Why do you want to kill me?

Why do you want to kill me?

Is it because my name is Wallenstein? Or because I don’t look like you and share the same customs and culture as you and your family? Are you jealous of my people’s business and financial acumen? Are you angry that we’ve returned to the land of our spiritual birth? Is the deity that I worship antithetical to yours? Why do you want to kill me?

Boat with Free Gaza flags at the beach.

Why do YOU want to kill ME?

Is it because my name is Ahmed? Or because I don’t look like you and share the same customs and culture as you and your family? Are you jealous of my people’s steadfastness and our determination to remain in the land of our ancestors?  Are you angry that the land wasn’t empty when you arrived from faraway shores? Why do you want to kill me?

Florist shop in Gaza.

I don’t want to kill you. Your suicide bombers and freedom fighters force me to defend myself and my family. I grieve the loss of innocent lives on both sides of the green line, but my people will never be victims again. We have the right to defend ourselves by any means necessary to ensure a future for our children and grandchildren. If you were just willing to live in peace and let bygones be bygones, there would be no killing.

I don’t want to kill you. Your brutal colonization is my Nakba, something you won’t even admit. You try to erase my history and my stories while demanding that I pay homage to your Holocaust. (By the way, I wasn’t responsible for your suffering!) I grieve the loss of innocent lives on both sides of the green line, but we have the right to defend ourselves against your occupation and siege by any means necessary to ensure a future for our children and grandchildren. If you were just willing to acknowledge the decades of humiliation and make reparations to the millions of my people forced to flee their homes so that you could establish your home, there would be no killing. 

Assalama Charitable Society for the Wounded – wedding celebration at the RASHAD SHAWWA CULTURAL CENTER in Gaza.

If it was only a matter of paying reparations to the refugees, we would have settled this conflict a long time ago. You want the right to return to the lands from which you fled in 1947-1948. We can’t allow you to return because then Israel will not be a Jewish state.

If it was only a matter of acknowledging the State of Israel, we would have settled this conflict a long time ago. Your Zionist enterprise gives any Jew in the world the right to make their home on this land, regardless of whether they have ever set foot on this soil, but you deny me the right to even visit my grandparents’ home in Jaffa or to study in the West Bank, keeping me imprisoned in the Gaza Strip. Choose peace or choose a Jewish state. You can’t have both.