Muhammad Ismael is a writer, historian and Palestinian family man trying to survive his and their 14th year of collective imprisonment in the devastated districts of Gaza. We’ve been working together since we met (on Zoom) this past year, to find new ways toward justice and their liberation on their own lands—and this is our latest, including a Petition you can sign (please, it takes 1 minute) to remind these people that the world has not forgotten them.
ROAD OF LOSS, GROUND OF HOPE
My name is Muhammad Jihad Ismael. Jihad was my father’s name, given in 1948 when he was born by the side of a road in Palestine. Our family was part of a mass forced march from our home-village Shaphir to a Gaza refugee camp, and my grandmother, full of sorrow at the needless cruelty of our dispossession, named him “one who struggles” for justice. Today I carry the name, and though I am only one Palestinian, a writer and scholar of 36 with three young children, I carry their memory and their cause.
The glowing core of our family memory is that for generations before the Catastrophe of 1948, we shared Shaphir and lived very much in peace with our neighbors of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Arab ways of life. As in hundreds of other farming villages in Palestine, there simply was no anxious concern among people(s) about their neighbors’ differences, and you can hear our elders remembering this in a single short film at YouTube, “The Land Speaks Arabic.”
My family and I have always lived here in the district called Balah. We have never known life without constant reminder that we live under brutal apartheid. We live in the rubble of our so-called leadership’s failures and corruptions. Our water is not fit to drink. Our 2.5 million people depend on 200 trucks per day allowed to bring food and necessities from fuel to medicine and milk. And we (like the world) are told we have no Palestinian history, although Gaza’s first name was “Minoa,” signaling our contacts with the West’s first and long-enduring civilization, Minoan Crete. DNA now demonstrates this too.
In the midst of staggering losses and the damages of 14 years’ imprisonment, we come to the core of our ineradicable hope. At this end of our long road downward, we hold to what is most basic and real about us. Just as it seems all is lost—Israel’s new Prime Minister announcing that “there will be no new negotiations”—our memories keep breathing us belief in the powers of goodness.
They live in ourselves, in our unity with each other, in our honorable goal to live again in peace with all our neighbors. Enough is enough. And straight into the hideous face of our “powerless” reality, we follow our ancestors 100 years gone, and like them, raise this Appeal to the Civilized World to help us create peace and its essential of justice.
Humbly, this one Palestinian family man asks you for the tiny bit of time it takes to read, sign and share our Appeal—to bring our best new leaders forward, to call for enforcement of standing laws and resolutions, and to bring those who profit by our pain into ethical relationships with us.
https://www.change.org/DemandThreeStepsForwardForPalestinianPeople
My middle name is “one who struggles,” because I know peace has lived in our land before and so can live again. There is a road: there is a hope.
Your fellow human being,
Muhammad Jihad Ismael
Muhammad.eagle.85@gmail.com
(edited in English by Jack Dempsey, jpd37@hotmail.com)