Palestine Letter: The struggle never ends

Palestinians mourn relatives killed by Israeli attacks at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza on October 11, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

“Those who force us to rejoice at the funerals of our martyrs are their killers. We rejoice aloud so as not to give them, even for a moment, the illusion that they defeated us.

I will remind you that if we live to see it, we will cry long after liberated!

We will mourn those at whose funerals we were forced to rejoice…
We are not heroes.
No, I’ve thought about it at length.

I’ve told myself we are not heroes,
but heroes we have been forced to become.”

I have been writing ever since I was a child in school. I wrote short plays on national occasions like Land Day and Independence Day about the suffering of Palestinians. When I was 13, I wrote a play about a martyr. In one act, his family is saying goodbye to him as he is wrapped in a Palestinian flag and a black-and-white keffiyeh covers his head. His mother cries shortly after he is buried in her home, screaming that her son was murdered by Israeli soldiers in cold blood.

The funeral procession turns into a march as they make their way to the cemetery, and the crowds chant in fervent unison, repeating phrases of heroism and martyrdom.

               “Rest, rest, our martyr. We will continue the struggle.”

               يا شهيد ارتاح ارتاح واحنا نواصل الكفاح

The scene was not the product of my imagination, but of what I’ve seen my entire life, the dozens of martyrs who parted with their loved ones and were sent off to their final resting place from their homes.

The mothers and sisters who sent off their martyred loved ones with ululations that typically accompany weddings and joyous occasions surprised me when I was young. I couldn’t understand why one would rejoice at the death of their beloved. But one time, my mother went to offer her condolences to our neighbor whose son was martyred. I was young, and she took me with her. My mother sat next to Umm Shadi, the martyr’s mother, and told her about how her son Fadi was a sweet boy and that he had always brought my mother the best pigeons to raise on the roof of our house. At that moment, Umm Shadi burst into tears which did not stop the entire visit.

I knew that behind the walls of strength and power that the families of the martyrs show, there is an ocean of sadness over their loss. But I did not understand at the time that we Palestinians lived in a totally abnormal reality.

Palestinian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah wrote about this in his novel, Safe Weddings, offering us an explanation of why we engage in ululations of joy on the worst days of our lives:

“Those who force us to rejoice at the funerals of our martyrs are their killers. We rejoice aloud so as not to give them, even for a moment, the illusion that they defeated us. I will remind you that if we live to see it, we will cry long after we are liberated! We will mourn those at whose funerals we were forced to rejoice…We are not heroes, no, I’ve thought about it at length. I’ve told myself; that we are not heroes, but heroes we have been forced to become.”

Throughout my entire life, the scenes of martyrs’ funerals, the bombing of homes, the burning of houses, the bulldozing of farmers’ lands, and the transformation of citrus orchards into Israeli military sites never stopped.

Writing for school at that time was the only window of freedom through which I could breathe a sigh of relief. I wrote about what I saw — sometimes as it was, and sometimes as I would like to see it.

But after the war of extermination reminded all Palestinians that the genocide would not stop, I could no longer write about things as I wanted them to be. All I could do was bear witness to the horror around me, first from up close, and now from exile as northern Gaza is being exterminated and wiped out. I watch on in disbelief as the massacres in Jabalia, in Beit Lahia, in Beit Hanoun exceed the horrors that I experienced in the early days of the war. Children are dismembered, animals eat the decomposing bodies of martyrs, unidentified bodies arrive in trucks sent over by the Israeli authorities before being buried in mass graves. Even the bitter ululations at martyrs’ funerals are no longer possible.

When I was in Gaza during the genocide, writing was difficult. Nothing was available to me, no electricity or internet. Everyone was busy securing safety and food for their families.

But even though my circumstances did not help me, the fact that I was part of the Mondoweiss team did. I had the opportunity to document dozens of stories during the war without being able to write them.

I would sit in the car for hours, recording stories on my phone and sending them as voice notes to the team. I would tell them what was happening around me as I saw and heard it. I would walk dozens of meters and stand in the street to connect to the internet so that I could send what I recorded for the day and then read on the site what I had sent the day before.

Every time I read a story, I would cry as if I were learning about it for the first time.

I was eager to read the stories the team was preparing, and I felt proud that even in such circumstances, I could bring the stories I saw to the world through the help of my colleagues.

I have worked as a journalist for ten years, but when I started working with Mondoweiss my stories started reaching more people. Palestinian organizations began to quote my stories during their speeches before the United Nations and decision-making bodies. Now I know why they say to the martyrs, “Rest, rest, and we will continue the struggle.” No matter where we are, all of us have been engaged in this struggle, and when we are gone there will be those who will pick it up after us.