Rebuilding the columns with our eyelashes

“I don’t believe it. I can’t believe we’re still alive,” was the message I received from Hadeel Wael Qassem, a 22-year-old pharmacy student living in central Gaza with twelve members of her family.

In the hours that followed, she sent me videos of celebrations in the streets. Though the footage was too dark to make out, the noise rang sharp and clear – whistling, screaming, shots fired into the air, music blaring on a speaker somewhere in the distance – these were the sounds of an exhale after 16 months of hell on earth. I imagine many of the people around Hadeel shared her initial reaction to the ceasefire. What a damning emotion: disbelief in one’s own survival. Israel has unleashed such horror on the people of Gaza that the idea of making it through to the other side is impossible to believe. And with good reason. Since the ceasefire announcement, Israel has killed 87 people, fulfilling for them the eventual arrival of death, the only surety that Gaza has known for 468 days. 

Of course, Israel’s relentless cruelty across Palestine casts a dark shadow over any kind of reprieve. On Wednesday, as the negotiating parties finalised their terms, an Israeli drone attacked the occupied West Bank, killing six people in Jenin. In Gaza, the ceasefire will not go into effect until Sunday, granting the Israeli occupation forces three more days to take as many Palestinian lives as possible. Meanwhile, the Israeli government continues to stall its official acceptance of the deal. All of this is unsurprising, given that Israel takes every opportunity to extinguish more Palestinian life: a truth underscored by the fact that the current deal is almost exactly the same as the version accepted by Hamas last year. 

In a world where every law, agreement, and norm is bent into a new shape to allow for Israel’s deep-rooted drive to violence, I find myself returning to the Pickle I wrote last month about the ceasefire in Lebanon. I argued that a ceasefire cannot meaningfully exist in tandem with the Israeli state. Only the end of Zionism can provide the cessation of violence so desperately needed. Now, I sit with my own words and ask myself: how could I ever temper the intense joy and relief of Palestinians in Gaza who are now finally seeing a path out of this destruction? 

On Wednesday afternoon, I felt what can only be described as a mere fraction of this life-affirming flood of joy, running into the arms of the friends whose shoulders I’ve buried my face into for the past 16 months, and running through my head all of our desperate prayers and pleas for this very moment. Specifically, I thought of my friends who have lost so much to the Israeli occupation, whose communities in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine have had so much taken from them. What a blessing to be able to sob with just one of these comrades, to blast Dammi Falastini in the kitchen, to see the texts pouring into group chats revealing only a fragment of these desperate emotions ripping through the world. How dare anyone deny this feeling of solace, this clamouring for hope and humanity and resistance to the evils imposed by Zionism?

But to iterate the truth and stick to its steadfast demands is not to deny this kind of emotion. Instead, it is the only reaction that meets such overwhelming imperatives. We must keep going. The moment after ceasefire will bring unending grief and mourning. Families will search for the bones of their loved ones and take keys back to doors which no longer exist. In this time, we can only guess what Israel will do, what continued impunity has taught its genocidal leadership about their capacity for destruction. We cannot afford to be complacent with a fragile peace – even as our chests fall with the greatest of sighs. 

Instead, those of us outside Gaza must increase our pressure and prove that our solidarity extends beyond a ceasefire to full justice and liberation for Palestinians. Of course, we must grieve and feel the full extent of the emotions of this moment. That includes honouring Gaza’s extraordinary resistance to an American-sponsored and British-funded genocide – and feeling animated by the enduring and unstoppable force of a people determined to be free. Palestinian resistance has brought Israel to the negotiating table by the sheer force of its existence and the undeniable fact that in the face of unrelenting destruction and death, the Palestinian people have refused to be erased. Where there is oppression, there will always be resistance. 

In a video posted to her Instagram, Palestinian journalist Bisan Odwa gives us one glimpse into this abiding, 77-year-old truth. When a man is asked about the first thing he will do after the ceasefire, he responds, “I will take my crutches, my injured leg and with my heart that the occupation tore apart, go to the North! If my home is destroyed, I will rebuild the columns with my eyelashes. If my home is destroyed, I will rebuild its roof with my pupils! If my land is bulldozed, I will fix it with my body.” ▼

Please consider donating to Hadeel and her family here. 

Kendall Gardner is an editor at Vashti.