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Eman Abdelhadi (She/Her)
Palestine will be free.
Palestinians will one day live dignified lives on our homeland. We will walk the streets of the old cities of al-Quds, Nablus, Nazareth and Bethlehem. We will hike the green hills overlooking Tiberius, eat oranges from Yaffa, drink the sage tea of the hills of Khalil. We will wiggle our toes in the sands of Gaza. We will wade into the sea as free people on a free land.
There will be no checkpoints, no wires, no tanks, no bombs, no missiles. Our movements will not be dictated by the color of our identification cards or the whims of concrete walls. We will roam the earth, following only the winds of fate and desire.
Palestine will be free.
Palestine is a promise. As Palestinians, we have watched the world shed our blood for 75 years; Palestine is the promise of a world that honors our humanity. We have watched the might of the dollar and the gun overrule the will of the people; Palestine is the promise of a world governed by justice not profit. We Palestinians have screamed our pain into the ether; Palestine is the promise of a world that listens.
It is our imperative and obligation to imagine that future as we fight to will it into being.
In our 2022 speculative fiction novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions), my co-author M.E. O’Brien and I imagine a global revolution that transitions life out of capitalism and into a system of collective self-rule and production through communes. We imagine a world whose primary levers are not profit but care. In New York, the revolution starts with a food riot, as trans sex workers lead the fight to ensure their community is fed. But the global revolution we imagine does not begin in New York, it begins in Palestine. Palestine liberates herself first, and the rest of the world follows.
Two years later, in the midst of a genocide in Gaza, I still believe the revolution begins in Palestine. From October 2023 to this moment (March 2024), Palestine has been liberating the world. Palestine has exposed the house of cards of Western “civilization” and “liberalism.” Millions have learned our free speech is anything but free, as the hand of repression has punished anyone daring to speak up for Palestinians. We have learned that academic institutions are citadels of power not citadels of inquiry, as campus administrations have rushed to silence student support for Palestinian human rights. We have learned our votes mean little when compared with the interests of weapons manufacturers and oil companies clamoring to profit from death. Enacting boycotts of the industries participating in the oppression of our siblings in Palestine, we have had to examine the ways our lives are intertwined with that oppression. Palestine has reminded us that what we eat, what we drink, what we wear—these are all political. Palestine has exposed the intricacy of a global system that takes our money and invests it in genocide. Palestine has been liberating us.
Palestine will be free, and Palestine will free us all.
Writing Everything for Everyone during the darkness and despair of the COVID-19 pandemic was a chance to imagine a world beyond the walls currently imprisoning us. It was a transformative experience for me, because it wrestled my imagination back from capitalism. Imagining a way out of the atrocities of our current moment infused my activism with a practice of hope. I re-entered my organizing spaces energized by the possibilities of the world to come, a world we create in the microcosms of our movement work.
I have become ever more committed to hope as political praxis. Capitalism and colonialism present themselves as inevitabilities, as the natural order of things. We know that is not true. We know the world could be different, should be different, will be different. Every time we take to the streets or feed ourselves in a protest kitchen or take care of each other, we assert this truth. We are bigger than capitalism, bigger than white supremacy, bigger than settler colonialism—and we will overcome them. To commit to a political praxis of hope is to constantly ask ourselves, what will the world feel, taste, smell, look like when we win? In this anthology, queer Palestinians beckon our future, birthing freedom through prose and verse. We know the fight has not been won, but we find solace in the certainty of victory.