Sumud, meaning steadfastness, articulates the Palestinian drive to remain on their land.

After travelling to Occupied Palestine, AFMN contributor, Samer Hassan, reflects on how Sumud was portrayed in the words and actions of Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, and Joharah Baker.

The last time I was in Palestine was in the summer of 2023 where I took a seminar class that included trips around the country. One of those trips led us to al-Araqib -- a small Palestinian village deep in the Naqab Desert. We arrived on a blisteringly hot day just a couple of hours after the village was raided by Israelis. It was a village made up of shacks with tin roofs, tarps, plastic chairs, some goats, and scattered mounds of rubble. By that point, the village had already been demolished by the Israelis over 120 times.

One of the community leaders shared a story with us—“One night, as my wife, [our] child, and I were sitting on the rubble, right after Israel had demolished our village earlier that day, my wife said something to me. As she was pouring me a glass of tea, she asked if I wanted to kill her and the baby.” I was struck by how stoic he sounded as he spoke. “I looked at her like she was crazy. Why would she ask me such a thing?” He went on, “She then said, That’s exactly what I would be doing to her if I did not get up the next day and rebuild our village.” This was a man who was determined to remain, in spite of the conditions imposed on him and his family. There was a common theme I saw across all the stories I heard: they all practiced a form of Sumud - a Palestinian concept that teaches everyday acts of both passive and active resistance amidst an ever-more-violent occupation.

I left the country conscious that things were on a knife’s edge. October 7th, 2023, was barely two months away, and the slow process of ethnic cleansing and genocide I had grown up learning of was about to be exposed to the world like never before. Like many others, I had spent two years doing what I could while living in the heart of the empire. We took to the streets and the airwaves; we marched, protested, and demanded that our elected officials follow the will of their constituents. We educated anyone who would listen, gave public testimony, spoke to the media. We gave our time, money, and voices to the cause, and wrote— boy, did I write.

After two years of a live-streamed genocide, I finally went back to Palestine. The guard towers, walls, gun emplacements, or occupation soldiers had never surprised me; after all, I grew up hearing my family’s stories. Occupation was the reason I grew up without a grandfather, as he was killed fighting in the 1967 war. The occupation was the reason my family fled to South America. No, it was not trappings of the occupation that surprised me. After my last visit, these had become all too familiar to me. It was the air quality. It had noticeably deteriorated.

According to the IMEU Policy Project, “two years of endless bombing surpassing the equivalent of 13 Hiroshima nuclear bombs were dropped on Gaza,” and this had taken its toll on an environment roughly the size of Maryland. There were also the flies; they were relentless. I had last been in Palestine during the peak fly season in the summer, so I was surprised to see so many in the winter.

And then there were the flags: Israeli flags that were now hanging everywhere. Every road, especially in the West Bank, had a flag planted every ten meters, stretching to the horizon.

Colonialism goes out of its way to envelop the land and everything within it; it draws boundaries and lines where none existed before. Every hill, every tower, every slight increase in elevation had an Israeli flag, as if to remind the Palestinians living there who owned the land and who was always watching. Perhaps that, in and of itself, is a kind of weakness. Having to spend time and money to remind an unyielding population of their subordination reminded me of Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, where he states that the native “is overpowered but not tamed.” Symbols of Israeli power were scattered all across Occupied Palestine, but these symbols of Israeli conquest have not tamed the Palestinian people. Those who I had the opportunity to meet had mastered the art of Sumud despite the overwhelming erasure and vitriol imposed by Israeli society and Zionist philosophies. Too often are Palestinian words misconstrued in the media and so, to counter this, I instead want to present the words of these leaders in their raw, monologue forms.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestine National Initiative, and Director of the Palestine Medical Relief Society

The first person that my group met on our visit was none other than Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi. He welcomed us into his office, where we sat down to discuss ways in which we, as Arab Americans, could best organize Palestinian solidarity in the West.

Barghouthi is the Director of the Palestine Medical Relief Society (PMRS), a non-profit that provides health care services to people in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Secretary General of the Palestine National Initiative, a political party seeking Palestinian liberation through non-violent means.

