I wrote this text while being in Boston for a few months. One morning, I opened my messages to see the news from home. Fridays and Saturdays are especially worrying. Again on December 8, 2024, settlers from the Dolev settlement next-door broke the newly renovated roof of the holy Maqam of Abu El-Enain (the father of eyes/springs) on our site. Nida Sinnokrot and I established Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture in the village of Ein Qiniya west of Ramallah in 2017 after operating nomadically for some years. Our location is in the West Bank’s Area C on a hill facing the village’s small built up area to the north. The site had been uninhabited since 1967 when the village fell under Israeli occupation. The Zalatimo family, the owners of the land, entrusted us with its stewardship, and renovating the houses that had fallen in disrepair. Sakiya was established as an artist project, experimental school, and a platform for curriculum development and knowledge production integrating art, environmental science, and traditional knowledge systems. It is grounded in a pedagogical framework referred to as rewilding pedagogy, which emphasizes the interplay between ecological systems and modes of learning.
Over a period of a week prior to this latest attack, Yousef Yacoub, our Mu’allim (master builder/teacher), had carefully pressed the roof’s white lime mortar paste using an old flooring trowel that he inherited from his father, until it became smooth and shiny. With constant slow movement, expansive care, and lots of patience, he had worked with his knees resting on a wood board, reaching over to work the entire roof, moving the board when needed to make sure he didn’t step on the fresh mortar. He had sent me pictures of the work, appearing in some of them with much pride. A week later, the settlers used sticks to break into the mortar that was not completely dried by the gentle sun of December, and proceeded to make holes in the roof.
I called Yousef upon seeing the pictures that he shared. He said that he assessed the damage, collected the debris, and was set in motion to repair the roof. “We do not have time to waste,” he said; “Al-Marba’aniyeh is upon us.” Al-Marba’aniyeh is a 40-day period that starts on December 21 of every year, known for its cold weather, short days, and heavy rains. Sakiya operates on a seasonal calendar where we try to be in tune with nature’s cycles, and where our work is connected to the seasonal caring and maintenance of our farm, water spring, and houses. The renovation of the roof of the holy Maqam was planned to finish before the heavy rains. Such disruptions are not unique to Sakiya. Naturally, we have developed subversive ways to endure and navigate the absurdity and violence of the occupation, adapting to the realities of the site, and adopting strategies for survival and growth. Friends of Sakiya, especially those living outside of Palestine, ask how we are able to continue to work in such conditions. How could we contend with this unnatural disruption of life without falling into despair?
The next day, I read that Amti (Auntie) Halimeh had passed away. Tareq Bakri, the founder of the “We Were and Still Are Here” initiative, had been sharing stories about her on his social media platforms after he accompanied her a few years ago on her first trip back to Beit Nabala near Ramleh, her home village from which she fled in 1948 as a 14-year-old girl with her family. Amti Halimeh lived in the Jalazone refugee camp near Ramallah ever since. Beit Nabala was completely destroyed by Zionist militias in 1948, but ruins and trees stand as anchors of remembrance to this day. Amti Halimeh was able to map the village on foot, walking from one tree to another, one demolished house to another. Tareq said in a post that announced her passing that “Halimeh will be buried in the refugee camp, but her soul will return to Beit Nabala and visit the Mediterranean, no checkpoints or walls would be able stop her.”
Halimeh’s return after death challenges political resolutions and geographical fragmentations. It is a notion of return that acknowledges death as part of the cycles of life. Her return announces a recognition of human limitations and the expansive ways we are part of life. Another return, similarly marked by death, is that of late Palestinian academic and intellectual Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who was buried in his family plot in the Ajami cemetery in Jaffa after he passed in Ramallah in 2001. Abu-Lughod also became a refugee in 1948 as a young man, and returned to Palestine as a US citizen, where he worked and taught at Birzeit University until he passed. He returned to Jaffa, his home city, as his last resting place.
