Palestine
17 / 76
Indigenous Palestinians Recount Their History
It didn’t start last week. From Isra wal Mi’raj, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and Salahuddin Ayyubi to the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist Movement, the Nakba, and the current siege of Gaza—Palestine’s history is well-documented.
Join three Palestinians—Morad Barghouthi, Dania Tbakhi, and Reem Sultan (whose family members were among those killed in the Gaza hospital bombing this week)—as they recount the true story of what is today an occupied land and a traumatized people on the brink of a genocide.
Related
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Jazakumullahu khair for coming in. Inshallah, Brother Murad will join us and give us a brief history, Islamic history, of Masjid al-Aqsa and why Palestine is really important to us in our aqeedah, in our theology. So, my name is Dania. I am a native to Palestine. My grandparents are Palestinian. My parents are Palestinian from both sides. I was born in the West, so I grew up in the States and in Canada. But I still have a lot of connections to what I call home, Palestine. And subhanAllah, this time Allah has chosen the people of Gaza in a very uniquely difficult position. But inshallah, they are the frontliners to essentially the attack on al-Aqsa. We have Sister Reem with us here today. Sister Reem, go ahead and introduce yourself. Assalamualaikum, everyone. Very happy to be with you. So, I am also a native Palestinian. Both my parents, my grandparents on both sides, and at least six generations and more were Palestinians. But unfortunately, I was born in Libya, North Africa, and then went around the world until I ended up in Canada. So, I am a Palestinian-Canadian, a mother of four, a pharmacist by profession, and a community activist. Mashallah. So, Sister Reem, do you want to give us a glimpse of where you're from in Palestine and what does that mean to you in the current light of what's going on today? Absolutely. So, my grandparents, maternal grandparents, lived in Jaffa on the Mediterranean. And in 1948, they were – just bear with me one moment.
So, in 1948, they were forced to leave Palestine because of what was – because of Israel, the birth of Israel. And they had my mother in Egypt. And that – having to go through all the Nakba and the exodus from Jaffa and finding refuge in Egypt was extremely hard on them. And then they lived in Egypt until my mother was ready to start work, and that's when she moved to Libya. My father, for six generations back, was – lived in Gaza. So, he is native to Gaza, and was studying in Egypt in 1967 when the Six-Day War broke. And so, he lost his right of return because whoever was outside of the Gaza Strip at that time could not return. This is a picture of myself with one of my cousins who happens to be a freelancer and covers wars and so on. When did you take this picture with him? Last year. So, I was in Gaza last year. Okay. This is our grandparents' house. Notice the tiles on the floor. These are very beautiful tiles. And I remember, you know, these tiles from when I was a child. And subhanAllah, the house is still the same, the way my grandfather, you know, built it. Behind me is a jasmine tree that's so fragrant when it blooms.
So, to finish the story, so both my parents at this point have lost their right of return, and they both ended up going to seek work in North Africa, Libya. At the time, Libya needed a lot of workforce, and so a lot of Palestinians were going there because you had to find work or else you're stateless. And in any country, you needed work so that you can have residency in a country. So, both of them met in Libya, and that's when I was born in North Africa. And then my father was pursuing better employment, and so the family ended up migrating to United Arab Emirates. And so, we lived there for seven years and then came to Canada. So, that's basically my story. That's a typical story you hear from a Palestinian. You know, we jump around, we're grasshoppers, and this is the comment from the Palestinian diaspora. Seven million of us, we don't live back in our land. We're kind of all over the place. So, kind of jumping forward now to what's going on. Here's another picture of you. Maybe I should go through these pictures. So, where we live in Gaza, we're in the northern part of Gaza, so very close to the border. And subhanAllah, it's still the village kind of feeling where we make everything by hand. So, this is us making bread. The bread, the dough is neat, and then you prep it, and then you cook it.
So, I think the picture after this should be of bread actually being put in mud ovens. So, this is still from the time I was a little kid. It is the same, you know, mud oven in the same spot, and they do their bread. Now, this is me acting like I know what I'm doing. It's extremely hot. So, I was burning my fingers, but my cousins do it like, you know, so easily. So, Gazans are very, you know, they can make their own food. And that's part of why they are resilient. The area where my family lives is all farmland, and so they farm all what they eat. So, in times of siege, I know that's not the case in other parts of Gaza, but for my particular family, we're very, very fortunate in the fact that my family are both fishermen and farmers. And so, they don't go hungry because they actually produce the food that they eat. Inshallah. Let's see what else. Next picture. That's the most yummiest bread that you will ever taste, fresh off from the oven. Inshallah, you're able to go back and taste it. Inshallah. And so, these are the younger generation. So, my cousin's kids sitting enjoying a game of Monopoly. And that's the one part that people forget, that these are children that live just like we live here in the West. They have dreams. They go to school. They play the same games that we play. You know, they just want to live like every child deserves to live. And to look at this picture and see how happy they are, and now to know that they're scared, being bombarded,
you know, coming back to destroyed homes, destroyed belongings. I can't tell you how devastating that is for me because I lived it with them. And for every Gazan child that has to go through wars, and they didn't go just through one war. It's war after war after war. I mean, when I go through it, it's mind-boggling. These children have known nothing but wars. It's like every couple of years, there's a war and they have to go through all of this again. Mind you, this particular one is the worst they've ever seen. But nonetheless, they keep having to face this. Let's try the next picture. Or maybe this is the end. Okay. These are the boys just, you know, being boys, playing games, just hanging out. And subhanAllah, they're raised to be such great men. Like now we see, you know, on social media, the men of Gaza are like no other. You know, they're sitting here caring for the elderly, taking care of the young kids, making them laugh, taking care of the cats, the animals, and at the same time, making sure to document everything for the world. And subhanAllah, we're always praying, obviously, for the children and the women of Gaza and Palestine. But then, you know, we can't forget the men. They're trained at a very young age to be very dependable. These are my aunts. So these are my four aunts. I since have lost my aunt, who's on the end, with the red covering on her head. May Allah bless her soul. I'm so happy that I got to see her after years of not being able to see her. And I pray that I'm united with all of them in this dunya and with all four of them in Jannah. Actually, they used to be five. I used to have five aunts.
