A Quest for Home: A Tale of Faith

What do you call home? What is that place of rest where you feel secure? Can't you pinpoint a specific location? Perhaps it is your family, a group of trustful friends, or your spouse.

Consider the fact that while you read this, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza, many of them now orphans or all alone without a single relative alive, are deprived of all that, even of the right itself to use the words “home” and “land”, or the combination of the two.

In light of recent events, almost 2 million people are, literally, between the devil and the deep blue sea, after being serially displaced toward the divided Rafah with the promise of a “safe area”. Despite facing daily onslaughts and ongoing tragedy, the southern gazan city has embodied the essence of “home” through faith, trust in Allah (God), subsequent resilience and communal solidarity -values that shine brightest in times of unparalleled adversity.

Nevertheless, Palestinians there seem to be  “waiting for our time” to be “victims live on air”, as the Palestine TV channel reporter Salman al-Bashir decried months ago, with warnings from international organizations such as the UN that an attack on the city would be catastrophic, “with more than 600,000 children in the path of an assault”, and not less cruel than the current usage of hunger and time itself as weapons.

In this day and age, in which we consider ourselves "free"; we find ourselves tied up to provide the right of a home to all those in need. Let's continue with determination to be the voice of those who are being silenced and actively exprese our rejection of this mirage of freedom and demand real action.

In the end, is it not the quest for a home a universal pursuit? A beautiful place of temporal residence in this world and perpetual residence in the next?

#Palestine #Children #Home #Afterlife #Justice #Freedom #Rafah #Orphans

"What would I do if my country was committing genocide?"
This was last question asked to all of us by Aaron Bushnell, an engineer of the US Air Force who took an outraged path to “no longer be complicit in genocide”.

As painful as it is to see someone choose this course -driven by the natural desire of justice shared by all human beings (but covered/ignored by many) and misted by the despear and the lack of knowledge about the sound path-, in the middle of the ongoing madness of unjustified annihilation and starvation in Gaza, he decided to turn his back loudly to a society that transgresses all limits.

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is you're doing it. Right now", he uttered in a social media post minutes before his fatal end.

This incident takes us back to 2003, when the 23-years-old American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to save a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition.

The verses of the poem written in her honor by the Canadian Muslim convert Dawud Wharnsby now finds a wider meaning:

“Rachel, what so pushed you, to put so much on hold?
From a school-hall door (military post ) to a need for more?
From where we all stayed, to where you last laid…
When hate tears the hope where the olive tree grows".

Let us take an step back and answer the late soldier main question, let us reflect on what we are doing, right now, in the face of the biggest human-made catastrophe of our times, and let us take a clear stance, raise our voice and increase our efforts to Stand With the Oppresed.

#Justice #Palestine #Aparthaid #Accountability #Conscience #Bestpath