هون خرا كثير بس لساته النا (hun khara katir bs lisata alena) translates literally to “it’s really shit here but it’s still ours.” ‘Here,’ a reference to Palestine, more specifically, the archipelago of towns and villages that I have access to as someone with one of the green IDs. The West Bank. Duffa Gharbia. To get to my village from the bridge we all have to cross to access our land, we pass no fewer than five checkpoints (or more if they so please). The first time a soldier points a gun at you, it’s shocking. The second time, it’s boring. The hundredth time, it’s nothing.

Going for a ride at night to buy a bootleg designer t-shirt led to us watching a refugee camp get raided by the usurpers. During the raid, kids were standing in the street, meters away from heavily armed soldiers in their armored vehicles. They whistled and jeered. The army came to blow up people’s houses that night. They shot and killed a kid.

We visited the soccer club my cousin plays for in one of the refugee camps. Five minutes into our visit, my other cousin ran around the corner and yelled at me: “The special forces are here.” While we ran to our car, a kid from the camp asked me to take a picture of him and his dad at the pizza oven they worked at. The soldiers came. A few minutes later the usurpers launched a drone strike in the center of the camp. They killed and maimed a few.

My friends and I would often sit on our favorite mountain next to our favorite tree where, if the sky is clear enough, you can almost see the sea we are not allowed to visit. We spent hours sitting and drinking and smoking in the bushes. Every few minutes a military drone would fly over our heads. One night, we saw flares and grenades. They came to blow up a house, again, except this time they blew up three. That night they shot and killed a kid.

A lot of my time was spent with my cousins in my village. Jemma’in isn’t very well known outside our rocks, our olive oil, and some scholars from centuries ago. The town just to the north, where the taxi stops, could be considered famous; only because settlers love to pogrom her. We would smoke hookah and drink coffee for hours on the roof telling stories. Our village is small. The roads are poorly maintained. There is trash in most places. Everything is white, thanks to the dust from the gigantic quarries that have seen most of a mountain mined out. Even our sweets aren’t very good. I was warned not to drink the water at least fifteen times. The shawarma isn’t good enough to risk; I was told to go to Nablus for food.

But it doesn’t matter. It’s home. It’s ours. We would all defend Jemma’in with our lives. Proof is in the time when the usurpers came and shot and killed a kid. He threw a rock at their armored car.

I’ve been warned about ‘current events,’ but I don’t care. After a year of having the genocide of my people broadcast around the world, I don’t care what you think. Let this be terrorism. There are people my age with aspirations and talents much greater than my own being melted and shot and maimed and raped and tortured and blown to pieces. Some of them have to be put in boxes by weight because there’s so much flesh and no way to identify it. The village where my grandmother is from belongs to the usurpers (for now). It is an Intel factory. The closest I’ve ever been to her home is through the computer I typed this statement on. The refugees from that village, many of whom fled to Gaza have been eliminated. There is nothing left. The homes, squares, schools, mosques, hospitals, beaches, restaurants, dollar stores, tax offices, DMV’s, friends houses, smoke spots, libraries, cemeteries, back alleys, romantic views, soccer fields, galleries, markets, universities – are gone. The usurpers have destroyed everything. They have killed hundreds of thousands. They have killed hundreds of thousands, and they will continue to melt and shoot and maim and rape and torture and blow up tens of thousdands more. There are nearly as many identified murdered children under the age of five than there are characters in this text. One of those numbers will remain static. In the time it took you to read this, it's not unlikely that 10 people were murdered – one every 15 seconds.

There is nothing new to say.

زَكَرِيّا حُسَيْن

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