One passed away a while back, and then I just recently lost one, and now I have three. Again, these are boys just playing games on the balcony or on the roof. And subhanAllah, this is the part that the world doesn't see, right? Again, they're just like boys anywhere, playing ball, hanging. You see this at the riverside here, right? I don't know the name of it, but it's a very common game that all guys play, for sure. Next picture. And one of the best things that Gazans love to do is be on the beach. This is a tent on the beach, and in this picture are my uncles and aunt, and as well as my cousin. So my cousin had invited us, her and her husband invited us out. My father, my uncle in this picture, to just enjoy the beach. They bring their snacks and whatever, sit in this tent and enjoy the view, and then go for a swim. And Gazans have always a saying that Allah loves us because we have a sea. There's so much happiness that they draw from being on the beach and being able to enjoy the water. And so no matter what Israel does, they always say that we have the beach, we have the sea. So this is basically the only entertainment that Gazans have, in the loose word of entertainment. This is their refuge, this is their place where they go and have fun. That's the only thing they have, is the sea. And Gazans' sea is also like, before the siege, my dad would tell me, when they go down to visit their family,
where I'm from, it's an hour away to get to Gaza and go to the sea. It's really well known for their beaches. The beautiful sand. And that's the view. So you're sitting up in a tent and all you see is the beautiful shoreline, and then people enjoying a day at the beach. And unfortunately, we all know that even kids playing on the beach get bombed. You're not safe anywhere you are. And I love this particular picture of a young cousin. Because of his pets, Palestinians are very loyal to their pets. There's so many cats and birds and turtles. And again, that's part that people don't know about. But now with the war, we've seen so many pictures on social media with them rescuing their cats and bringing their birds and their furry friends. Again, you know, just like any other child. Yeah. Next picture. Okay. And that's humanizing, right? Humanizing the struggle is they're just like us, you know, but they were just born there and they stayed there. And inshallah, may Allah have mercy on those who left us during these hard times and may Allah grant them victory and ease their souls. Because what they're going through as we see, what we see is a small glimpse, is nothing that we can ever fathom. And I just want to make it clear to everybody that what happened on October 7th didn't come out of nowhere. You know, the struggle has been going on for 75 years and even more than 75 years.
And I want to delve a little bit deeper into the history of Palestine and its own work in the land of Palestine and tying it to my roots, but also tying it, let's start, let's go a little back, Isra' al-Mi'raj, where the Prophet, peace be upon him, he went to Masjid al-Aqsa and that's where he ascended to the seven skies. That's where he got the commandment of prayer. So Masjid al-Aqsa is very important to us from a theological point of view. It's part of our aqeedah. He came down, he led a prayer with all the prophets. So we have to take care of it. We have to learn about it. And my grandfather, may Allah have mercy on his soul, lived by the statement of saying that, you know, it's really important to remember that Palestine was first occupied intellectually and culturally before it was occupied geographically. And to grant Palestine its freedom, we must first recapture our culture before reclaiming its borders. And I think that's really deep and really important for us to think about because now on the outside, and as we speak right now, there's a lot going on right now. And that always happens at night, you know, right before dawn. And we feel very helpless. I'm sure everybody here feels very helpless. And, you know, we know the power of dua, but there's another power that we have and that's knowledge. We need to educate ourselves. It really empowers us because there's a lot of information out there right now and a lot of misinformation. And our tool in knowing what's right and knowing our history and knowing who deserves this land and what this land was built on is really important. Absolutely. And for a long time, our actual culture, our dishes, they were all, you know, being taken away. We were losing our own culture. So it's nice to hear. Nice to see now people know what the flag of Palestine looks like.
The kufi that we both have donning on is, you know, people know what it is. It's part of identity, our identity, you know, and it's a statement. As well as the Palestinian traditional clothing, which a lot of people now know that we're both wearing, which is the stitches that our grandmothers would do, prepare from when they're young and prepare it to the day they get married. So the girl would actually be embroidering her own dress for the day that she would get married. These are our cultures and our traditions. And it's so nice to see that those Hinnah nights are back. I see a lot of youth that some of them are not even Palestinians. They're throwing the Palestinian Hinnah. They're donning these clothes. They're singing the songs. And that's bringing the culture back. And that's so heartwarming. Alhamdulillah. That's true. That's true. Everything has a meaning, subhanAllah. Even our kufi, the different prints have a meaning. Like this is the fisher's net for the Mediterranean Sea. These are the olive trees. And these are the borders from the Lanta River, from the Jordanian River to the sea. As-salamu alaykum, guys. Wa alaykum as-salam. I'm sorry. I had a bit of a technical difficulty there. Not to leave and come back. Alhamdulillah. Well, I'm back. I'm back. I might have missed some of what you said. I'm sure we could get back on it, inshaAllah ta'ala. Jazakumullah khair, Sister Reem, Sister Dania, for being patient with us. Alhamdulillah. You went through several slides of your families and pictures of Palestine. But I want to ask you a personal question now, Sister Reem, because I really felt the passion that you had, especially for the Palestinian culture. What do you feel when you look at those pictures, as a Palestinian? My pictures that I shared of my family?
