CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Shallāl: On Water, Palestine, and the Grammar of the Unrelenting

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I write this from Lenape land, Turtle Island, stolen and renamed New York. A land never ceded, never surrendered, never forgotten by the people it belongs to. I begin there because the day I’m writing this–March 30th–demands it.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of Palestinian Land Day. On March 30th, 1976, Palestinians took to the streets against mass land confiscations in the Galilee. Zionist security forces opened fire, killing six and wounding dozens. The land was taken anyway. Not a single professional body stood up to say a word.

Fifty years later: the demolitions in Silwan and Bustan continue. The West Bank is being annexed in real time. An eighteen-month-old child named Jawad Abu Nassar was detained on the first day of Eid, his legs burned with cigarettes, a nail driven through his leg, tortured in front of his father to force a confession. Last week, Francesca Albanese delivered her report to the Human Rights Council. She titled it simply: “Torture and Genocide.”

Empire is not hiding. It is governing.

I know many of you are reading this carrying an enormous weight. And I want to speak directly to that before I say anything else.

There are mornings when what I feel is not grief exactly. It is rage that has nowhere to go. A need to climb the highest mountain and scream, not words, not arguments, just sound, the kind of sound a human being makes when they have witnessed something that should not be possible and the world has not stopped. When the birds are still singing and the trains are still running and someone somewhere is complaining about the weather, and I am standing there........

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