And Roses Too. . .

Across social media, Palestinians in Gaza have insisted on documenting the genocidal crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli army with European and North American states’ support, in addition to documenting joy, beauty, and the right to happiness:

My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am 27 years old and I have many dreams.

 I am not a number, and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children's laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.⁴

Nour was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, but his words continue to resonate across time and space. His final message before being killed included this dream:

I dream of planting flowers at all places where bombs were dropped.

It is for these loves and such dreams that we will remember Nour and all the people who have been killed, injured, and displaced in Gaza, to insist on this manifesto.

Roses are more than a dream for the future—“when the birds shall return,” in Fadwa Tuqan's words⁵—but a practice and commitment for today and the future. To embrace the right to live, with bread and roses, today is to gather strength for the future, as articulated by the Palestinian journalist, Hind Khoudary, on 24 November 2023:

Today, I visited the sea, where I bared my feet to the waves.

Laughter echoed as kids had their heads shampooed by their mom.

Gazing at the sky, I inhaled deeply, gathering strength for the ongoing battle of reporting.⁶

The images of displaced Palestinian children, teenagers, adults playing and walking on the Gazan coastline by Deir al-Balah, as taken and shared by Palestinian photographer Ali Jadallah on 21 April 2024,⁷ remind us of this individual, familial, and collective quest for happiness and joy in the midst of displacement, dispossession, intergenerational grief and trauma.

Away from the sea, as hospitals and patients were besieged and threatened—to become the site of mass graves—doctors and journalists alike confronted the superlatives of the violence and destruction of Palestinian people and infrastructure by creating and sharing music, their exhausted voices united and echoing around the world in defiance as they sang “We will stay here until the pain goes away.”⁸ The pain remains and expands, as do the echoes of their voices.

The music of an oud player “brings solace to displaced Palestinian children residing in tents in Rafah,”⁹ while parents have sung loudly to overcome the sounds of death as, with their voices, smiles and embraces, families have sought to celebrate their children's birthdays in the midst of systematic bombardment, insisting on children's right to joy, love, and happiness; to be recognized as children; to not only survive but also enjoy their childhood:

A mom's desperate attempt to celebrate her daughter's birthday amid Israel's assault

No cake, candles or balloons

Barely enough water to make a few drinks.

You can hear the buzzing noise of a predator drone on top of their heads that can bomb them at any second! Yet she smiles!¹⁰

We hear Palestinian children's laughter and witness their smiles as they play among the rubble: swinging between broken electricity cables, the “children of Gaza play despite the pain”;¹¹ running up the now-sloping roof and “sliding off the rubble of their homes during Eid”;¹² creating and sharing joy as they pull one another along in their makeshift toys;¹³ as, together, they fly their kites.¹⁴

Insisting on the right to childhood, to play, to experience joy in such a context is a practice of resisting the “politics of unchilding” Palestinian children—the dual process of denying children's rights and negating their very presence and existence as children—which the Palestinian-Armenian academic Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (detained and tortured by the Israeli security forces in April 2024 for her academic work¹⁵) has meticulously documented and vocally denounced (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2019).

As Palestinian women in Gaza have sought to bring joy to their children, they have, exhaustedly, worked to maintain a semblance of routine in their everyday resistance to displacement and dispossession, as embodied by Mahmoud @Awsaj_Gaza's mother:

My mother maintains her morning routine in the tent, with roses next to tea, sage, oil and olives, and the Qur'an. My mother takes Khuzaa [her place] with her as much as possible. Habibti Yumma [my darling mother].¹⁶

In a logo-ed tent, two red roses stand tall on the makeshift table full of the essentials of life and living.

They are not alone.

Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed shares a photograph of himself in Deir al-Balah “watering and taking care of his yellow rose amid destruction, despair, and human losses.”¹⁷

Together, all of these practices sit together with acts of resisting the dehumanization of Palestinian men who have, through gendered and racialized Orientalist discourses and politics, been constituted as ungrievable threats (Palestinian Feminist Collective 2023; Al Helou et al. 2024; Gaza Group 2024); this resistance includes asserting and reasserting the tenderness, care, and love of Palestinian men, as captured and shared in the drawings of @Beqararkarke:

The man who played with a baby amid the rubble

The man who smiled at a child even after losing his own

The ambulance driver rushing to hospital with a baby in his arms . . . ¹⁸

Sharing, as Palestinian journalists Shebah Younis and Hatem H. Rawagh did on their social media, not only the inconsolable tears and lamentations of intersecting relief and grief—of “a hero from the civil defense [sic] team [as he] breaks down into tears after rescuing a child from under the rubble”;¹⁹ of a “Palestinian paramedic breaking down in tears as he tries his best to cheer up a baby they've just rescued”²⁰—but also the most loving of words uttered to comfort a child rescued from the rubble in Al-Bureij camp:

“Are you taking me to the cemetery?”

“No my dearest,” he says to her.

“You are alive, and as beautiful as the moon.”²¹

This is about more than “humanizing” the Palestinian face or promoting “empathy” with those enduring everyday life in displacement (as important as these are); it is about shifting the very way that we view and respond to displacement and the rights of people, including those who have been and continue to be subjected to genocidal violence.

It is to return to people's right not only to exist and have their existence acknowledged and supported in dignity, but also to enjoy the right to joy, beauty, and happiness in the present and future: the right to enjoy both bread and roses.

Nour al-Din Hajjaj's dream is being enacted daily. In the midst of the ongoing attacks, Yahya Bashir from Gaza²² affirms:

I cleared the rubble from Israeli airstrikes, tilled the soil, and planted seeds. This is our home, our land. Everything will return more beautiful than before.

While Palestinians continue living and dying amid the carnage inflicted on them, they are manifesting, here and now, that there are many roots and routes to bread and roses. They teach us that these are intertwined, continually growing, and that surviving, in line with this manifesto, entails the insistence on life and living.