Yeah, like of Palestine. Your family there, your land there, the house there, everything. The bread. Proud, proud moments. Proud moments, happy, happy memories. And I don't know, the feeling that we're heading in the right direction. Though at the beginning there was a lot of despair, feeling despair, feeling dismay, like when is this going to end? I just came back from a protest here in London, Ontario. That's where I live. And there were thousands and thousands of people chanting, free Palestine, free Palestine. And subhanAllah, for a stateless person that just came to Canada in 1989, that was told, don't say you're Palestinian, keep it low-key, don't get into political debates, just say you're an Arab. To walking down downtown London, Ontario, chanting free Palestine, it felt amazing. But you know, I feel like people don't know, because I'm a Palestinian myself, and I actually lived in Palestine for five years. So in those five years, there are so many memories that I don't really talk about in public. Now I'm a public speaker and whatnot, and there's a lot of stuff that I don't feel comfortable speaking about. But now since we're in a setting where we're all Palestinians and we're all sharing what we kind of went through, I remember my first night of living in the West Bank, my first night, I slept, I was like, it was a new house, and it was like 2 a.m. My mom was only home, my dad was here back in the States, and six soldiers broke the door down, and I woke up at 2 a.m.,
and I had three of them pointing their gun at me, telling me not to move. That was my first night in Palestine. I'll never forget it. And then from that day on, I knew what's up. I knew what Palestine is about, what life is about. Later on that year, I saw a lot of our land, about 120 trees uprooted, just our olive trees in the West Bank. And these are like Roman. These are olive trees that dated back to the time of Isa a.s. So like, you know, as Palestinians, we have these personal experiences, and then we have our family, right? Oh, your cousin, your cousin. Like I just called my mom the other day, and my mom and dad are in Palestine. And they're like, oh, you know, your cousin Mohammed, he got shot in the stomach, and they took him to the hospital. He had to do an emergency surgery. But alhamdulillah, he's good. Just says he misses the knafah. SubhanAllah, it became like a, it's like that for a Palestinian. And then we have to go out, and people don't really know what it is that we go through when we go there, and when we talk to our family, and we see the videos and the pictures. I want Sister Reem to speak a little bit about that, inshallah ta'ala. Yani, just when you talk to your family, and then Sister Dani, inshallah. Yani, just tag on to that. And when you speak to your family, what is it that you feel? What are some personal experiences? And then how do you feel when you speak to your family over there? So, subhanAllah, in Gaza specifically, we all know it's the biggest open-air prison in the world. One of the pictures that I shared was of my cousin, who is such a talented, talented young man.
He's a freelancer. He's won awards, international awards. If this young man, Sami, is given an opportunity, I know he would do wonderful things. He's tried so hard just to leave the country, to get better training, to get a better opportunity, but that does not exist. So, they live in Gaza. You know, 60% of youth don't have a job and will never have a job. And then they sit there and can't even leave. So, it is a horrendous type of, you know, it's a difficult, difficult life. And that's important to know, because this is the life that they've known since 2007, when the siege was put on Gaza. So, you've got these youth that never left. They don't know what outside is like. They are in prison. And at one point, they just explode, right? You know, one of the things that my family tell me is, you have no idea how difficult it is. You know, we have no hope. There's no potential for us. We just make the best of it. And that should never be the case. And I don't think people know, when we say open-air prison, obviously, we want to avoid that negative connotation, like, you know, because prison is associated with criminals and people that do crimes and whatnot. This is more of a concentration camp. It's more of a concentration camp. But we say open-air prison because these innocent people in a concentration camp are pretty much treated like prisoners. You know, where the food is controlled, the water is controlled, the amount of electricity they have is controlled, their travel, you know, and they're being watched and monitored and surveillanced with the highest technology in the world all day.
Every move that they do, everything that they message, any Facebook post, any Twitter post, everything. But prisoners are guilty. Yes, subhanAllah. Sister Dani, what do you have to say about your experience? I know you're from Khalil. So I'm from Khalil. So we're in Hebron, which is where the Ibrahimi Masjid is. So Prophet Ibrahim's Masjid. And it's a difficult city to live in. It's actually one of the oldest cities that the settlers, the legal settlement started in. Obviously, they, you know, they go to Ibrahimi Mosque. They settle around there. You know, my aunts still live there. My cousins live there. And when I go to visit, they still have this resilience. Like even when we talk about Gaza now, they're, you know, we're from the outside. We're like the trauma, like, and obviously this trauma, it's terrifying. But they're like, how else is Palestine going to be free? Who's going to free Palestine besides these boys and these women who are seeing what's going on? So they have this firm belief and we see it now. It's resonating. A lot of people are seeing the faith, this faith that we will never know. And they're chosen to be there. SubhanAllah, Allah chose them to be there. Allah chose them to be the guardians of Al-Aqsa. And that's not even something that we're just saying for the sake of saying. The Messenger ﷺ, there's an authentic hadith where he said, فَإِنَّ هَا خِيْرَةُ اللَّهِ مِنْ أَرْضِهِ يَجْتَبِي إِلَيْهَا خِيْرَةُ مِنْ خَلْقِهِ It's the best of land that Allah ﷻ created and to it, He brings the best of His servants. So it is literally that Allah ﷻ chose them to be there and put up with that struggle and persevere. And persevere and for the first time, I think, with the social media platforms that we have today that we never had in the past in any of these major conflicts and escalations.
