairo now. More than 2 million other Gazans remain trapped. This is a story of Shahd and of her family who escaped, and of her family and friends who didn’t.
‘We’d like to stop talking about human things, but stone are no better.’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’, from Time
Outside Shahd’s living room window, a cherry tree is trying to blossom in January. It’s the coldest day of the winter in London. In the park on the other side of Denmark Hill, ice is packed tight against the foot of a tree trunk. The cold front bites at my fingers beneath my gloves. Shahd isn’t wearing any. She pulls the sleeves of her jumper down as far as they will go over her hands. I don’t offer her my gloves.
It’s 17 January, and 163 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours. In Rafah, 19 people are about to die in an Israeli airstrike on the home of the al-Zamili family, while thousands are fleeing to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, trying to escape the onslaught. In Gaza City, where Shahd was born and grew up, the homes of the al-Sharafi, Shama’a and al-Harazin families have been marked for destruction from the air.
For three months, Shahd’s family had been charging phones by car battery to transmit proof of life, but when I met her in mid-January there had been a communications blackout on the Gaza Strip for four days. The days bleed into each other, the mind reels, the skin burns.
She has a week-old message on her phone from her friend Amal Samouni. In 2009, Amal lost her father, brother and 25 other relatives in an Israeli military attack. Amal was left with permanent shrapnel injuries. She was the subject of the 2018 documentary film Samouni Road, which won L’Œil d’or at Cannes. Now, Amal is sheltering in a tent with her children, and three other brothers are missing, taken by Israeli troops. She is asking Shahd for help. Shahd doesn’t know what she can do for her from here.
‘This is another story for you,’ she offers me, ‘There are so many fucking stories that our minds can’t breathe.’
I first met Shahd in Belfast two years ago, where she had come to perform Dabke at a festival of Palestinian culture. We met on one of those rare Belfast mornings when it is both dry enough and warm enough to sit and drink coffee in the street. She had been out until four, partying with locals in a social club formed to raise money for dependents of political prisoners during our own conflict. She was fresh while her boyfriend, who had taken a taxi home at midnight, was looking like Belfast had taken it out of him.
As of this year, Shahd has been living in England a decade. She arrived as a refugee but was issued a British passport last summer. Has it ever felt like home? I ask her. She laughs.
‘One time I came back [to the UK], with a refugee document, and I found it so strange when the officer in the airport – Manchester, I think it was – told me, “Welcome home,” for the first time ever and the only time. You’re so used to coming back and being treated like an outsider; you do have the documents they give us, but we still have to queue with the other nationalities and the biometric is not recognised.’
‘There was another time at the airport, I had my permanent residency at that point, and I had to change my travel documents, so I was given new refugee travel documents with biometrics, and all I was thinking was, “Oooohhh, maybe I’ve been upgraded in the system.” And I went to the lane with the locals, and the lady saw me and asked, “Are you British?” And I was like, “I’m a permanent resident but I have a refugee travel document.” “No, no, you have to go. Change,” she said.
‘Every time you have any encounter with the system, you’re reminded you’re an outsider. It’s alienating, it doesn’t make sense. I’ve lived here 10 years but until last June, I was always investigated upon return to the country. “Where were you?” “What were you up to?”’
Sitting in the flat on Denmark Hill, Shahd tries her father on the phone and gets a recorded message from the network provider: ‘Peace for Gaza, communication has been disconnected, but with our love may Gaza and its people be protected’, is the English translation.
‘Hearing this recording brings all sorts of scenarios into your head. You have nothing that you can do but pray.’
Shahd has done more than pray. Along with those copper-fastened categories of Gazan, Palestinian – of which she is fiercely proud – the lingering feeling of refugee – which she can’t shake off – her new status as British citizen/subject – which she is still weighing up – she is a doctor of philosophy, a dancer of Dabke, an activist, a teacher, a Londoner in that sense that one carves this identity painstakingly out for oneself, a singer, a writer, and a woman touched by rage and hurt and diminishing reserves of hope. She is the author of a blog, Palestine from My Eyes, and a forthcoming book on Gaza, Between Reality and Documentary – but what she has seen of England may be just as crucial to relate.
