Freedom Breathing
Palestinian Sumud — the alpha and the omega of duties
This piece is free to read on substack.
Sumud: A Palestinian Concept
Instead of attempting to give a definition, I am writing this article to show examples of people demonstrating ‘sumud’ — all of them glorious examples of individuals expressing steadfastness in the face of extreme challenges to express the collective will of the people.
Sumud
The Traitor
A young man responsible for the martyrdom of multiple Palestinian freedom fighters is seen being dragged by a woman. She's blocking his escape by standing in the doorway, gripping his shirt tightly, and yelling, "Spy! Spy!"
Other men arrive at the scene and surround the young man — the traitor, the collaborator — eventually taking him away to be executed. The woman who caught him is his mother, and the person who executed him is his brother.
People living under brutal military occupation have of necessity, to live by a code. They have to live by a strict code because otherwise we all die — and so it's everyone's duty to make choices to maximise the chances of survival. This is why, in every time and place, throughout the world, but especially in times of war, the traitor must lose their life for putting their own personal need and survival, above that of the group.
“Personal interests are now the collective interest because in reality every
one will be discovered by the French legionnaires and consequently massacred, or else everyone will be saved. In such a context, the every man for himself concept, the atheist's form of salvation, is prohibited.”— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth.
Sumud
Hunger strikers in the Zionist Prison
For the hunger strike to work, everyone in the Zionist dungeon must uphold their resolve, as any one person wavering in commitment would undermine the goal — the greater good.
Writing in ‘The Rose and The Carnation’, the honourable Yahya Al Sinwar described the planning of one of the hunger strikes, from the first person with the idea, to stealing a pen and paper to write the plan down, wrapping it in nylon, then putting it in your mouth to pass inspections, which then goes from cell to cell, hostage to hostage, mouth to mouth.
Planning for the hunger strike is a dangerous process as Palestinian hostages are not allowed to gather or interact, requiring weeks of undercover coordination to ensure that the strike begins at the exact same moment. Through the hunger strike, Palestinian hostages of the sham Jewish-only colony would enter a battle of wills, enduring the pains of hunger on top of torture and coercion by the enemy to wait for death, thereby overcoming the jailer's arrogance. How else do you negotiate with an implacable enemy, one that doesn't have a soul?
"It was unacceptable for these individuals to die without cause, nor was it desirable to showcase the Palestinian cause in a dignified way," Sinwar writes in his book, implying that this mass self-sacrifice would risk humanizing the Jewish supremacist's caged subjects, or worse, they would be seen as heroic, forcing the jailers to cave to their demands. Our enemy is terminally insecure, as evidenced by their need to call themselves the chosen people.
How else do you negotiate with an implacable enemy, one that doesn’t have a soul?
Sumud
The Released Palestinian Hostages
Palestinian hostages who were recently released by the ceasefire and hostage deal were forced to watch a 3-minute video prepared by the Jewish army's Operations Division in cooperation with the Prison Service, documenting the destruction of biblical proportions they committed in the Gaza Strip in what Trump is calling, "wiping out a civilization."
Enemy media boasted about it across all their platforms to reassure Europe's squatters that Palestinian suffering will continue no matter what — Don't worry God's chosen people! The Amalek may have left our dungeons, but we destroyed their lives exponentially!
The Israeli newspaper ‘Hayom’ reported that one prisoner fainted from shock after watching the video. Walla Communications framed it as "a deterrent to the freed terror convicts." Other Hebrew media outlets mentioned that it was "to demonstrate the cost of the war," which is the Jewish way to tell children, women, and men, some who have not seen the outside of a prison wall in years and decades, that their freedom cost them a holocaust. Yet these recently freed Palestinians that come home in buses are greeted by massive crowds of their people — cheers, whistles, clapping, crying, so much crying.
"We imagined a greeting but not in this size, Wallah," recently freed Palestinian Mohammed Zayed, who spent 20 years and a half in Zionist dungeons, said through tears, "We imagined love and affection from our people, but not to this extent, you have held our heads up high, the Palestinian people deserve freedom and life and dignity, they deserve everything we have offered — everything I gave in twenty years is nothing in front of the Palestinian people." — via @ qudsn.
This vile and depraved Zionist enemy on our land has not figured out the Palestinian people in the more than 100 years of ‘colonizing’ us; the European euphemism for invasion, mass murder, rape, land theft and occupation.
Sumud: Concluding Thoughts
In Gaza, it is both the personal and the collective effort of the people who brought the enemy to their knees, those who held on to the ground despite the massacres, bombardment, constant terror, invasion, siege, and starvation, rejecting all attempts of being exiled from their land, including those who fought the metal-rusted imperial death machine with their bare hands — legendary sumud.
Inside the concentration camp, the sacrifices given don’t come with a grudge directed at their own, as it is clear that everyone is a victim of the Zionist occupation just the same. Everyone lost something, be it a limb, a loved one, or a home. Unlike the sham Euro-colony planted on us, in Gaza no fingers are pointing at resistance, wagging had they only not resisted, and no people are blocking the roads in anger at freed Palestinian hostages coming home because look what happened to us.
On the contrary, the newly released Palestinian hostages cry they should have let us die in the torture chambers, and Gaza cries for the remainder of their people in the dungeons to come home. Because what kind of life would we live without each other anyway?
This vile and depraved Zionist enemy on our land has not figured out the Palestinian people in the more than 100 years of colonizing us.
For me, Sumud, the concept of steadfastness is a code that we have to live by, passed down to us from our ancestors who were a piece in their piece in the story, that is now our piece to carry on in a larger piece of the story, which is Palestine.
Sumud expresses the microcosm, in the macrocosm; it’s an individual consciousness allying with a collective action, a sum of duties found in the spaces between the living and the dead.
All the blood spilled since the white demons stepped foot on our land will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Thus, every breath taken must carry the revolution — freedom breathing. Because for this Palestinian story to be complete, we have to live by a code, otherwise, we all die — and it’s everyone’s duty that we all live.