Now the people are able to see the perseverance of the Palestinian people. They're able to see the person that just lost a family member or many family members, perhaps 20, 30, 40 at a time and then come out and say, الحمد لله, we're here, we're never gonna leave. This is our land and we're defending the cause for the whole entire ummah. Actually, Palestinians don't say that they're defending it for themselves. You know, growing up, I remember my mom used to always feed us this stuff. You know, we're watching the news, we're learning about our cousins and our uncles and Murad, you went there and you came and you saw this. Oh, this happened to you, stopped at a checkpoint, they did this to you. We're here, we're representing the whole ummah. We're defending on behalf of everyone in this entire ummah and everyone that has a conscience in the world and everyone that stands for justice and everyone that wants peace. So الحمد لله, the Palestinians are, I feel, I feel a people that Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَ تَعَالَى has been kind of, you know, سَقَلَهُم in one sense. You know, they've been sieved through over the past years and prepared for what is going on. SubhanAllah. So I know, did any of you lose any family in Gaza? I know Sister Reem, your family is in Gaza and I was informed that you have lost several of your family members. Can you please explain to us like who they were and were you connected to them? Your direct relatives, how distant were they and so on? I think when you speak to any cousins, you have to specify which war that they lose members in. Because there've been so many wars and you lose in each war. And right now, I can tell you in Gaza, there's not a single family in Gaza that haven't lost someone.
There are actual families that have been completely erased from the civil ministry, like from the books, completely erased from the books. So that means the grandparents, the parents, the children, everybody's wiped, the whole family. And the reason that is, is because in Gaza, everybody lives in the same building. So the family erects one home on the piece of land and it's floors with units. And so everybody lives in this building. So when they hit one building, they've actually destroyed the whole family. So nobody survives. So there's so many family names that everybody knows that are no longer, right? This family and that family. And back in Gaza, like my family would name them. I don't know them enough, but subhanAllah, like how awful that is. But personally, on a personal note, in 2012, I lost my uncle. I believe in 2019, I lost two of my cousins. And in this war, we lost five, where I come from. And I'll specifically say where I come from when we put them out, so people know. But the closest out of the five is our neighbor and his child. So it's devastating. It is devastating. And you just, living here in London, I attended three funerals, one after the other. To pay your respect to the family members that are still left. And I was sitting in the third one, looking and talking to myself, saying, will tomorrow be mine? Will I have to host tomorrow? And this is what every person in Gaza is saying, right? Outside, worrying about the family is, when will my turn come? When will my family be killed?
And that's the mindset of the people right now. You know, I saw a video of someone writing names on all the children's arms, so that they can be known if they die and they're in the rubble, to just know what their name is, so that they know how to deal. And that was just, that's so sad. Imagine how traumatizing that is for a child, to write their name on their arm just in case they die. Like, how is this child going to go home and sleep? Not just in case they die. It's also just in case they get estranged from their parents, or they are the sole survivors, and nobody knows who they are. So it's identified. Like, really brings back images of the Holocaust and what happened in the Holocaust, to tell you the truth. It is a genocide by all, you know, the full meaning of the word. And even women, subhanAllah, women in Palestine, in Gaza, women in Gaza will sleep with their hijabs on, because they don't want to be exposed if they were to die. And this is, you know, a fact. They will not take their hijabs off. And subhanAllah, it breaks my heart when I speak to my cousins. But you know, I feel like, you know, in the Holocaust, and I'm not playing this down, like the Holocaust was horrible, but there were countries with armies that stood against this, you know, the German power at that time that was doing this genocide, right? Like, today, where are the countries with power that are standing with the Palestinians? Is anyone doing anything right now towards the Palestinians? Like, besides, you know, when I watch the news, as a Palestinian, we all grow up watching the news. And we know, I think maybe for someone outside, they could say, oh, look, this country condemned, this president spoke,
this, you know, they passed this resolution. It didn't get accepted, but there were this many protests. We don't see anything in practice. Where is the actual help? The people are still dying. They're still being bombed left and right. Just yesterday, 170 kids died in one day, in one day. Subhanallah. Sister Dania, what do you, like, right now, as we're speaking, I know Khalil is a whole different form of occupation, subjugation, and oppression. Can you talk a little bit about that? I don't think people understand that Palestinians in the West Bank, there are different forms. Like, people, Palestinians in Jenin, like, as of yesterday, were being bombed by airplanes. And in Khalil, there's this horrible segregation. It's like the epitome of apartheid in Khalil, right, where Jews and, like, Israeli settlers and Arabs are living side by side. But we see, like, you know, them being allowed to do anything they want, as opposed to the Arabs not allowed to go home. Sometimes their homes are taken, doors and whatnot. Like, can you tell us a little bit about that and what your family in Khalil is going through? So let's take a step back and see how Khalil got there. Maybe let's do that. Because Khalil was once a flourishing city. And the way that my dad talks about when he grew up going there, Khalil didn't just randomly have settlers just take over their streets. And here, if we look at the map of Palestine, we kind of want to jump back. And I don't want to give you too detailed of a history lesson because I know there's too many numbers, and it's a bit overwhelming. But let's kind of just understand how Palestine came to be. And so Palestine pre-1917 was under the Ottoman Empire,