Three times while teaching at Sheffield Hallam University, where she completed her PhD in Palestinian cinema, Shahd was accused of antisemitism. Three times, she was cleared. However, the third time it happened, she’d had enough and packed her bags for London. She is currently taking a legal case against the university for discrimination.
‘We are all terrified,’ she says of the Palestinian diaspora in England.
‘We know we are really in a horrible position, but because we have our families risking their lives under bombs we don’t talk about it as much, but this is very important. It’s very important to address the vulnerabilities of people like us in a system like the UK that has responsibility for paving the ground for apartheid in 1948 (Al-Nakba – the Catastrophe – is how Palestinians refer to their forced displacement in the aftermath of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine and the formation of Israel). That we don’t talk about it as much is just because we have the priority of saving lives. I can’t remember what it’s like to live normally.’
Not long after she first arrived in London, Shahd helped found the Hawiyya Dance Company to showcase Palestinian Dabke. Is she more at home here, then? Is that why she came back? There is pain etched in her voice when she considers this question. And maybe it’s pain caused by the twisted nature of the query, that I’m asking her to think deep about here when her childhood home in Gaza has been gutted and her father, brother, sister-in-law and nieces lie freezing in a tent on the border with Egypt.
‘It’s a difficult question, to be honest, because I’m at odds with the system wherever I go. But I just thought that, in London, maybe because it’s where I founded my Dabke group and my oldest friends are still here …’.
As often happens, her thought trails off, returning to her family in Gaza before boomeranging back to England.
‘They are living a nightmarish reality. They were displaced again from central Gaza, from Nuseirat [refugee camp], most of its residents fled; our relatives who hosted my family are all displaced and pitching tents. My family has managed to pitch a tent at Rafah. The freezing weather at night is unbearable, they go to great lengths to get water, to get wood, to cook something – my God, the risks they have to take. Every day, they worry whether they have enough to feed the children. Sometimes, the adults don’t eat because they prioritise the child.
‘We’ve been disconnected from our family in the north, my uncles, my aunties, cousins … in Jabalia refugee camp, they chose to remain and some of them can’t leave – my two uncles, they’re older than the Israeli state, they were five when they were first made refugees, and now we can’t get in touch with them, their homes are destroyed. One of them, Hader, lost his daughter Rana and two of her children [On 23 October last year, Rana, 40, was killed along with her children Mohammed, 5, and Naama, 7, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Jabaila. Heba, 35, wife of another of Shahd’s cousins, was killed in the same attack, along with her children Leen, 12, Jihad, 10, and Sham, 5].
‘My oldest uncle, Abu Sama, is like a moving history of the land, he knows so much, he is very educated as a nurse, he was displaced so many times and he is hardly mobile, he’s in a wheelchair – they live now in their bombed house, there’s a room that is still intact. The schools are full, UN schools are not safe despite what international status they have, and so people return to their bombed homes: whatever is there is good enough, even if it doesn’t have a roof, even if it doesn’t have standing walls.
‘I never really felt at home in this country, and for somebody with my history, it’s hard to reconcile … to constantly feel like you matter less or you don’t matter at all … the ethnic cleansing facing my family has shattered me into a thousand pieces. Is it supposed to be like this? Is it normal? I’m supposedly now British and I should feel more care from the system, but I don’t feel any difference in my reality, I don’t feel any defence. When it comes to my family, I don’t feel like the system cares at all – they’re opposing a ceasefire, what is more disturbing than that?
‘Since coming to England I’ve missed a lot, including culture, and Dabke has been an important part of my life since I was a child in Gaza. Much of people’s perception of Palestine here is viewed through destruction and loss, and I wanted to be part of changing this image to remind people that our culture is grounded in the land, that it speaks to our history in the land, and this is what Dabke symbolises for me, and it felt like a great honour to speak it and perform it in front of international audiences to remind them that Palestinians are not just strugglers. They say that if there is no culture, there is no people, and providing this culture was my way of resisting the image, the negative images that people associate with Gaza and reminding them of our culture, our music and our depth.’
Shahd was educated at the United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City, in part by Huda Hamada, whose speciality was science. Huda is dead now, killed along with her husband, two sons, one a journalist, and a daughter, a pharmacist, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Al-Saftawi Street in mid-October 2023, next door to where Shahd grew up.