“You can get depressed if you only see one way of solving the [occupation] problem. Most of the people who are depressed are the ones who thought they would see a Palestinian state very soon, and the so-called two-state solution. If you really put all your hopes in that direction, of course, you’ll be depressed because what you see on the ground is exactly the opposite. But if you believe that our struggle is for freedom and justice, regardless of the form it takes, then you will see that we are advancing and making significant progress.

I was injured 9 times, and I was shot twice. I can mention 100 factors that can make you depressed or unhappy if you keep talking about them, but on the other hand, there are more than a hundred other things that will make you optimistic. It depends on how you view the world. The solution is very simple. One democratic state, while bringing down the system of apartheid, will bring down the whole settler colonial project.

Look what happened in the US over the past couple of years, that by itself is a good indicator. If you see the struggle of Palestine as part of humanity’s broader struggle for justice, you realize we are on the right track. Our narrative has become much stronger; our story has become much stronger. If we can keep bringing that to people, it would be good. What makes many people depressed, on the contrary, is what makes me more optimistic. Most of the changes are happening among young people, younger generations, and that’s especially encouraging. We are investing in the future, and the Zionists are investing in the past, and that shift is becoming very clear.

I would say that if the balance of power changes, many of those settlers will simply leave. I always say to those who recognize Palestine that their recognition is meaningless unless you back that up with sanctions on the settlers and unless you impose sanctions on Israel, then you are simply saying words.

A while ago, I was interviewed by a media outlet, and they said I was practicing discrimination against a settler because he liked living here and wanted to stay here, they said I was preventing him from living here. I said fine, he wants to live here, I want to live in Jaffa, my father lived in Jaffa. Will they allow me to live in Jaffa? You can’t have them here [The West Bank] and prevent us from living there [Jaffa]. I was born in Jerusalem, worked as a medical doctor there for 15 years, and am no longer allowed to be there. Officially, I haven’t been allowed in Jerusalem since 2005.

This apartheid system is so much worse than Apartheid South Africa. You didn’t see segregated roads or highways there. Who does that? Some highways are exclusive to Israelis, and if we drive or walk on them, we can be arrested for at least six months, and now you won’t even make it to prison; lately, we can simply be shot. The level of discrimination here is unlike any other place on Earth.

Look at the issue of water, they take away 85 to 90% of our water in the West Bank, they allow a Palestinian to use no more than 150 cubic meters of water per capita per year, while settlers, who are illegal in the West Bank, can use up to 1450 cubic meters of water per capita per year. It’s a level of discrimination unprecedented in its profundity.

Facts, you have to use facts and figures. The Greeks spoke about ethos, pathos, and logos and we have to combine all of that. The facts and figures can’t be silenced:

We have 80 medical teams in Gaza working around the clock, treating about 200,000 people every month. Although Israel attacked nine different clinics, they are still functioning and reporting to us.

We have 71,000 cases of infectious hepatitis. On average, each Palestinian in Gaza is getting sick three times a month.

Israel hasn’t allowed vaccines inside for a very long time and for many children, they have surpassed the appropriate age for some of these vaccines. Even if you start the vaccine regimen right now, it won’t have the same effect on these children.

About 100,000 children are suffering from malnutrition.

We had to hire about 90 midwives to take care of about 90,000 pregnant women because they don’t have the proper prenatal care.

The whole of Gaza does not have a single MRI. They were all destroyed, not a single one left.

There are only 7 CT scans left in the entire enclave. One factor is that institutions become more aggressive and violent when they feel they are weaker, but on the other hand, there is another tendency in Israel. The whole society is moving towards fascism. What we deal with now is not just an authoritarian system, not just occupation, not just apartheid; we deal with fascists, and their behavior is fascistic. How many Jewish Israelis accept a Palestinian state? More than 80% in the last poll refused to accept a Palestinian right to a state. On top of that, they passed a resolution in the Knesset to prevent a Palestinian state from forming. They just passed a law that consolidated the whole system. The Nation State Law says that self-determination is only guaranteed for Jews, exclusive to Israel. This law was passed not only by the majority government but also by the opposition party.