and it was doing well. It was flourishing. It was a land of people. It was a land that had civilization. And 1917, 1918 is when World War I ended, and the British took over. And this is really important to know because the British forces, when they conquered Palestine and labeled it the British Mandate of Palestine, that's when we began to see the influx and the hidden agenda. So the hidden agenda at this point was the Zionist movement of bringing the European Jews, Zionists to Palestine. And a promise was made to them. The Balfour Declaration was made to them, which aimed to give land, which promised them land that was not theirs, without the consultation of the Palestinians, of course. And under their propaganda, you know, they named it a land without a people for the people without a land. And obviously Palestine was, you know, and that's just part of, you know, legitimizing the disposition of the natives of Palestine. And, you know, Palestine was very far from that. And we can see from our grandparents and our great-grandparents, you know, it was a flourishing society. The Ottomans, you know, they built a train between Lebanon to Haifa, to Madinah al-Munawwara, like there was people there. There was education there. And, you know, Khalil, for example, at that time, was known for their leather and still known for their ceramics and their glass. And Niafa was known for their metal company. And Nablus was known for their soap that we still buy to this day, the most organic, beautiful soap to use. And the cheese as well, right? Oh, yeah, of course. And the Knafeh, Nablus. The Knafeh, of course. Of course. And so there, when the refugees and the legal settlers began, you know,
trickling through the Haifa seaport, which my grandma tells me about when she was there, she would say, like, suddenly these people came and they were armed, you know, by the British military. And they began parading in the streets. Like, it was slowly but surely, you know, a very strong beginning of an occupation. And so jumping a few years later, you know, there's tension, obviously, in the land. 1947, as we see here, right before 1948 on the map, 1947, the UN planned this partition plan, which proposed this idea of 55% of the area would be Israel-Jewish state, and 45 would be an Arab-Palestinian state. And we see here the blue is the proposed for the Jewish-Israeli state. And so Israel basically would get most of the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, which is the most, and they got the best land, basically. So it's obviously a biased partition. When that happened, that was right after World War II. So to stop there, 1948, let me give you a picture of my grandma when she was. My grandma was graduating high school. She was actually in a boarding school, in a Catholic boarding school, in Jerusalem, just to show you that there was harmony between the Christian Arabs, the Jewish Arabs. My grandma said that we had Jewish neighbors, and I would play with them. As a child, she would play with her Jewish neighbors, and they were Arabs. So they all did live in harmony. And all of a sudden, 1948, this is, I think, the biggest, this is the most important date, which was al-Nakba. So May 15, 1948, al-Nakba, catastrophe. That's the translation. May I interject for a moment? Of course. Maybe because this part is, I've listened to so many stories from my grandmother about, you know, the British mandate
and what happened before 1948. And I just lost her this year. So she's lived to tell me many, many stories. May God bless her soul. So my mother's uncle, so my grandma's brother, was actually a fighter against the British mandate, wanting to push them away so that they don't control Jaffa and the streets of Jaffa and the markets of Jaffa. SubhanAllah, he was captured by the British when he was 17 years old, and he was set to be executed. And the family was working really hard to get that reversed because he's underage. You had to be 18 and over in order to be executed. But nonetheless, he was executed. But before then, he was in a prison cell. And the guard for the prison cell was a Jew, a Jew that knew him. And this Jew had seven children. And this Jew told Mohammed, my grandma's brother, I'm going to open the cell, you're going to leave, and I'm going to put one of my kids, and then I will tell them, like, I'll make up a story. I want you out. This is how much they lived in harmony. There was no difference between a Christian and a Jew. Till this day, Palestinian Jews, Palestinian Christians, they've lived together for years since the ancient times. When Omar ibn al-Khattab came, he left everything the way it is. He never took anything away. And that's a very important fact that I'm sure we'll look to as we speak because that's history. I just wanted to interject with that. That's perfect. That's amazing.
Subhanallah, just to chime in on the convo for a bit, my village is about 20 miles from, or less than 20 miles, like 15 miles from Jaffa. And my grandfather would always tell me, you know, we were the biggest exporter of, like, lemons and oranges and all that. And our village, it's called Wadi al-Laymoon. People in the area would always call it Wadi al-Laymoon, which means the Valley of Lemons, because we would always plant lemons. Like acres upon acres of lemon trees, alhamdulillah, and olive trees as well. And he was like, I would roll them down to Jaffa myself, just walking. And he would sell. We also had a house in Jaffa. And my grandmother used to go to that house at Sayyaf, you know, go to the beach and, you know, buy soap and exchange. And it was a very, mashallah, active or vibrant economy as well. Jaffa and Haifa were extremely vibrant economies, and they knew about them all over the Mediterranean. Exported items to Italy, to Greece, to even as far as Morocco. People bought. So we had a vibrant economy. And, of course, history proves anybody could go back and reference and read the history of Palestine and its economy prior to 1948. And then he told my grandmother, because my grandmother was, she never went to school. And, you know, she was just, she was illiterate. My grandfather, however, him and his siblings, they went to college. Actually, they were doctors in political science and medicine and other subjects, alhamdulillah. So they were very educated. But my grandmother, she's like, wallahi, wallahi, ya sitti, you know, I wish we never invited them over. We were so nice to these people when they came. They told us they were tortured and they were miserable.
