What Does ‘Sumud’ Mean for Palestinians?

On my first trip to Palestine as an adult, I visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where I was drawn to a large, colorful wooden statue of St. George slaying a dragon. According to the inscription on its base, it was a gift from the city’s prominent Dabdoub family, my family who have lived in Bethlehem since the Crusades.

When I asked my local guide why the statue was there, he shrugged his shoulders and replied with one word in Arabic: “ResilienceSaint George is considered a hero by the Palestinians. One of the Bethlehem sculptors described him as “a knight full of peace and grace, riding his horse and always fighting evil.”

When I asked my local guide why the statue was there, he shrugged his shoulders and replied with one word in Arabic: “ResilienceSaint George is considered a hero by the Palestinians. One of the Bethlehem sculptors described him as “a knight full of peace and grace, riding his horse and always fighting evil.”

The word “steadfastness” is often translated as “steadfastness” or “perseverance” (or misunderstood by Israelis as “clinging to the land”) but is best mixed with notes of boldness, conscience, and dignity. The Palestinians call their children steadfast, but otherwise no one announces their steadfastness. Others attribute it to them in a way of rudeness, moxie, or rez. Resilience is a stable body and an unstoppable force. Like Saint George, Samoud is a dragon slayer.

Arabic is spoken by about 400 million people across nearly 30 dialects, but steadfastness is a particularly Palestinian term — and has been since 1978, when the Palestine Liberation Organization recommended steadfastness as a mechanism for dealing with the trauma of life under Israeli occupation.

The word recently gained international recognition when the Global Resilience Flotilla, a civilian-led convoy of more than 40 ships carrying humanitarian aid, set sail from Europe in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Italy and Spain sent naval ships to protect the fleet, and the leaders of Colombia, Malaysia, South Africa and Turkey condemned the Israeli military interception of the fleet earlier this month.

Raja Shehadeh, co-founder of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, describes resilience as “watching your home turn into a prison” and choosing “to stay in this prison because it is your home and because you are afraid that if you leave, your jailer will not let you return.” In his published magazine, The third way“If you live in this way,” he wrote, “you must constantly resist the double temptations: either to acquiesce to the jailer’s plan in numbing despair, or to become mad through hatred of your jailer and yourself.”

The common Western understanding of steadfastness is the way Palestinians responded to Israeli officials suppressing the display of the Palestinian flag. Many people now celebrate watermelons for their natural display of black, green, red and white – the colors of the flag. It’s a brave act of subversion: In the age of social media, the watermelon emoji has gone so far as to ban the symbol of the Palestinian flag.

Al-Samoud is how the Palestinian refugee camp, known as the most tear gas-contaminated place on Earth, turns gas cylinders into jewelry for its gift shop. It is the epic dream of Rawabi in the West Bank, the first planned city in Palestine. He’s Handala, a cartoon avatar of a 10-year-old refugee who has since turned his back. 1973. It is the determination of children in the West Bank to see the sea. Nearly half of Palestinians are children, or were so at the beginning of the genocide. Every Palestinian birth is an act of resilience.

Samoud is also Hussam Zomlot. He was born in a refugee camp in Rafah, and became ambassador to the United States and then the United Kingdom. It’s the Palestinian tech startup scene. It is journalists in Gaza who give recorded statements to be played after Israeli weapons finally reach them. Resilience inadvertently captured the world’s hearts for a moment in March, when it appeared in the form of an elaborate iftar held in the ruins of Gaza.

This summer, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir posted a 13-second video of himself mocking Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian political leader imprisoned for 20 years. Fadwa, Barghouti’s wife, combed through the video to find a single frame that she believed showed her husband’s strength, and asked his followers to use that image in their post about the encounter. That moment is resilience.

Wherever there are Palestinians, there is always steadfastness. Others might argue that Palestinian identity is defined by The Nakbathe Arabic word for catastrophe used to refer to the mass slaughter and displacement of Palestinians during the founding of Israel in 1948. But the darkest hour of a people is rarely the focus of its heritage.