If you focus on all the problems, you can easily get overwhelmed. We need to focus on one issue, sharing the narrative of Palestine, and concentrate on the fact that this is simply a matter of justice.”

While I do agree with Dr. Barghouthi that the Palestinian narrative is heard louder today than before, I cannot help but note that this isn’t just a war of words; it is a war of erasure. As we know, Zionism is predicated on the annihilation of all things Palestine.

Being in that room and hearing about the abysmal situations my countrymen were in was hard for me to swallow; not that it was new information. On the contrary, other than the detailed figures regarding Gaza, I knew this all too well. What surprised me, was that Barghouthi still believed in liberation through nonviolent means. Here was someone who was shot two times telling me the way to victory was through nonviolence. In the case of Dr. Barghouthi, he believes in and practices just one form of Sumud: passive resistance.

But, I wonder, how do you liberate yourself nonviolently from one of the most militaristic societies on the planet, one that boasts some of the most advanced weaponry and is given a blank check from the United States, all while Palestinians aren’t even allowed to get in their cars and travel to a nearby town without being shot, harassed, or arrested? There are very few cases around the world where a population is able to take down a fascist government without violence, and even fewer cases when this government in question has such strong support among its own nationals.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, Scientist and Author, Founder of The Palestine Museum of Natural History

Professor Qumsiyeh was a professor at Yale University and decided to move back to Palestine with his wife in 2008. He and his wife saved their money in the US and funded the building of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, and its Palestine Museum of Natural History and botanic garden, a beautiful structure teeming with flora and fauna. Inside are exhibits with fossils and specimens, and outside are gardens devoted to Palestine’s biodiversity. The couple now works to preserve Palestinian natural and cultural heritage and calls on the world to come and help with their project. The pair greeted us as we arrived that evening, and we conversed over coffee.

“I want to put the occupation in terms of a medical analogy”, Professor Qumsiyeh began.

If I suffer from a number of symptoms, and I get 7 or 8 different diagnoses, I’m in trouble. How do doctors agree on a diagnosis? When I was at Duke and Yale Universities, we would all sit down and review difficult patient cases at the end of each week. We would discuss all the different symptoms and develop a prognosis and the best treatment plan. Here’s a symptom: in 1988, my village engaged in the Cow Revolt. Why is it called the Cow Revolt? Because the Israeli military order said we couldn’t have any milking cows, we could have milking mice, milking rats, but no milking cows. There’s even a documentary about it called The Wanted 18. Now, if you take this one symptom, and that symptom was called Operation Hunt Cow by the Israeli military. This one symptom alone can excuse a lot of symptoms that many people have mentioned before, for example, a religious conflict, Jews Vs. Muslims. Sorry, but the cows are not Jews or Muslims or anything else. The owners of the cows, the people in my village, are 70% Christian and 30% Muslim. But everyone in my town was in on it, we were all in on this crime of smuggling the cows, so it can’t be a religious conflict. Can it be a military occupation? Sorry, no, France was occupied by the Germans for years during World War II. Does it fit the diagnosis of a military occupation? No, because Germany never said to France that they were not allowed to have milking cows. So it doesn’t fit. How do cows fit into this diagnosis? It does, however, fit the diagnosis of displacement settler colonialism. But not all colonialism is the same, by the way, displacement settler colonialism is a particular kind of colonialism, like saying there’s only one cancer, you have to be specific with cancer, there are many types, correct?

Algeria was not displacement settler colonialism; the French never wanted the Algerians out of Algeria. South Africa was never displacement settler colonialism; they wanted to keep Black people as indentured servants and workers for the mines. The best examples of displacement settler colonialism are the United States and Australia. The US never wanted the indigenous people, and Australia never wanted the Aboriginal people. So you make a diagnosis based on symptoms and patient history, before you offer therapy.