And we gave them clothes because they had that. And then they used to stink. And we used to offer them to take showers in our house because we didn't just want them to look raggedy and walk around like this. We gave them pieces of our land. And then one day, all of a sudden, they all sided with this terrorist group called the Haganah, you know. And they just thought they were a group of Yahud that, you know, were extreme. And then the non-extreme ones were still cool. And they could live amongst them. But to their surprise, this backfired on them. And my grandmother was like, I wish we weren't as nice as we were. You know, we should have just been smarter than that. But I'm like, you know, sitti, this is our culture. This is our shiyam. This is how we are as people. As a matter of fact, you know, there was a video that came out the other day. And while it's so deceptive and such a great lie that they're trying to spread right now as they're, like, trying to demonize the Palestinian people and humanize us, basically, there, he was saying in a short clip, I think it was on, like, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, you know, a short, and he was saying, look, if Palestinians were to come and take over Israel, look at what the Palestinians are going to do to the Israelis. They're not going to leave a single one. They're going to commit massacres. But if the Israelis take over Palestine, look, you know, we're not going to do that. We're going to let them live. And wallahi, such a great lie. That was a slap. So I'm like, ya rab, just allow us to respond to something like this.
Wallahi, not a single, despite everything they did to us, despite everything they did to us, they will not see the reaction any different from the reaction of Yusuf alayhi salam after his brothers did what they did to him. After they did what they did, subhanallah, wallahi, Palestinians, we were never told, wallah, we're going to do this and do that. We don't want, we just want peace and harmony. Right? Palestinians legitimately want peace. There's no, actually, none of the factions of Palestine, all of them, none of them say that we have animosity towards Jews, in particular, Christians. We don't have that in us as Palestinians, alhamdulillah rabbil alamin. And I think the world needs to know this. And it wasn't, it was simply the Zionists. It was the Zionist colonization, the Zionist ideology, the Zionist racism that we faced. So it's very important for everybody to know that Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in the Holy Land in peace until the Zionists spread their hate and wrath, and this, you know, that they're better than everybody else, and their blood is, you know, is not equal to the blood of anybody else. Sister Haganah? Yeah, and so exactly that. Zionism, the Zionist gangs, that's what happened in the Nakba. So Nakba is the catastrophe in 1948. So let me tell you from my grandmother's point of view. So my grandma was supposed to graduate high school. She was in this boarding school. And all of a sudden, they're like, hey, something's going on.
There's these two Zionist gangs, Haganah, which is now the IDF, and the Orjuan, which is the Jewish, like the militia. And they're just causing havoc and violence. And so of course, at the time, you know, you know, my grandma, she just fled to my maternal grandma fled to Jordan. She didn't know what's happening. She thought she's gonna go come back, graduate, you know, that's what she wanted to do. But little did they know that the Nakba, the catastrophe was the beginning of the cleansing of Palestine. And these Zionist gangs expelled 750,000 Palestinians. We are the grandchildren of the Nakba. We are the, you know, the, this is what happened to our grandparents and, and they caused 30 massacres. So what we see in Gaza, the massacre that we're seeing right now in Gaza, is one of the 30 massacres that happened. You know, at the time, then May 15, is when Israel declared their occupation, they declared theirself as an independent state. They killed 15,000 plus people, 530 villages wiped off the face of the planet. And my grandfather at the time, a young man, the village right beside him, Deir Yassin, which is very well known, was wiped off the face of the planet. So he fled. So my grandmother fled, my grandfather fled on his feet, carrying his younger brother. And he tells us, his sister was carrying her children in the bucket that she used to bathe them in, on her head, running, fleeing on their feet, because they were scared, obviously. But what's so important, and I'm sure you both can relate with this is, they left with their keys. And as you can see here, the key of Al-Auda, you know, like, it's very, very huge in the Palestinian culture. We, we talk about this key, because they left with their, they closed their house doors, and they left because they thought it was like, you know, when a hurricane happens, you know, just kind of pack up your car and go and you're gonna come back in a week or two.
You know, my mom's aunts hid their gold in the closet, they thought they were gonna come back. You know, they never, nobody could ever imagine or like, you know, like this, nobody can realize the gravity of the situation. And they fled all over, you know, they fled to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, North Africa, they fled everywhere. And that's why we're the biggest diaspora. So, the third map, as we see here, 1967, is the Six-Day War. So, which, which slide? And, you know, the next, it was called a Nexa, 1967. And it didn't materialize out of a vacuum, it was an ongoing battle. But they finally took the land that they wanted. And they said the settlement colonization began. And we can kind of delve deep into that. So sad.
