I performed this speech in late October of 2023, at a vigil to honor the lives lost back then. With the situation only getting worse, unfortunately this speech is still as relevant as it was back then.
In 1949, the founder of Israel, whose name I won’t dignify here tonight, said “The old will die, and the young will forget.” There’s just one problem: The young have never forgotten, because we refuse to. And what we see happening in Gaza today is Israel’s attempt to fix this. They want to kill us so that maybe, one day, the world will forget and the stories of Palestine become legend and myth, lost amongst the stars, our facts indistinguishable from our fiction. Our oppressors want to turn us into fairytales, into monsters you should be scared of. They wish to use the Palestinian people as an example, lessons of what happens when you turn against your captor; an example to the world that there is no escaping settler-colonialism, there is no escaping white supremacy. But we will not go silently into the night, and we will not forget our past, our present, or the hope of our future.
With a population in Gaza that is over 50% children, and military targets aimed at schools and hospitals, make no mistake that Israel still thinks they can erase us. They think they can martyr thousands, and if they martyr enough then maybe the world will forget, as the world tends to do. But we will not forget, because much to their chagrin, Israel’s bombs have not made us weaker, but stronger.
There’s another quote worth remembering, that Israel itself seems to have forgotten.” With knowledge comes power.” And nothing has felt more certain in the last 12 days than this, because while our old and young both die at the hands of racism and apartheid, more people are learning the truth. With every single person that learns it, with every ounce of knowledge that makes it past those barricades and into the hearts of millions, the Palestinian liberation movement gets more powerful every single day.
Last month, my father got a text from a relative in Gaza. It reads, “Perhaps in a few hours, we will be cut off from the world due to a complete power outage, and the batteries will lose their charge. The Internet will be cut off, and the electricity company and street generators will not have a stock of diesel. We will die in silence, away from the eyes of the world and our friends. Forgive us in any case.” Those that we honor tonight knew they were facing death, and still they remained absolute. They remained in their homes, and they refused to be expelled to another land, because they knew what they were standing for.
My final quote for you tonight is by Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, who (amongst many things) said “A people who are not afraid to die, are impossible to defeat.” We may have lost our brothers, our sisters, our children and our doctors. But look around you. Look around the world. There is no defeating this Palestinian resistance. We will continue to shine a light on what needs to be heard no matter how dark the world gets. And long after we leave this space and go to the homes we are lucky to have, the light within our hearts will continue to shine, getting brighter with every bit of power that we gain, simply from sharing our truth.
These lights, and the ones in vigils just like this through-out the globe, they don’t just signify those we lost in the last 12 days. They signify our strength, and our resolution.
Tonight, we remind our oppressors that it is not the Palestinians who are going to become fairy tales, warnings of what it means to fight and lose. It is them who are going to become the cautionary tale, it is apartheid and genocide and Zionism that the world is going see as the monsters. We are teaching the world that you can only go on so long, suppressing humanity and killing out of hatred and fear, before the world sees you for what you really are. I think this is a lesson that will stick, because despite all their erasing, and bombing and killing, we will never, ever, forget.