Writing What Must Never be Forgotten
The Attempted Erasure of Palestinian People
This was one of the first news feeds that came across my computer screen today. With in a few moments of awaking from my sleep the world is turned upside down. Death, death, and more death in Gaza. As I sit in my comfortable chair, six thousand miles away, at my tidy desk, and sip my black Columbian Coffee. What a shame it is to carry the identification of a US citizen in these times, as our blood lust leaders in exorbitant suits and ties, continue to tell their murderous lies.
One scroll down and I came upon this, another who hung over the abyss.
The truth of these words bear repeating,
“There is no forgiveness for any of us for what we have allowed. None.”
I responded,
“Yea, we're all going to hell for this. Oh wait, we are already in hell. An eternity of watching children exploding right in front of us. This is Hell for sure!”
But, my words fall short as I reach for metaphors that are well beyond my grasp, in a vane attempt to say the unsayable, write the unimaginable, and express the unthinkable. ‘I have children and grandchildren too, God damnit! Will this be there lot !?!,’ my mind raged. But even this tracked the distance between the one who is a fire watcher and the one who feels the burn.
In my feeble state, I have no choice but to turn the narrative over to one who is not six thousand miles away, in his comfortable chair, at his tidy desk, sipping his black Columbian coffee.
Preventing the Erasure of the Children of God
Please witness a few words from Gaza by Dr. Ezzideen. Words that he wrote today that express the effects of the charging station killings. Dr. Ezzideen has asked us to share the words widely across all platforms so that a clear testimony can be registered.
“If my words have reached you, it is not by accident.
It is because suffering demands to be witnessed.
Help me bring this book into the world.
Not for recognition.
Not for escape.
But because memory, once written, cannot be erased.”
“What is the name of a world where
love ends not in old age, but in flame?”
It was a modest thing, a table, some wires, pieces of broken plastic, and borrowed sunlight. It existed not because it was allowed, but because it was needed. In Gaza, where electricity belongs to the past and mercy is an idea spoken of only in prayers -and even those whispered with hesitation- people gathered there to charge their phones. To send proof of life. To whisper, “I am not dead. Not yet.”
Today, they brought silence instead.
A strike. Sudden. Loud. Pointless.
The charging station no longer exists.
Among the dead: Dr. Ahmad Nabhan.
A man of caution. A man who believed in rules, not out of naivety, but because without rules, there is madness. And Gaza has already seen enough of that. He obeyed the warnings. He moved south when the killing grew loud. Then, when the ceasefire came, he did what all men of principle do in delusion: he returned to work. To serve. To heal.
At the Indonesian Hospital, he resumed his post. Each day was a bet with fate. And yet he believed: “If I am useful, perhaps I will be spared.”
He spoke often of his son. It was not merely love, it was adoration, the kind that trembles because it knows what is at stake. And his wife, she was not simply his companion. She was his anchor to the dream that life could still be something more than endurance. He wanted, like all fools who have not yet died, to leave. To go far. To give his child a future, even a dull one, as long as it was free.
But death, as it always does, came not for the criminal, not for the cruel, but for the one who waited his turn.
And now, in the apartment where no light comes unless it is stolen, his wife sits. Not crying, she is far beyond that. She is thinking.
She is thinking the kind of thoughts women think only once in life:
How do I explain to a boy that his father is ash?
What do I say when he asks if the rules still work?
What is the name of a world where love ends not in old age, but in flame?
The boy keeps asking why Baba hasn’t come back. He says maybe he’s charging his phone somewhere else. Maybe God needed him. Maybe he’ll come at night, like he used to, whispering promises, pressing kisses into his dreams.
And the mother? She doesn’t correct him.
Because in this house, truth is a cruelty no child should hold.
Because she too sits and waits, not for Ahmad, but for a reason to keep moving her legs, to keep standing, to keep being called alive.
What does a woman become when the only man who truly saw her disappears in a flash of fire and wire?
What does a child become when the voice that named him, the arms that lifted him, are suddenly nowhere, not behind the door, not in the clinic, not even in the dirt, because there is no body to bury?
They live on, the wife and the son. Not out of hope, hope is gone, but because life, even when shattered, insists on itself.
In the corner of the room, his shoes remain, upright.
She will not move them. Not yet.
The boy still sleeps with his father’s broken phone under his pillow.
And every morning, he asks if the charge is back.
This is not simply death.
It is the slow unraveling of everything that once made sense.
#GazaGenocide 3:54 PM · May 28, 2025
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