Leaving is like, is falling into the same mistake we did in the past. That's exactly what happened before. You know, the neighboring countries sent buses upon buses to load up as many Palestinians as possible. Take your keys, lock your doors, just come back. Whenever the war is finished, you're gonna go back home. And they just never went back home. So the Palestinians now are adamant that they're not leaving, because they know the moment you leave your house, it's over. This is an occupation. And al-fitnah akbaru min al-qatal, like Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, right? Al-fitnah, these tests are greater than death. So I feel like those, the people that are in in Palestine right now, are the people and the progeny of those that that stuck to their land. They sought refuge. They didn't go to a different country. They stayed in their land. By the way, Gaza is about 60 or 70% refugees. So they're not even from Gaza. And I don't think a lot of people don't imagine that when the thing happened in October 7, when when when Gaza kind of broke the barrier and they went into the into the occupied lands.
For others like, wow, they're invading Israel. But as a Palestinian, I was sitting with one of my friends and he was like, hey, that's my village. That was actually half of that settlement was on my grandfather's land. That's how a Palestinian saw it. Yeah, you see all that land. That's, that's what my grandfather, my father says he used to play when he was a kid. That's exactly what the people of Gaza said. So just in reference to Gaza, when the 1967 war happened, I'm sorry, no, when the 1948 Nakba happened, Palestinians left to different areas. Some left by sea to Egypt, others left to Lebanon, others left to Jordan. Some left to Syria, actually kept going to Syria. And then some went into Gaza. So that's basically what happened. So the 70% refugees were actually that influx of people coming down to Gaza and settling in Gaza. And the occupying force left the two areas, decided to basically push all the Palestinians into Gaza and into the West Bank. And that's why those two areas were remained, because those are the areas that they wanted all the Palestinians to be in. So that's how Gaza has so many refugee camps that we hear on the news, like the Ashateh, Jabalia, you know, all these names that we hear are because of the Nakba and them leaving their own cities and own towns and coming.
And so when this happened, you know, they're looking, saying, yes, that's al-Mishtal, I'm from there. Or that's, you know, I can't remember the Arab name for the villages, but they wouldn't call it by the Israeli names. They'll call it by the Palestinian names for these villages that they know they're from. Of course. Really heartwarming. And that's part of the vicious truth of the occupations. They tried to erase our land by changing the names, but we will still call it Yafa and Haifa. And what's even more interesting is, and this is something that really my mom used to always talk about, especially in the kitchen when she's cooking. She's like, they don't even want to take our food from us, you know, so like they would take the hummus and the falafel and the shawarma. And now you go to restaurants in like New York City or whatnot and Israeli hummus. Israeli hummus, like that really gets the Palestinian, you know, that is really like hurtful, you know, because they not only want to take your land, they want to take your culture, they want to take your style, they want to take your, even your, our attire. Some of them want to take our tatris, you know, the, like the garments and whatnot that the palace that are unique to our cultures, because they're, they're like, they consider themselves empty. Like Israel, when you look at it, it's really a dysfunctional society. 90 different languages or 90 different nationalities, right? And 70 different languages in one country. They're all somehow patched together with a language that was revived 100 years ago.
They just, you know, and they're coming together to try to make this, so they're shopping around for a culture, right? And they thought that we are going to forget by being kicked out of our lands. And subhanAllah, I think Palestinians became, they clinged on to their culture even more outside. So now we're more proud. And you find like subhanAllah, the youngsters are so proud that they're Palestinian and not in the negative sense, proud as in like, you know, because there's a certain type of pride that's anti or counter Islamic, right? But this pride is a pride that of belonging to an ummah. Like we belong to the rest of the Muslims, we belong to the rest of the Arabs, and we're not going to forget that. SubhanAllah. So I love that. And Alhamdulillah, what we're doing right now is contributing towards this. And it's an honor for all of us to take part, inshAllah, for those viewers out there to spread this message, you know, to other Palestinians who you feel are distant maybe from their culture. Let them see this video. Let them see what the Palestinians are going through and went through in the past. They tried to bury us, but they only planted seeds, Alhamdulillah. There's one lesson that I want to draw while the map is up. So we've talked about the declination of Balfour and how the British gave this promise to the Jews or the Zionists actually, that they will give them a land in the Middle East that they can call home so they don't have to worry about them migrating anywhere, that they can all go to Palestine. To Palestine, to our lands and occupy it. At that time, there was a Khilafah. At that time, the Muslims, until
the Khilafah fell, there was always a Khalifa. There was always a leader for the Muslim Ummah. All the Muslim Ummah was one under one Khalifa. In order to win the war, the British came to King Faisal at the time and promised him that he will be the Khalifa. They will make him the Khalifa if he was to stay away from the Ottoman Empire. So that's the promise they gave him. So again, divide and conquer. This is the promise they gave him. But then they went to and they made an alliance between the French, the British, and I believe the Russians. And they decided that they were going to break the Arab rules in between them. Right? So that's the second promise that the British made. And then the third promise they made was the Balfour Declaration. So with each group, they made a deal. So they came through for the Zionists and they gave them Palestine. They came through with their allies and they, between France and Britain, they actually divided the lands between them. And Italy was part of it. Russia didn't. For some reason, Russia had lost something and pulled away and so didn't get a piece of it. But the promise that never happened was that, of course, they were going to give anything to the Palestinians or make them Khalifa. The reason I brought this is because the moment that we stab ourselves in the back, the moment we separate is the moment we fall.
