Sumud, an Arabic phrase, embodies the flexibility to face up to hardship and preserve a way of id and objective regardless of the challenges of residing beneath occupation.
A nation that maims, kills and starves males, ladies and kids is unlikely to outlive. Additionally, leaders of countries who’ve aided in these atrocities will possible face the identical destiny.
The Gaza Tribunal, newly created to counter the complicity of many Western international locations in Israel’s struggle crimes, crimes in opposition to humanity and genocide, tells us: “Gaza represents a breaking level within the historic journey of humanity, when a world system primarily based on energy, not justice, prevails.” Richard Falk, the tribunal’s president, at its first session in Sarajevo, characterised Gaza because the “ethical problem of our time.”
It’s Gaza’s kids, Palestine’s future, who’ve borne the brunt of Israel’s atrocities. The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Gaza probably the most harmful place on this planet to be a baby. And the commissioner common of the UN Reduction and Works Company for Palestine, Philipe Lazzarini, concluded about Israel’s struggle on Gaza, “This can be a struggle on kids. It’s a struggle on their childhood and their future.”
Two-thirds of the Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel’s self-declared “ethical military” have been ladies and kids. One in ten kids in Gaza are malnourished due to Israel’s engineered blockade of humanitarian help. And, greater than 40,000 have war-related disabilities on account of its assaults: “Gaza now has the very best variety of child amputees per capita wherever on this planet.”
A child psychiatrist with Médecins Sans Frontières, Medical doctors With out Borders, in Palestine, observes that there’s by no means a ‘publish’ in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s ongoing trauma, it’s protracted trauma, it’s one struggle [Israeli] after the opposite.”
As I agonize over the unimaginable struggling and trauma of Gaza’s kids, the chorus from Billie Vacation’s 1941 mournful song, “God Bless the Youngster,” retains coming again to me: “God bless the kid that’s acquired his personal.”
The soulful lament is tailor-made for all who expertise bodily and psychological ache. Its lyrics appear as in the event that they have been written with Palestinians in thoughts.
The poem encourages reliance on one’s energy and resourcefulness to outlive the painful inequalities and harsh realities of life. Regardless of its melancholic tone, it makes a robust assertion about self-determination and defiance within the face of adversity. With time, it has turn out to be an anthem of independence and self-reliance.
Generations of Palestinians have skilled numerous injustices and have needed to wrestle for survival on their very own. Sumud, a core worth in Palestinian society, has been their lodestar.
For many years, US-financed Israeli regimes have resorted to systematic cruelty and overwhelming pressure to crush Palestinian resistance. Their ruthlessness, nevertheless, has made Palestinians stronger and extra creative in resisting Zionist oppression.
The Palestinian wrestle for freedom has begun to deliver the world collectively and throughout generations. Palestine has come to imply freedom, particularly to the disposed and disenfranchised.
Regardless of the prepared availability of the US army arsenal, Israel has been unable to defeat a guerrilla pressure, with no actual technique of protection. The Israeli army has murdered numerous Palestinian leaders, relentlessly bombed their nation from the air, turned historic Gaza into rubble, however they haven’t succeeded in crushing the spirit of sumud.
Considerably, the picture of a democratic, civilized and ethical Israel has been uncovered for the sham it’s. The worldwide group has come to acknowledge the Zionist entity for what it has all the time been: a brutal, lawless settler-colonial challenge within the coronary heart of the Islamic world, striving to be the undisputed regional hegemon. Whereas engaged in unbridled barbarism in occupied Gaza and the West Financial institution, Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Sadly, Washington has dedicated itself financially, militarily and politically to Israel’s genocide. The Arab regimes, 23 of them (excepting Yemen), with a mixed inhabitants of practically 500 million, are weak, corrupt and depending on the US.
There may be a lot your complete Arab world can and will be taught from Palestinian sumud. Their liberation power and persistence bear witness to what’s doable: a brand new unified regional order that claims NO to U.S.-Israel hegemony.
Curiously, after World Wars I and II, Arab leaders of these years understood the need of forcefully opposing the implantation of Western imperialism within the area usually and in Palestine notably.
