Book Lion

“I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conqured, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiary in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“If you think I am wrong, I am wrong for all the right reasons.
Dealing with death on a regular basis makes you shallow inside. Your soul sleeps inside your chest, pleading to be woken up. In those dark times in a battle, one bad moment, a step on a mine, a bullet on target, or a lethal explosion, and you are a dismembered lifeless memory. Your dead flesh lays on the hot sand which burns your bare skin if you are unlucky enough not to be numb.”
― Swaraj Bhatia, Our Days :A Survival Odyssey

“The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“What’s crucial in this whole process is that you don’t matter. You as an individual—your aspirations, your ideas about what is right—mean absolutely nothing. And that’s when you understand why people get radicalized. I completely understand why somebody would join ISIS or al-Qaeda or the Assad regime or the Kurdish groups. You are in dire need for a narrative that can justify this futility. There has to be a point. So you become radical. This suffering has to be for a reason. Otherwise it’s too painful.”
― Wendy Pearlman, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria