From Amman, looking towards Palestine

Amman street art, looking towards Palestine.

Amman is a city haunted by Palestine. It is filled with Nabulsi soap and Nabulsi kanafe. Stores with names beginning with Ramallah, Jaffa, Palestine, Al Quds. Kuffieyehs everywhere. T-shirts depicting Palestine, coupled with slogans of return and longing. Gold pendents in the shape of Palestine hanging from the rear mirrors in taxis. Hand-knit watermelon pins on coats. Bookstores crammed with titles reflecting everything Palestinians and other advocates (Jewish and otherwise) have been saying for so long to a mostly deaf world: Tracing Homelands; Going Home; Looking for Palestine; Stranger in my Own Land; Seeking Palestine; Justice for Some; Perfect Victims; We are Not Numbers…and Gaza. So many titles on Gaza: The World After Gaza; Gaza, an Inquiry into its Martyrdom; A Genocide Foretold; Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza; Genocide in Gaza.

I notice this whenever I come to Jordan. But I am struck by it even moreso this time.

Everyone here is talking about Palestine, whether foreigners or locals. You overhear it in every cafe, in conversations all around you.

Exile here is like a scent you catch on the breeze. You feel it in the air, the unhealed, ongoing, unending lament and longing. Palestine hangs heavy in the air over Jordan.

Like a lady I met at the Amman Baptist church a few years ago. She told me that she is from Bethlehem. I told her I love Bethlehem and that I’ve lived there from time to time. I saw the pain flash across her eyes. She sighed deeply and told me she wished she could do the same. I felt ashamed of my privilege, my insensitivity.

This undying connection is something I really wish that the Western world understood. And even more so, that Israelis understood.

Any so-called peace deal that does not recognize Palestinian attachment to Palestine, that tries to downplay it, ignore it, shame it, mock it, belittle it, break it, minimize it, scorn it, starve it; erase it, imprison it, bribe it, breadcrumb it, genocide it, apartheid it, red-tape it into oblivion or beat it into submission will fail.

True, the old have died, as Ben Gurion predicted, but the young have not forgotten. And they never will.

And neither will others in the world who see what is happening to them. Especially after Gaza.

All the world’s cutting-edge spyware and facial recognition techniques and AI-empowered killing programs and white phosphorus and dumdum bullets and two thousand pound bombs and double-tap strikes and prevented ambulances and flying checkpoints and new watchtowers and skunk water and teargas and control over undeclared borders and hundreds of new road blockades and humiliating strip searches and armed settler militias and indefinite detentions and torture and burnt olive trees and smashed homes and erased libraries and economic strangleholds and social intimidation and smeared reputations and jobs lost and VISAS withheld and endless “collateral damage,” measured by children’s skulls and baby teeth cannot beat the human spirit into submission.

These methods are all inorganic, like plastic. Like something concocted in a laboratory. Like things that taste like metal in the back of your throat. Like pixels in a computer screen. Like a song composed by an AI robot.

But hope is alive. It breathes. It has roots. It keeps producing seeds. Its fragrance is as sweet as rain-soaked soil. As sweet as sun-warmed za’atar.

No inorganic control method can force stories and hopes and memories to stay buried. The human spirit—by the spirit of God—rises. Words rise. Poems rise. Songs rise. Cries for justice and righteousness and truth and mercy rise and keep rising. Even from underground prisons.

Neither a mega-war nor a fake peace deal can stop this rising. All the nuclear arsenal cannot stop it. All the mountains of money cannot purchase it. All the new wars cannot stomp it out. All the time cannot erase it. Even genocide cannot starve it to death.

It exists. It will not stop existing until the root issues are dealt with genuinely and righteously.

Only then will real healing come.

The world should know this well by now. Why do we behave so stupidly? As if a new war will distract everyone from the core issue? As if we can rewrite the laws of the universe?

I hope and pray that the Powers—currently drunk to the point of insanity on bloodlust and delusions of regional and global dominance—will wake up to this reality and deal justly with it.

And if they don’t?

We must do it then. Somehow. For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis. Because neither of these groups will ever live in peace, security, and dignity until we deal with organic issues in organic ways, and be human together. Until crimes are truthfully faced, confessed and resolved.

There is no other way.