What’s the point of asking for patient history? How old they are and so on. Because the patient’s history is essential to determine whether the patient is perpetually ill or has a congenital disorder, if he has Down’s syndrome, it’s different than if he has COVID-19, which comes and goes, but if you have Down’s syndrome, you’re born with it, and you’re gonna die with it. People, like Donald Trump, say things like he’s solving a 3000 year old conflict. Hollywood portrays this conflict as something that has raged for thousands of years, and we were always fighting, right? Where do they come up with this idea that the Middle East is so violent? We are actually one of the most peaceful countries on Earth. Some of you may not believe me on this, and I can prove it to you scientifically. You take our history, and you take the number of years we were involved in wars and divide that by our total number of years, and you get a tiny percentage. I would say we are more peaceful than the majority of countries on Earth, and certainly more than the US, which is 250 years old, and around 228 of those years were at war. Think about France, what percentage of its history was spent at war?

OK, so our patient doesn’t have a congenital disorder, the patient has an illness that is called displacement settler colonialism, like a flu, it comes and goes. Most countries on Earth have had a form of this colonialism or another. So that’s, in a way, a good thing. Why is it a good thing? Because you have other patients to compare with to see what happened to them. We have three possible scenarios:

1. Algeria, where 1 million French people packed their bags and moved to France. I’m not going to say “moved back to France,” because some five or six generations never saw France in their lifetimes. This was a bloody conflict that cost about one million lives. This scenario is pretty rare.

2. The second scenario is genocide, as happened in the US and Australia, where you have tiny percentages of the indigenous people left. That’s also rare, not as rare as the first scenario, but rare nonetheless.

3. The third scenario is where the descendants of colonizers and the descendants of the colonized live in one country and undergo a process we call decolonization. This is found in most of the world. South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Based on this probability, the majority of patients ended up in this condition.

[Option three] is where we are likely headed, and this is what we call a prognosis (the likely course of disease or ailment). Now the only thing left is how to accelerate our arrival at this prognosis. What do doctors say if you get COVID-19 and you don’t have an underlying immune problem or something like diabetes or something fatal, you should eventually be okay. Isolate yourself, and everything will be okay. Why? Because you have strong B+T cells, that’s your immune system. That’s your resistance. Resistance. Resistance is the most critical element of recovery from an illness, whether that’s an individual illness or a societal illness. And we know that from history, in the USA, for example, what are some positive things that happened in its 220-some years of wars they engaged in? What are some positive things that happened? How did women win the right to vote? How did you get a 40-hour work week? Unionization? They happened because of resistance, because enough people said, ‘Enough is enough.’ Once resistance reaches a certain threshold, once your T-cells reach a certain level, you’re done with that illness, or at least you’re on the road to recovery.”

Professor Qumsiyeh’s medical analogy gave me some hope that Palestinians regaining their self-determination is at least statistically likely, and his building of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and its programs aimed at teaching Palestinians about their land and how to preserve it is a wonderful act of Sumud.

Joharah Baker, Palestinian Writer and Human Rights Advocate

Joharah Baker and I met at one of the two hotels still owned by Palestinians in Jerusalem. During our interview, at around 10pm, Israeli settlers decided to walk around and “tour” the hotel.

Joharah lives in Jerusalem’s African Quarter, from where she educates people across the world to see the occupation of Palestine through a gendered lens. Joharah works for Miftah, which focuses on international advocacy and the dissemination of the Palestinian narrative, while documenting daily Israeli abuses. Joharah and her colleagues at Miftah guided and educated us during our time in Jerusalem.

“Afro-Palestinians are a marginalized group within the Old City of Jerusalem. They face a multi-layered amount of discrimination because first, they are Palestinian, and second, they are African. In general, they have underdeveloped residential areas, but they suffer from the same things that other Palestinians suffer from: discrimination and erasure by the Israeli state. It’s very difficult to maintain a presence in Jerusalem.

But over the past couple of years, there has been greater visibility from this community, as younger Palestinian generations are more educated and help raise awareness about the Quarter. They are much more involved in Palestinian society.

