Gaza: Resilience Amid Ruins

I live in the United States, where I often look around and see people going about their day, sipping coffee, jogging, shopping — untouched by the images of Gaza that now live in my mind. It is not indifference born of ignorance; it is a chosen blindness. To the so-called “West”: spare us your lectures on human rights and racism. While you preach morality, your governments arm and enable genocide. While Palestinians are slaughtered, you go about life as if nothing is happening. Your silence is complicity, your comfort is built on our blood. Don’t speak of justice while you stand by and watch it burn.

And yet, despite this abandonment, the Palestinian people endure. For more than 16 years under siege, for nearly two years under unrelenting bombardment since October 2023, Gaza has stood as a testament to human resilience. Schools, hospitals, homes, and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Families torn apart. Communities erased. And still — amid starvation, thirst, and the constant fear of death — the people of Gaza refuse to disappear.

Take the words of Munira El Najar, a Palestinian mother and teacher, who wrote to the mothers of the world:
“We do not ask for pity, but for witness… so that your children, when they grow up, will know that we had children too, that we had arms and hearts and fears just like you. Let the world remember that in Gaza mothers still give birth under fire, raise children in tents, and teach them that love survives even in war.”

This is the unfathomable resilience of Gaza. Mothers counting their children each morning, praying none were lost to the night’s bombardment. Fathers standing in food lines not knowing if bread will come. Children learning to laugh despite the sound of drones circling above. Life in Gaza is not lived in the ordinary sense — it is survival, a waiting, a testament.

Journalists, doctors, nurses, and aid workers in Gaza embody a kind of courage that the Western world cannot even imagine. They know that to report, to heal, to serve is to paint a target on their backs. Israel openly hunts them, threatens them, and kills them — and yet they persist. They work not only out of duty to their people, but out of defiance to a world that ignores their suffering and denies their reality. Their heroism is incomprehensible, a kind of sacrifice beyond the imagination of those who sit comfortably in newsrooms in New York, London, or Paris.

Even the armed groups, despite the relentless military campaign against them, continue to resist. Israel has degraded their capabilities but has not extinguished them. Their persistence, though militarily small compared to Israel’s might, is symbolic: Gaza will not be erased.

What lessons do we, in our comfort, draw from this? Gaza teaches us resilience in the face of despair, patience in the face of endless hardship, faith even when the world crumbles. Their lives, filled with uncertainty, uprooted by violence and deprivation, are still marked by hope and devotion to God. Their “beautiful patience” (ṣabr jamīl) is not passive, but active — a refusal to surrender dignity.

And above all, Gaza teaches us community. In the ruins, neighbors feed one another, families shelter strangers, and people hold each other up when the ground has given way. Their unity under fire reminds us that solidarity is not an abstract concept; it is the act of survival itself.

The West will one day look back in shame — or be judged by history as complicit. But Gaza will be remembered for something else: for resilience, for faith, for love under fire. The people of Gaza, rooted like olive trees in their land, remind us that when the forest burns, the trees do not run. They endure, and in their endurance lies humanity’s most powerful lesson.

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by Sami Wakim via street art united states

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