Shahd took what she learned from the likes of Huda to England with her, where she threw herself into the life of the place. But maybe this has been her undoing, why she had booked a one-way ticket out of here when I talked to her. Maybe she would go to Barcelona, to stay with her mother, who escaped Gaza over Christmas. If she had kept her head down, stopped seeing back home, or saying nothing here of what she still saw there, then maybe … I mean, England’s culture is no longer based on crude notions of white supremacism, it’s adaptable if the subject is mouldable, it can accommodate the once foreign at the highest echelons of power if simple but fundamental premises are accepted, a monopoly on violence on the world stage being one. If Shahd had shut the fuck up, she could’ve fit right in, gone far even. The Dabke could have been rendered quaint, the turns of phrase adorable.
‘But imagine the cost of living like that,’ she replies instantly when I put this to her.
‘It gives an insight into the type of society I live within, function within, that speaking on the part of the oppressed is making me a target, making me unsafe and is playing into my thoughts of leaving the country for good.’
But what about the benefits of living in a democracy – political participation without crackdown, cultural production without censure?
‘Except if you’re Palestinian, this is the exception, Palestine is the exception. I’ve seen it even before this, you’ve seen it, and it’s really the litmus test; I see it now as a test for humanity, there’s no excuse for ignorance now, we’re not in 1948, we’re not in World War Two when criminals could get away with their crimes and millions could die before any accountability or change. We live in different times, and genocide is being broadcast on live TV and people are being killed in their tens of thousands. There are areas where people have no clue how many people are dead.’
‘Watch your brothers die on TV, and don’t move, they are in a new world, although with no exit’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’
If Ruskin Park was cold, Shahd’s flat is colder still. She moves to turn on an electric heater, a radiator on wheels that trundles over the floor like an armoured car, and then she hesitates. She asks me to help her fix the living room door. What’s the point of the heater if the door is lying open?
The door has come off its hinge at the top. I look at the hinge and ask for a screwdriver. As if I know what I’m doing. She brings instead a power drill and I insist upon a screwdriver, attempting a tone of authority. I look at the hinge and look again, talking about maybe needing a new one while contemplating the metal, hefting the door back and forward, up and down off the floor. Shahd digs a screwdriver out from beneath the kitchen sink and I’m able to determine that it’s a star and that the screws are stars. I turn the screwdriver, but the screws stay loose and the door unstable, ‘No,’ I sigh, ‘new hinge.’ ‘Thank you,’ she laughs. I mutter some shit about spring being a long time coming and ask for more words.
‘Every town we performed in was so special, the Dabke itself brought amazing reactions from the people wherever we performed,’ she says.
‘We had a lot of demand on us to perform at so many events, and it would be the central thing that drew people in. Always, it was breath-taking for people to watch that they’d want us again, again, again; in Cornwall they want us again, Belfast they want us again. It has a very powerful impact on people. The steps itself take a lot of inspiration from the movement of the peasant, it’s the peasant folk dance, and together with the music they make a fiery atmosphere.
‘Often, because I’m the speaker, it’s through me that the poems come in. We don’t just dance to music but we also try to make a narrative of the music, so after five minutes of dance, we have sometimes poems to give us a breather, and it would be my voice that’s reciting the poems. I sometimes sing as well, not just perform Dabke, but I would be a dancer most of the time.
‘I came here with an awareness that I have privileges that not many of my classmates had, and not because I’m smarter or whatever but just because of inequality, and so I came here with awareness of my privilege in comparison to others who I left behind, and at least here, despite all the restrictions, I don’t have the worries of sudden bombings or power cuts and water cuts. And I tried to use that privilege, but I still have survivor’s guilt to this day, ten years later.’
To hear Shahd talk of privilege in these terms seems almost absurd. To escape death by bombing when so many of your loved ones and compatriots haven’t, to still have windows in your walls when your relatives don’t, to call that privilege is to torture the word beyond recognition. But there’s also a concrete reality to what she says: her father, Ismail, who spent 13 years in Israeli prisons for alleged involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a landlord, renting out three flats, before Shahd’s family were forced to leave Gaza City in the face of the Israeli advance. Shahd insists he could never have brought himself to evict anyone for failing to pay rent.
‘I’ve thought it about long and deep, but I think the selfish culture comes from the privilege, the sense of privilege, and it’s people feeling like, “Oh, this doesn’t affect us, we don’t care,”’ Shahd says.
‘This attitude, the selfishness that comes from privilege, there needs to be a lot of reflection on this here, there’s probably a lesson that they could take from Palestine, with the social togetherness and the social support that people provide to one another even at times when basic necessities are insufficient or unavailable.
‘I grew up in a society that had destitution and poverty, but I’d never seen a homeless person. Palestinians understand that life is about struggle, and we learned this a very hard way and try to support each other as much as possible. Money has lost its value in Gaza; if you have money you don’t have anything to buy, and if you don’t have money there’s hardly anything you can buy because most things are very expensive because they don’t exist as usual.
‘I’ve seen my family sitting outside the home, just sitting and waiting for God’s mercy, and I would be talking to them, checking on them [by video call], “How are you? How was your night? What did you have for breakfast?” Things like that, and I would see people coming past and they would be like, “Please come, sit here, anything you need, whatever you need, we’re family.” Every home is open these days because there could be anybody who’s suddenly homeless or doesn’t have shelter. My uncles keep shuffling around homes, it’s incredible, but without the social solidarity people couldn’t have survived – they share everything, even a loaf of bread. And the oldest are sacrificing themselves for the young, oh God.’
But here, thank God, no one is sacrificing themselves for the young, so, I suggest to Shahd, should she be grateful for the shelter England has offered her, for taking her in, providing her a passport, offering her an education?
‘There are many people in the UK who want to expel me or deport me, I’ve seen a lot of hate like this,’ she says.
‘It’s absolutely astonishing that we’re expected to show gratitude for living and being conditioned to live like second-class citizens in this country, it shouldn’t be normalised. The feeling of being a refugee has never escaped me. Since last June, I am British, and, for once, I thought maybe my British citizenship could save my family. I tried to talk to my MP, I emailed her multiple times, and after so long, after ignoring my emails for so long, finally I received an email from her parroting the Israeli narrative and trying to explain it from the Israeli perspective. She ignored the whole thing about my family in her reply, didn’t ask how they were, nothing whatsoever, it’s as if she didn’t even take note that I was writing to her on behalf of my family.
‘And the gratefulness? Do you know how I feel? I feel so angry, so outraged. You know what, just before deciding to leave, I was like, “God, how long is this is going to continue, this nightmare that we’re living?” I can’t find work, I can’t work, I can’t function as a human being, I almost forgot what it’s like to live normally, I don’t know what’s normal. I applied for the job centre and there’s just no understanding whatsoever. I live in emergency times and I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. I could look at my phone now … I don’t know what’s going to happen, I didn’t know that my mum was going to be in Spain.
‘For the first time ever, I felt, “Okay, maybe it’s good to use the system to relieve a bit of the financial burden on myself,” and when I did, it felt like harassment, honestly, that I had to keep reminding them that my family is under constant bombing, that they’re in a tent, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what my day is going to be like, if I might have to travel all of a sudden and be with my mum. I can’t attend every day, a meeting once a week or twice a week, can there be another way to communicate? By phone? And they were like, it has to be in person. How do you expect me to really engage with these processes now? It felt like they really don’t see our humanity and they’re just like, with a straight face, “This is what Universal Credit means. You need to be attending meetings in order to get.”’
‘When she said that she was water and light, they started to eat something bitter and hard in the dark… That’s to say they didn’t hear the storm’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’
Dear England is showing at the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street. ‘The country that gave the world football has since delivered a painful pattern of loss,’ is how they sell it, ‘Why can’t England’s men win at their own game?’ The ads slide past on the wall as the escalator ascends towards Liverpool Street.
Outside in the light, David Cameron has ordered the Royal Air Force into action against the Houthis. Eighty per cent of people in Yemen eat once a day. Kids are taught in caves because Saudi Arabia – with the RAF’s assistance – already bombed the schools. Impeding free trade is the Houthis’ crime this time, putting their necks on the line for the people of Palestine. Leaders like Cameron can still pick a fight for England’s enlisted men when they want to. Trade must be free.
‘It’s dangerous times, not just for Palestine but for the whole world,’ Shahd says.
