Who’s fighting who here?

A very special woman, Mai is. I know, because we know each other for many years now. A few weeks ago I came to visit her, we had dinner and talked. Especially her. For me it was enough to just listen to her, to burst out laughing at her sharp observations, and to tear up at the depth of her commitment to her struggle for freedom—a freedom that others constantly try to trample—and at her unwavering, nonviolent worldview. You are inspiring, I told her at one point. Read her text and see for yourself.

Ayala Shalev, Editor, That’s About Us

---

Who’s fighting who here? / Mai Shahin

We Do Not Fight Each Other. We Fight the System That Profits From Our Death.

There is a lie being told about us.

That this is a war between two sides. That it is ancient. That it is complicated.

That our death is regrettable — but necessary.

But I need you to hear this with your full being:

We are not fighting each other.

We are resisting a global system that feeds on our blood and then calls us the problem.

This is not a “conflict.”

This is occupation. This is apartheid. This is a genocide unfolding in real time.

And the world — the so-called civilized world — is watching it with clean hands and silent mouths.

Gaza Is Not a Battlefield. It Is a Mass Grave Being Dug in Slow Motion.

There are no words for what Gaza has become.

Only fragments:

Ash. Flesh. Smoke. Infants. Dust. Silence. Silence. Silence.

There is no symmetry. No two sides.

There is a nuclear-backed military state,

and a population caged, starved, and bombed.

We are told not to say the word genocide.

As if saying it causes the crime.

As if naming our annihilation is more dangerous than carrying it out.

But we say it.

Because if we do not, we are already dead.

The West Bank Is a Laboratory of Control.

Here, the violence is slower. Quieter.

Papered over in paperwork.

A system of checkpoints, permits, home demolitions, beatings, curfews, and bureaucratic strangulation.

It is a colonization dressed as “security cooperation.”

It is a daily humiliation measured in hours spent waiting, walking, explaining that you exist.

It is watching your land shrink, your water stolen, your voice dismissed.

And yet, we do not vanish.

This Is Not Just About Israel. It Is About Every System That Makes This Possible.

The governments that sell weapons.

The media that sanitizes murder.

The silence of institutions that pretend neutrality is peace.

We name it because we must.

Occupation. Colonialism. Militarism. White supremacy. Capitalism.

These are not abstract ideas.

They are the hands choking us.

And we are not here to make them comfortable.

Nonviolence Is Not the Absence of Rage. It Is the Presence of Vision.

You want to see resistance?

It is the mother stitching wounds with bare hands.

It is the child learning in the ruins.

It is the grandmother refusing to leave her house, even when settlers break the door.

We are not peaceful because we are passive.

We are peaceful because we know what violence does to the soul.

We do not resist because we hate.

We resist because we remember what it means to be whole.

And because they are trying to take that memory from us.

They want us to become them —

To respond with the same cruelty they use to erase us.

But we know:

Once you surrender your humanity, you are already colonized.

We Are Still Alive. And That Is a Problem for the System.

You were supposed to forget us.

We were supposed to die quietly.

We were supposed to play along with the script: victim, terrorist, ghost.

But we are not ghosts.

We are living. We are breathing.

We are building, even as they bomb.

We are singing, even as we bury.

Our power is not in missiles.

It is in memory.

In care.

In the unbearable truth that we are still human — even now

If You’re Not Outraged, You’ve Forgotten You Have a Soul.

This is not the time to look away.

This is not the time to analyze, theorize, or balance both sides.

This is the time to choose.

Not between Palestinians and Israelis.

But between systems of domination and the right to exist.

We are not asking you to save us.

We are asking you to wake up.

To feel. To scream. To act.

Because every time you choose comfort over conscience,

another child dies unnamed.

Because neutrality is the mask that genocide wears in public.

We Will Not Be Erased.

We are not a problem to solve.

We are a people to stand with.

We are not waiting for permission to be free.

We are already building freedom in the rubble,

planting justice in the dust, and speaking life through the blood.

You will hear our voices long after the bombs stop falling.

And when the history of this moment is written,

let it never say:

They died quietly.

Let it say:

They rose, they wept, they healed, they called the world back to its own humanity.

---

Living in the West bank, Mai Shahin, founder of “Satyam/Homeland” is a therapist and a committed activist who believes in non-violent resistance.