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My dear,
Here I am, writing this letter to you. Who am I? It doesn’t matter. What matters is what I have to say. I know that you are busy right now, busy staying alive, busy trying to ensure that the fire does not reach you and your children and your relatives and your family and your people and your occupied, deprived country.
We’ve received letters from Palestine, received many pictures that do not need to be described. We’ve received the sounds of continuous raids on the north, south, east, west, and center of the Strip, on your flesh, on your hearts.
My dear, we’ve received pictures of dismembered bodies, pictures of tears, of the blood of mothers and fathers and children and grandparents and grandchildren under the bombing, and they are all a testimony to the bomber’s lack of humanity, the bomber that has described the bombed as “human animals.” And still the world has not shuddered. Especially its rulers and leaders.
But I, like many others, did shudder, and I will continue to shudder in anger at this unbearable oppression as long as I live. But for now you will have to forgive me because my voice will not be enough to stop the US-manufactured Zionist raids.
So, who am I? It doesn’t matter much. But what may matter is that I am Algerian. That is, from a country that experienced colonialism and a war of liberation, that lost one and a half million martyrs. So it was only natural for us to study the Palestinian issue in school, and for our country to stand by Palestine from the outset, not due to a sense of hostility against Jews, as they claim, but a hostility against colonialism. We know how colonialism replaces one people with another, how it expels the colonized, steals their land, and appropriates whatever part of the colonized culture they want… simply put, colonialism separates between the two peoples and establishes the superiority of one over the other. The colonizer does not meet the colonized. And if that meeting does occur, it comes through the gates of violence.
Wherever colonialism exists, there is an oppressor and there is the oppressed. And the civilian colonizer lives a protected existence while the colonized merely tries to survive. The life of the colonized is always threatened, not only by the military colonizer but the civilian colonizer as well. So I repeat my point that standing against colonialism is not equivalent to standing against Jews but a rejection of the colonizer and the occupier. You are, of course, aware of this, and you know very well that the only religion colonialism knows is oppression and vileness.
Yet there are those who still claim that Israel is a state like any other state, that it is even a promised land that God promised to the Jews. Many of them have indeed returned to this land, after more than 3,000 years. How strange it is to hear these words today from those who profess their belief in the need to separate religion from the state. How strange it is for these people to cheer on a state based on religious nationalism, on illusion and a distortion of history.
If human groups are waging wars to get back what was theirs, or what they thought was theirs, then let us begin by returning the United States of America to its indigenous peoples… or let us revive theories of eugenics and ethnic cleansing, destroy the mixing between peoples... what a dangerous slope!
All over the world, thousands of Jews are denouncing Israel’s crimes and demanding freedom for Palestine. They teach us every day the difference between Judaism and Zionism, describing it as a racially oppressive approach that brought the concept of the Promised Land in the late nineteenth century as a way into colonialism. They teach us every day that not every Jew is a Zionist, and not every Zionist is a Jew.
Still there are those who say that Israel is a state for the Jewish people, claiming from their houses in the West that they believe in secularism and a civil state. In this case, what is then the fate of Muslims, Christians, atheists, and agnostics who are not Jews, many of whom exist in Israel? What does the phrase “the Jewish people” even mean? Are we talking here about the connection or lineage that goes back to David, Moses, and Abraham, for example?
This line of thought has one descriptor: racist. And racist thought must be completely rejected, just like gross double standards and intellectual contradictions must also be rejected. How can we denounce countries that follow extremist religious regimes, such as Iran and Afghanistan, and not denounce a new religious state – which is not only oppressive, violent, and an occupier, but which even unfairly treats its own people, differentiates between women and men?
My dear, I grew up and was brought up in Algeria with the popular saying, “With Palestine whether oppressed or oppressor.” I used to hear this phrase being uttered by my relatives and neighbors, by the entire Algerian people and other peoples around them. I was young and wondered, why should we be with Palestine if it is an oppressor? I later learned that when colonized people defend themselves, they are considered to be oppressors by the colonialists. So the attribute of oppressor was added.
I grew up in an area where proverbs expressing hatred for and cursing Jewish people abounded. I never understood this hatred, as I enjoyed listening to Jewish Algerian singers and was fascinated by Jewish culture just as I was fascinated by other cultures. I also used to hear proverbs that were directed against atheists and anti-Muslim proverbs that cursed Muslims in other regions… so I learned not to hate anyone for their origins or beliefs.
When I read history, I was shocked by the genocides of the Jews in Europe less than a century ago. I also read that the United States did not accept them as refugees, and I was further astonished by how many European countries tortured and exterminated part of their own people.
So today, as an adult, I really wonder: how do Europe and the United States support the extermination of Palestinians? Don’t they see that what they are doing is nothing but a repetition of what they did not so long ago?
My dear, I’ve learned that we must struggle to consolidate the concepts of justice, freedom, and basic and fundamental human rights. They do not pertain to only one specific population but to all people. In order for concepts to have meaning, they must be applied in reality and without discrimination. If we do not give them precise definitions, name them, and demand them, they will be used instead to justify injustice, imprisonment, oppression, and inhumanity.
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Forgive me, my dear, I’ve wandered off into writing about history, illusion, truth, lies… perhaps something I’ve shared will fall on receptive ears. But I forgot to ask how you are doing, now that you can’t find a safe space to live in that will be spared by the army whose bombing is so indiscriminate it has even extended to hospitals. How you are doing, in a place from where doctors have screamed to the world, “A message to the world… what is happening now in Gaza is genocide, what is happening now in the world is genocide!”
Between one death and another, I tried to fixate on the smiles of the innocent people who were trying to be happy before they were exterminated. My mind did not want to accept that they had already been killed. Youssef al-Jamil… the little boy with pale skin and curly hair. How could I ever forget him? How could I forget his mother, who went to bring him some tomatoes from her neighbor’s because Youssef was hungry, only to return to him and find that that he will not return to her? The smile of journalist Rushdi Siraj, how could we forget it?
We build relationships with every Gazan person through our screens. They tell us what is happening, they talk to us every day, we see how they are losing one kilogram after the other, and still they stand before us, persevere, continue their journeys. We pray that their names will not be added to the list of martyrs tomorrow… even though we know that we will be reading someone’s name on the list tomorrow.
Heba, before I go, I need to tell you that I was very impressed by your artworks. I also love to draw. I am like you, I love paintings depicting women in traditional Palestinian clothing… I love your paintings of Gaza and Jerusalem, the way you combine colors in your work. I love how you add plants, olives, oranges, Indian figs, how you sprinkle them all across your canvases… I especially love your painting of a woman with a grey cat, the one you named “My Cat and Me.”
My dear, how I hoped that your attempts to survive would be successful. But you’ve left us, you were taken away. Just know that we saw your paintings and we loved them. We loved you. It was said that they burned in the shelling. But we’ve documented them from your page.
You, my dear, you known Palestinian woman, you have been taken by bombing whose source is also known. Heba Zagout, a Palestinian visual artist, you were killed at the age of 39 with your sons Adam and Mahmoud by violent Israeli shelling on Friday October 13, 2023.
Wiame Awres