‘If a school or a hospital or a bakery or an ambulance is allowed to be bombed in Gaza and that’s gone unnoticed or normalised, then why be surprised if those become legitimate targets in any other place in the world? Schools and churches and mosques, residential homes, it’s just causing unnecessary destruction just for fun and experimenting with their military innovations on our bodies and our lands.
‘When you’re young, you think there’s a possibility for change. I came here with lots of energy, and I did give so much energy into this place. And you’d think that now, with the whole situation that Israel created with the dispersion of Palestinians and so many being in the Global North in respected positions, you’d think that there would be a little more sympathy, more sensitivity. On the ground, in the terms of mobilisations, you’ve never seen the gap so stark between the people and the leadership like we did in the past three months.’
Ismail, at 72, is a fit man. Every morning, he would go swimming in the Mediterranean. He was in the sea with Shahd’s mother Halima when the attack out of Gaza began on 7 October. In the panic of trying to get out of the water, he injured his shoulder. Later, when the family were forced to flee Nuseirat refugee camp, after their earlier eviction from Al Siftawi Street, he went out on a donkey cart looking for shelter for the family, including his grandchildren, one five years old, another five months, ‘a storage unit, anything that was not a tent’, in Shahd’s words, when there were explosions nearby, the donkeys panicked – ‘imagine, donkeys panic!’ – and rushed in each other’s direction, crushing Ismail’s knees between them. Now, he can barely walk 50 metres at a time and has regular bouts of fainting.
On Denmark Hill, on her phone, Shahd shows me photographs of the family home on Al Siftawi Street, built by Ismail, next door to Huda’s bombed out house, the insides now reduced to char. In October, Shahd had sent me a photo of Halima and Ismail in the living room, preparing to go on a demonstration against their imminent displacement, sunlight creeping in past the curtains, through the white archways. Amid the devastation, cushions are what I notice. In the photo from before, a cushion acts as a guardian of normality, lying plonked against the arm of the sofa, holding up the background while Halima and Ismail showcase a red-and-white keffiyeh and the flag of Palestine. In the later photos, Halima and Ismail are gone and the yellow foam is hanging out of the cushions. The coverings have been punctured and scorched, the curtains have collapsed, the windows are broken and the archways are black.
It seems obvious that we should feel uncomfortable when we’re confronted with scenes like this, stories like these, but what is this discomfort really? What is it not? It’s not guilt, shame or helplessness – we’re not helpless. It’s not inadequacy and it’s not rage. It’s lazy halfway-house resignation. Here we are resigning ourselves, letting our legs catch the breeze, dangling from the precipice, our eyelids drooping, perched at the end of the world. Our sensibility for the world and those in it dies from disinterest, not exhaustion, and this angers Shahd.
‘It shouldn’t be normalised that people under the same system are afforded different rights,’ she says.
‘The stratification of rights is against the very principle that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims to champion, and the stratification of rights has been part and parcel of oppression in Palestine – it’s not functioning in this way here, but we have to make it serious, take a serious note of how stratifications of rights can lead to more division, more hate, more violence.
‘I really came here thinking I could be a positive force for my people, and I thought, despite all the flaws of the system that excluded and alienated me, I enjoyed a privilege and access to platforms which my peers in Gaza don’t have access to, and I try to use that as much as possible, with hope that something will change.
‘I graduated from here, I lived a lot of my life here, I thought maybe there was still something to offer, or something to take from this place, the downfalls outweigh … I’ve booked already my flight to Spain, a one-way flight. I’ll see how it goes with my mum, and the job-hunting process, but so far I haven’t been lucky with anything I applied for in this country and I feel, even before all this started, I felt that I was punished for who I am. I applied for so many positions, I think it’s related to what happened in Sheffield. If you Google me, you will see a lot of bad things, a lot of bad coverage.
‘I don’t want to give up hope on the people because I can see people are trying, but the system is overpowering and now I see things at a depth that not many people can see because of my background and my personal encounter with the system. I see how it’s not welfare that is driving the government and its polices, it’s not world peace, it’s economics, it’s exploitation and it’s warfare. And it’s sad, it’s really sad that at the most multicultural of times that the world has ever experienced, with all these movements across continents – we’re not homogeneous societies anymore, whether here or there – despite this, the world order that has been consolidated since World War Two is still maintaining those realities, unequal realities. It defines my existence, it defines my interaction with the world, and I’m sure it defines many people’s interactions with the world if they belong to a racialised community, but if you don’t feel it and it doesn’t affect you, you’re probably privileged and need to reflect and appreciate what you’ve got and use what you’ve got to make it available to others.