In terms of the Occupation, because we are Palestinian, you will see the difference in development when you walk the streets. When you go to West Jerusalem, you’ll see that it’s very developed, but East Jerusalem isn’t. Israel’s ultimate goal is to empty Palestinians from Jerusalem; it’s nearly impossible for us to get a building permit here, so what ends up happening is Palestinians live in overcrowded clusters in the city. What happens when the family grows? You have to live somewhere, right? So we build upwards, but Israel calls that illegal, but what are we to do? We have no other choice. So when Israel decides to demolish our homes, they say it’s because we built without a permit. It’s impossible for us to get a permit, remember? There are entire neighborhoods within Silwan, in East Jerusalem, that now have demolition orders.

Israel also likes to say that some homes were once owned by Jews prior to 1948, which allows them to come in and kick the Palestinians out. Which is ridiculous because all the homes were owned by Palestinians prior to 1948, but we aren’t allowed to use that same argument.

I don’t think Zionism in the long term can last. It’s a racist ideology, and it’s based on the annihilation of the Palestinian people, but it’s not just the Palestinian people who are being wiped out. The goal is to remove everyone who doesn’t think and act like them. We’ve all seen the maps of Greater Israel. Just like Nazism fell, Zionism will also fall because it simply can’t maintain itself. These ideologies are so bizarre, so inhumane. They can’t last and tend to crumble. Zionism is going that route. When your existence is based on the annihilation of another, it can’t be maintained. It will self-destruct.

The solidarity movements that have sprung up in the past couple of years have given me hope. Momentum has picked up significantly since the genocide became clear, but it can’t keep going.

My message to people in the West is don’t look away. I know it’s not easy, seeing all this death and destruction. But there needs to be more activism. Solidarity movements must grow. The goals must be to boycott and hit them where it hurts. Politicians must be pressured into supporting an arms embargo.

We Palestinians also have a role in maintaining pressure. My organization, Miftah, leads many delegations to educate people and increase pressure worldwide. We’re constantly educating people about what’s happening, particularly to women and girls here in Jerusalem, but any progress that you try to make under an occupation like Israel’s is an uphill battle. The hurdles are many–it can look like an employee who doesn’t get a permit to enter a particular place. Civil society in Palestine is largely dependent on donations from people in the West. Israel is trying to cut that off. Miftah is about disseminating the Palestinian narrative.

On the first day Palestine is free, I will be happy to replace any legal Israeli documents with Palestinian ones. That will be a heavy weight lifted off all of us.”

Joharah teaches and advocates about Palestine all while living in a city that is often ground zero for some of Zionism’s most fanatical supporters. Sumud lives and breathes through her with every action she takes to remain a resident of Jerusalem. It is a battleground of population demographics and trigger-happy occupation soldiers.

Existence is Resistance

As someone with the privilege of having an American passport and can therefore move around Occupied Palestine relatively freely, meeting and speaking with Palestinians trapped under occupation was a humbling experience. These Palestinians took a risk in speaking with members of our group, but it is our duty to remember them and amplify their voices in the West. Sumud lives and breathes with the continued breath of every resisting Palestinian in Gaza, in the West Bank, in ’48’, in the camps, or in exile in the diaspora. Like Mahmoud Darwish once said, “On this Earth there is that which deserves life.”

I still think about the man who was sitting on top of the rubble of his recently destroyed village with his wife and child. I recently saw that al-Araqib has now been demolished for the 238th time. Looks like he’s still getting back up and rebuilding.

My experience in Palestine taught me that we have reached another inflection point. The situation as it stands cannot last; you cannot have this amount of unemployment and lack of mobility, all while under the brutal knee of cruel occupation and genocide. When Joharah Baker said, “Zionism can’t be maintained; it will self-destruct,” I thought about the Israelis who took the time to go out into the remote areas of Occupied Palestine to uselessly plant their flag because deep down, they know how fragile their state is. Deep down, they know those flags do nothing but delay the inevitable downfall of a state built on dispossession. All Palestinians have to do, like the man from al-Araqib, is to get back up after we have been knocked down. Through the learned skill that is Sumud, time remains on our side.