May He Live

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 15 Jul 2024

Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance – TRANSCEND Media Service

In the Gaza Strip alone over the past nine months 186,000 Palestinians were killed by bombing them, by denial of food, water, medicine and by destroying their infrastructure etc. As I am in touch with many families in Gaza by phone I hear horror stories including literally starving to death and if there is a food it is only bread or only rice (no proteins, vegetables, milk, fruits etc.). And what worries me more are families we lost touch with (no phones). The regime tramples our right of religion, right of movement, right of education, essentially our rights of life.

I reflect on these horrors. I reflect on Western (US, Germany, UK, Australia, etc) collusion and collaboration with an ongoing genocide and ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. I reflect on hypocrisy and on cowardice. I reflect on racism and hate that left 8 million of us refugees and displaced and the rest squeezed into concentration camps. I reflect on 21,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails being treated worse than any regime ever treated its oppressed people in its prisons. Torture, starvation, amputations, denial of medical care and dozens killed under torture that we know off (but fate of 98% of prisoners unknown since no legal representation or visit by Red Cross/Red Crescent is allowed). I reflect on the control of western mainstream media that ensures little or no coverage of reality and lots of regurgitation of lies and distortions. I reflect on all of that but I do not get despondent. Why? Because of one thing: resistance. My book “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment” summarized over a 120 years of resistance, 14 uprisings (this Gaza Ghetto uprising makes number 15). This includes hundreds of forms of resistance; only tiny minority armed and that is also legal and encouraged by international law.

May He Live (and Die) Resisting

by Mazin Qumsiyeh

Bulldozers uprooting 2000 year old olive trees
While refugees still to doors they hold the keys
Settlers and soldiers marauding and killing
Of lands and homes they enjoy pillaging
A grandfather laments 7 year old girl, soul of his soul
Colonial partners send money and soldiers to play a role
Chldrens’ brains in their fathers hand
While Netanyahu’s son on florida beach gets tanned
Bloodied heads tossed far from bodies
Decaying bodies left in destroyed hospitals
While politicians verbal acrobatics belittles
the 2000 pound bombs leveling neighborhood supplied by the USA
while Zionist Blinken pressures ICC and ICJ to stop or delay
A girl insists that she recognized a mother from her hair
But a consumerist world shrugs – we don’t care
Soldiers and politicians of a most fascist army threaten and mock
as F35s bombs Nuseirat, Gaza city, Bureij, Rafah… and every block
No safe place in a concentration camp packed by refugees
Being denied food, medicine, fuel, and all amenities
D9 bulldozers, buzzing drones, white phosphorous, fire belts,
moans of death under the rubble and babies flesh melts
to get stock prices of weapon makers soar
while genocide Joe plays the role of a whore
all for Palestine’s gas fields to steal
a new Asia-Europe 6 trillion road deal
the Suez replaced by the Ben Gurion Canal
Nile to Euphrates “promised people” cabal
Belt-and-Road initiative replaced
a new empire to be created
Old ones subjugated
Via lobbies dominated
Olive trees destroyed
Pine trees planted
Communities uprooted
Racists validated
A global war initiated
To make the rich richer
and the poor poorer

To all this there is antidote available
Resistance is possible
We resist by insisting on our rights
to return, to live, to eat, to kindle our lights
to hope, to live, to plant our trees
to tend to our vegetables, and our bees
for we believe that to exist
means to resist
and to resist means to live free
like human beings should be
For there is no other path
to avoid the wrath
to live meaningfully
and die peacefully
And when I am dead
Let it be said
here lies a good troublemaker
of actions and ideas a baker
born poor, died poor
helped others in the short tour
in the land of his birth
lived a rich life in resistance
with dogged persistence
the hope alive he kept
for injustice he wept
the path of struggle he travelled
through storms he peddled
may he get his wish to die resisting
as he lived joyfully participating
In life’s sorrows
dodging arrows
Not resting
Fully Loving
Meaningfully Living
Peacefully Dying
____________________________________________

Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate professor of genetics and director of cytogenetic services at Yale University School of Medicine, is founder and president of the Holy Land Conservation Foundation and ex-president of the Middle East Genetics Association. He won the Raymond Jallow Activism Award from the national Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1998. He is co-founder and national treasurer of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and has written extensively about the Middle East. Qumsiyeh is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, author of Sharing the Land of Canaan and Popular Resistance in Palestine, a professor at Bethlehem University and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem. http://palestinenature.org

Go to Original – popular-resistance.blogspot.com

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DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH 729, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

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