‘In Ukraine, it took eight days to issue sanctions – the international system has never been mobilised that quickly. Do you remember the protests in Hong Kong? They opened routes for people from Hong Kong to come and settle here, they offered the same to Ukrainian refugees, and I don’t know if you noticed but if you land at any UK airport you see banners greeting refugees from Ukraine and you think, ‘Woah, what a treatment.’ You’ve never seen this treatment extended to any other people. Like, imagine: I’d love to come back and see a banner guiding Palestinian refugees, but it’s only Ukrainian refugees, so there’s power politics even when it comes to refugees. This is pain and a struggle, this should be universal regardless of what power you have, the treatment of those people should be universal, and there are treaties that afford these people running away from wars the protection rights they need, but then you see all these countries making up double standards, sometimes implementing them, sometimes not.
‘It’s no surprise when you see me and other people who have families in Gaza who are glued to the screen, because we get our news from the screen … I saw on Al Jazeera news that the Israeli army had been setting fire to homes in Al Siftawi, and then we knew that our home was bombed. At that time, my uncle and cousins in the north, they went for a visit to the house, my house, and they saw the destruction. The house next door was completely flattened, the debris all around, and also our house itself had been directly hit by shells.
‘Later, we learned that they burned it, they burned everything, they burned our home. We’ve been seeing videos of the Israeli army setting fire, with impunity, to homes for no reason, just for entertainment. These videos, they left us all in shock. The burning means your memory is burned too, they’re not just destroying, they’re erasing our memories; family albums are burning, everything. My mum, she came to terms with the fact that her embroidered clothes, which are so precious to her, have also been burned, that the family albums are burned.
‘Another family was showing me their photo albums, and I was enjoying it! And all of a sudden it occurred to me that these albums that I’m looking at with this family, my family doesn’t have that now, and I had a panic attack … There is no future for the house.’
Even without the houses on Al Saftawi Street, without Huda Hamada and her children, there must be a future. Nobody, no matter what they claim, fights for the past. It’s 2 February, and transportation company Kuehne+Nagel has confirmed it has severed all ties with the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit. It’s 9 February and there are worried comments in the pages of the Financial Times on the impact of a boycott campaign in support of justice for Palestinians. It’s 12 February, and ‘hell is falling down’ upon the civilians of Rafah. Every weekend in London tens of thousands have been marching for a ceasefire.
Day by day, the future swings like a pendulum. Everywhere it swings back and forth, everywhere but in Gaza. Because in Gaza, the bravest people on the face of today’s earth grasp the future in their hands, not letting it get further away from their children, colouring it with clumps of Palestinian soil. Their grip relents not even when their hands are severed by the past.
‘It’s never been so obvious that the status quo is not representing the people in the streets,’ says Shahd.
‘I believe that there is so much pain festering in so many homes, not just Palestinians; anybody with any shred of humanity is horrified to see the images and to hear the news that’s coming from Gaza. Even people who have no relation to Gaza. Everybody can see what’s going on, despite the filtering of the news in Western mainstream media and despite all the twisting and the propaganda and Israel claiming to be the victim here, despite its support by even greater military superpowers. It’s a sense of immunity that spreads in the messed-up psyche of these politicians.
‘They really need to do a lot of unlearning to free themselves of their colonial legacy, of the British Empire, and see the world from the perspective of those who were under the brutality of the British Empire. Palestine Action, for example, gives me hope that there are people who are willing to use their privilege, to put their bodies on the line to shut down arms factories.
‘I think something like that, focusing on these spaces afforded to us, in terms of direct action, using one’s privilege to denormalise the presence of such lethal and destructive factories so close to our living spaces, our universities and schools, there should be really more compassion, taking responsibility for the system and take steps to change.’
‘Stay strong,’ I’d told Shahd that day on Denmark Hill, laying my gloved hand on her arm before retreating to the train. Absurd imprecation. Things of nothing. Weakness mocking strength from behind its intricate firewalls. Doing the bare minimum will be the death of us.
‘Let’s not bother to fear those who insult our insubordination, the conquered will always have the last word’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’