It is with this idea of return to nothingness, and stillness in death and destruction as part of the cycle of life, that I find myself reflecting. Not from a place of existential despair but rather as a solemn meditation on the human condition. It is in this nothingness that I believe we could find space for what could be an alternative, for imagining freedom, for starting anew while holding space for the stories and spaces that were. I see the results of over 15 months of the genocide on Gaza as signs of the inevitability of suffering. Perhaps death is a release from human suffering. But the persistence of life is a refusal to surrender—a refusal to violence, a refusal of human failures.
It is perhaps in Gaza where the meaning of life is clearer than anywhere else in the world. Despite the Israeli determination to make life impossible, it is indeed in Gaza, where life is the most valuable. It is a life without deceit. As we watch from afar, we are reminded that our lives are not treated as sacred. Yet the embrace of life as a cycle—where we find ourselves having to mourn the dead while at the same time take care of the living—remains central. We will not survive the genocide or its traumas alone, but together, perhaps, we might. Returning can be a solitary condition, but survival is collective. In the face of so much greed and destruction, people in Palestine continue to share resources, knowledge, stories, and strategies. They continue to return to building in the face of destruction as a way to survive. School classes are being established on the sand of Gaza’s Mediterranean shore and under the tree at Sakiya as alternative classrooms. In Gaza, because schools have been bombed and/or became makeshift shelters to the millions of displaced people, and at Sakiya, as a refusal for the conventional classroom. In both cases, we believe, these classrooms attempt to decolonize knowledge production and allow space to reimagine collective responsibility, agency, and liberation.
A return to rebuilding in Palestine, such as at Sakiya, and the resilience of the farmers in Ein Qiniya, despite constant threat and destruction, are acts of refusal to the terms of colonial rule, a refusal of a world measured by coercive power. In them there is also a return to a relationship with the land that carries a promise for a life outside of suffering. We are constantly faced not only with the reality of destruction but also with the promise of annihilation, the looming fear that things might not survive. Yet in our persistence to rebuild, there is an insistence to hold destruction in life’s cycle, treating it as part of life, while at the same time establishing stronger bonds with what holds life.
We are rebuilding Sakiya to be stronger and better respond to attacks. Nida Sinnokrot, artist, educator, co-founder of Sakiya, and my partner, speaks about “ephemeral infrastructures” as social, architectural and artistic building and rehabilitation methodologies. Ephemeral infrastructures are able to preserve and hold, deter and disintegrate, or all of that, depending on the season, the needs, and the realities on the ground. With this strategy, we think about spirits as infrastructures—the spirits of our holy trees and the holy spring that protect the hill. One of the projects Nida developed under this concept is “Sonic Scarecrow.” A scarecrow based on the sonic ecologies of the Palestinian commons, it defies destruction orders by the Israeli military and eliminates the need for fences, which are also not allowed to be built in Area C of the West Bank.
The persistence of life in the face of absurdity is both tragic and heroic. Despite the inevitability of destruction, there is an endless return to rebuilding. And despite humanity’s insistence on destruction and collapse, there is an equal insistence to honor the dead by honoring those who are still alive.
The challenge, then, is to break the cycle. To revolt against the cycle of destruction. And for people outside of Palestine, to have the courage to leave the cycle. To envision a world where persistence of life transforms into liberation, where survival becomes not just an act of defiance, but a promise for growth and renewal. This cannot be done without recognizing that in Palestine’s case, living under a settler colonial rule, apartheid, and genocide, is an everyday and not a past reality. Telling our stories, preserving and passing down of our histories and knowledge, while mourning our loved ones, contending with continual loss and displacements are all important actions that take a great deal of work, but cannot be done individually. Creating networks of solidarity, strengthening connections that challenge and defy coercive powers are some of the things we ought to do. And at the center of all of that, I believe, is a relationship to land and to each other that truly embodies an understanding of the entanglement of all life on earth, that survival and liberation are collective. ■