Sixty-two years after its villages were razed, its olive groves set aflame, its people set adrift on a refugee's road, Palestine is still alive.
One year has passed since the massacre in Gaza, and for all its sputterings the international community has not acted. Yet with the blockade in full force, an Arab-constructed wall erected on Gaza's southern border, and continuing airstrikes by the Occupier, Palestine remains defiant.
A night past the daily torments of occupation. Yesterday, a farmer was denied a fair share of water for their crop. Yesterday, a concrete wall prevented a family sharing a meal. Yesterday, a refugee could not find employment in a country that does not want them. But all the hardships of tomorrow cannot quell Palestine's resistance.
Today we stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Palestine, still defiant, still resisting. We stand in solidarity with all those who reject injustice, despise despotism, dream of a human freedom, and who see that freedom's realization will not come of governments. Because Palestine is more than just a land.
The governments have failed. Arab regimes stand mute by the travesties of Occupation, or willingly enforce it in their own lands. Saad Hariri deplores Israeli aggression against Lebanon while his government denies civil rights and fosters a discriminatory society against Palestinian refugees. Abdullah and Rania, the humanitarian darlings of the Middle East, enforce an autocratic reality, treating half their people like unwanted tenants. The Gulf, awash in oil, has unabashedly exchanged principles for profit. The wizened, fractured Palestinian Authority has become an accomplice to the occupation of its own people. And leading the despots, the Mubarak regime in Egypt - long at the beck and call of the West and submissive to the Israeli Occupation, Mubarak has buried the Nasserite tradition of resistance beneath a Wall.
Gaza is under siege. For nearly three years, a complete economic blockade has denied the import of food, medical supplies, livestock and agricultural wares, industrial materials and the flow of exports, strangling the already impoverished Strip. Tunnels, dug beneath the southern border into Sinai, have prevented starvation, saved the sick, and slowed the collapse of Gaza's economy. But the chokehold tightens.
Covert construction of a Wall is nearing completion on Gaza's southern border. It runs underground - panels of allegedly unbreakable steel will penetrate eighteen meters beneath the desert, spanning more than ten kilometers to crush the flow of goods into the Strip. Yet unlike the miles of grey concrete in the West Bank, this Wall of Shame is built by an Arab regime. As the steel panels lower into the earth, we hear the applause of the international community, we hear words of friendship whispered into Mubarak's ear by the Occupier, and from the Arab regimes we hear - nothing.
But Palestine will resist! Today we all look to it as our home, for if in our cities and villages we do not have walls and soldiers, we still are under Occupation. Our governments, even if they do not call themselves Zionist, still carry out Zionism's aims. And so our lands, no matter their names, are still not our own. Our neighbors, even if they do not dream of return, are still denied their freedom to think, to express, and to create. For Palestine's freedom is Our Freedom.
And so we call upon our comrades, stand up! Our sisters and brothers in Palestine, in Egypt, in the whole world - tear down this Wall of Shame, tear down the walls imprisoning your freedom! We reject Zionism, we reject imperialism, and we reject this sour and shameful complicity. Sixty years on, and still we resist - and still we dream.
Falastine horra, wa kulna ahrar!