For instance, Egyptian diplomat and first secretary-general of the newly established Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, recognized additionally as Azzam Pasha, defined the League’s place concerning Palestine and the Zionist declare throughout a 1946 public listening to of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Cairo. The fee, assembled on the finish of World Warfare II, was tasked with investigating the influence of settling 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Palestine.
On the Cairo hearings, Azzam Pasha advanced an unbiased approach ahead:
“The Zionist, the brand new Jew (European), desires to dominate and he pretends he has acquired a selected civilizing mission with which he returns to a backward degenerate race in an effort to put the weather of progress into an space which desires no progress. Properly, that has been the pretension of each energy that needed to colonize and geared toward domination…The Arabs merely stand and say NO. We aren’t reactionary and we aren’t backward…We’ve got a heritage of civilization and of religious life. We aren’t going to permit ourselves to be managed.”
Azzam Pasha, like different Arab leaders of his time, rejected the institution of an unique Jewish state, proposing as an alternative an autonomous Palestine that revered the need of the Arab majority whereas safeguarding the equality of all inhabitants, no matter faith. It’s regrettable that the present management within the Arab world is deaf to it.
Palestine just isn’t the place of origin of the Zionists and their progeny, who’ve for 77 years illegally occupied stolen land and sustained themselves on pilfered sources. It explains the Israeli regime’s full absence of remorse or reservations about destroying 5,000-year-old Gaza.
Since October 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces have systematically leveled Gaza, a war crime beneath Article 53 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Conference, which prohibits the destruction of already occupied land by an occupying energy. Because it withdrew from the March 2025 ceasefire, Israel has carried out deliberate managed demolitions throughout bombed-out Gaza and has nearly flattened Rafah, whose historical past spans 1000’s of years.
Palestinians, like their cherished olive timber, have lives deeply rooted within the soil of Palestine. And like them, they’ve refused to be uprooted by British, Zionist and American imperialists.
The October riot has internationalized the Palestinian Nakba (disaster). Palestine can now not be ignored. The survival of the worldwide order and the rule of regulation is linked to the viability of the Palestinian nation.
Assist of the worldwide group for the Palestinian wrestle is extra essential right this moment than ever. That passive help have to be reworked into concrete motion has
lastly been deemed important by some nations. Elevated concern has led to the formation of numerous worldwide teams: the Gaza Tribunal, the Hague Group and Madrid Group, amongst them.
The Gaza Tribunal, often known as the Folks’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative, attracts on the experience of a broad group of intellectuals, lecturers, legal professionals, human rights activists, ethical and cultural figures and civil organizations to function a “courtroom of humanity and conscience,” particularly concerning Gaza.
On the Emergency Conference of the Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia, on July 15, 2025, for instance, all 30 international locations agreed that “the period of impunity [of Israel] should finish—and that worldwide regulation have to be enforced.”
The acknowledged purpose of the Madrid Group, a coalition of over 20 European and Arab international locations, is to finish Israel’s struggle and blockade of Gaza.
After 22 months of barbarism, the overseas ministers of Britain and 27 other countries lastly “sharply criticized” Israel for its conduct in Gaza. As onerous as they’ve tried, they may now not ignore the day by day slaughter of ravenous Gazans desperately making an attempt to get meals. Over 1,054 have been killed within the space of the help websites for the reason that Gaza “Humanitarian” Basis—an Israeli-backed U.S. contractor—seized management and militarized help distribution on 26 Could 2025.
On Tuesday (22 July 2025), UN humanitarians warned that the lifelines retaining individuals in Gaza alive are collapsing. And on the identical day, the final functioning hospitals there reported that 21 children had died up to now three days on account of malnutrition and hunger. Israel’s cruelty has no finish.
Billie Vacation’s lamentation about resilience and the endurance of the human spirit —“God bless the kid that’s acquired his personal…that’s acquired his personal”—is urgently felt for everybody in Palestine, particularly for the youngsters.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing within the historical past, politics and governments of the Center East. He contributed this text to The Palestine Chronicle.