Displaced Palestinians move with their belongings in the Nuseirat refugee camp area in the central Gaza Strip on September 23. Iyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images

Palestinians are used to being misunderstood. Stereotypes portray all Palestinians as they are Terroristsinstead of Fighting terrorists Fighting the Israeli occupation and genocide. Resilience is the confidence in the knowledge that many of the people who call Palestinians terrorists are not frightened by our weapons but by our very existence, and by the Palestinian pulse that beats like a warning heart under the cover of Israel over Palestine.

In our interconnected age, resilience is available to anyone online. It appears in the name of outreach programs in American churches, in a clothing brand that sells Che Guevara T-shirts, on a Finnish bag, in the lyrics of British songs, and in a non-profit perfume sold in Oregon. God bless.

It is fair that the world is full of misappropriated foreign concepts.Aloha, No briga, com. duende, He will come, ikigai, jugaad. Clumsy cultural exchanges are endemic in the West, where people buy fake sympathizers with runway keffiyehs or questionable Chinese tattoos.

Despite its Palestinian specificity, resilience reveals universal truths. The United States and Palestine may seem like two opposing worlds: a land of opportunity versus a land of occupation. But steadfastness is not strange to the history of the United States. American resilience is Chinese poetry engraved on the walls of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. that it Emmett Till Mother demands open casket. It’s First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who refuses to change out of her blood-stained pink Chanel suit. (She is said to have declared this in a casual definition of steadfastness: “Let them see what they have done.”)

American Resilience is a hotel-turned-civil rights museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It is written in names on Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It is a Puerto Rican flag draped into a bandana from the crown of the Statue of Liberty. It’s the AIDS quilt spread over the National Mall. It is the presence of absence at the 9/11 Memorial. It’s the shoe collection found in any Holocaust museum. Painting and repainting crosswalks in rainbow colors in Orlando, Florida.

American resilience knows that revolutions do not begin with chants or marches or even riots, but with the sacred, silent stillness of students sitting at a lunch table in Greensboro, North Carolina, or a 42-year-old seamstress sitting in a bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

“My resistance is not escape,” Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student who was recently returned to school Columbia University After he was arrested for his activism, he said last month. “It’s easier to distance myself and go somewhere else; [but] I choose to be part of the solution, part of the resistance, and part of imagining what the future will look like.”

A displaced Palestinian woman plays with a child outside their tent near the seashore in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on September 29. Magdy Fathi/Nour Photo via Getty Images

In a historic year for global support for Palestinians, American sympathy for Israel fell below 50% — to 46% — for the first time in the 25 years Gallup has tracked that sentiment, with sympathy for Palestine reaching an all-time high of 33%. This shift is largely due to American disgust at Israel’s brutality in Gaza, which 60% of the American public now disapproves of, according to a separate Gallup poll. American Jews are also largely negative toward Israeli violence and war crimes.

The global community also understands resilience. “Tank Man” slowly moves left and right, alone, facing the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square. The odometer hit the 1,000,000 mile mark on a freshly painted and polished vintage Chevy Pastel in Havana. or hitokage-no-ishiHuman shadows burned into stone, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Resilience is not a burden or a stigma on people. Humans have shared the survival instinct since our cave-dwelling days when we left our handprints on the walls. This art was not a matter of regional vanity; Archaeologists have recently discovered that they may have actually been testimonies to family, community, and shared joy.

We’ve come a long way from those caves, but not as far as we like to think. Resilience is an eternal reminder of the have-nots and how easy it is for people to mistreat the have-nots. It is an indictment of Israel’s brutality, of the US government that funds it, and of the wider world that watches it with just a finger.

However, the have-nots refuse to be the have-nots. We are the chemists who turn lead deprivation into Oscar gold. This is resilience: the unapologetic ownership of the knowledge that one’s very existence has a power that cannot be compromised by brute force or cowardly cruelty. If the United States is the world’s crucible, then Palestine is the world’s mortar, where humanity is crushed and crushed to its core. What remains is perseverance.