And so this was one of the reasons the Khalifa fell. Because, unfortunately, Arabs kind of separated and made their own plans. And so this is a lesson to be learned that, you know, Allah ﷻ taught us in the Qur'an in many places to be together, to be one unit. And I think, you know, and I think those, the people that hate Islam and the enemies of Islam, they understand conceptually how our ummah should be united. Which is why the default question to any Muslim is, do you condemn this group or do you condemn that group, right? Because they automatically assume, just for the fact that we're Muslim, that we're already together on it. Whereas with others, we assume division and separation and that they're not with each other. So, subhanAllah, it's as if everyone understands our unity, but our ummah needs to understand it today. We need to understand how we're together. SubhanAllah, like collectively, if the ummah were to all take a stance, and we're talking about not like a political stance, but an economic stance. And to actually put pressure to stop it and to demonstrate this unity, right, that exists between us. I think things would be completely different. But just like what happened before, in the history is long, but you summarized it in divide and conquer. Divide and conquer, that was the whole thing.
And I think when the British conquered Palestine, we were so separated that it wasn't even British men or British soldiers that came and conquered the land. It was actually a combination of some British, but Egyptian soldiers, about 100,000 of them. And the rest were, many of them were Indian, mostly Muslim soldiers that came in on behalf of the British to conquer Palestine. Right, and that's the whole divide and conquer, and they promised. They said, hey, you know, the way the British colonized was a completely, they had a completely different strategy. And you could tell, even from the Iraq War, I used to read it, I love reading history. And I'm like, man, these British are so, I mean, the way they colonized the world is so deceitful, but genius. When the Americans came and, you know, when America invaded Iraq and they opened a base, they called this base, you know, Alpha Five, Beta, whatever. And they would have like some American name for the base. What did the British, the British had a military base in Iraq, and you know what they called it? They called it Abu Al-Naji base. They called it Abu Al-Naji, just Abu Al-Naji. Who's Abu Al-Naji? Every Iraqi knew Abu Al-Naji was the guy who helped the British take over Iraq when they first came. And, you know, he was the one who convinced all the Iraqis that the British rule is a good rule, subhanAllah. So when they came back, like, let's call it Abu Al-Naji. So, the British are the ones that played this huge deception with the Balfour Agreement and backstabbed us and allowed the Haganah to do what they did.
SubhanAllah, my great-grandfather, Sidi Abdul Rahman, he was martyred in the first terrorist bombing of the Haganah called Amaliyyat al-Saraya in Jaffa, right? They literally, they put TNT around the building of the Palestinian political leadership and boom, it was gone. And he died in the first, in that first attack, subhanAllah. And from there, I spoke to my grandmother and I told her, subhanAllah, when you went and found my grandfather, how did you find him? She said, Wallahi, all I knew of him was his socks, the socks that I gave him that morning. The rest of his body was mutilated, I didn't know. But if I didn't give him those socks that morning, I wouldn't have knew it was him. May Allah forgive us all and unite you with Allah. And I kind of want to jump in and talk about, Brother Murad, you asked me how Khalil is now and I kind of want to show pictures of what settler colonialism looks like and what the occupation looks like. So this is for our, that's me against the apartheid wall. So it's really important to also know our language and to know these key words, right? And apartheid means, you know, like this, this idea of like, we have no right to citizenship or right back to Palestine. You know, they, they, this wall separates between the West Bank and now the occupied land of Israel. So it's really important to see. And it's a massive wall. It's very, it's very large, very long. And, you know, it's a, it's preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes. And denying us our land to our freedom and freedom of movement. So it's really important. As we look through the pictures of this idea of freedom, freedom of movement within the cities. So this is in Khalil and Hebron where I'm from.
So we see, this is the old city where the shops are. And we see kind of the fence on top. So a lot of the settlers live within, around these areas. And the settlers, especially in where I'm from, they're one of like just the worst kind of people. They are very degrading to the Palestinians that live around. So we have these fences on top of the shops because they throw trash onto the city. These are stores that merchants have, like just random stores. Like it can be a coffee shop. It can be a sewing shop. They throw rocks. So they have to protect themselves. So they have these fences. And a lot of times, you know, when you walk by, this one was pretty clean, but a lot of times you walk and you just see on top of you, all the trash and all the rocks. And when you walk amongst them in the streets, they can shove you, they can, you know, I've been in situations where, you know, they just like scream at you, you can't walk here. This is, and it's a street. Like they tell you, you're a Palestinian, you're a Muslim. You can't walk here. So it's a very racist regime. Other pictures I have of, you know, this is really important to know. This is basically the human cages and daily life of anyone in the West Bank. So these are checkpoints and they're all across the city. So, and Khalid especially, if you're walking, like kids going to school will have to pass these, through these. Everybody has to be carrying their ID. When I go, I have to be carrying my passport at all times. They can deny you entry. They can just close it when they want. There are heavily weaponized IDF soldiers all around the city. You can't pass by. And when it gets crammed, it gets really crammed. And this, I think, was walking up to the Ibrahimi Mosque. So when you're going to Fajr, when you're going to any prayer, there's always these barcades. And they literally look like cages. So it's a very dehumanizing, you know, way of living.
This is my grandma's house, which is she, so if you guys remember during one of the maps, it showed like the end of one of the last maps, there was a little, it looked like little islands. So now the West Bank, isn't just like you freely move from like going to Nablus to Khalid and to, no, there are little, it looks like little enclaves. There's 227 little pieces, pockets of land that you can go to. And you can't freely like just drive from point A to B. The Palestinians have to take a certain land, usually very dangerous lands, ways, yeah, they're, you know, on the hilltops and it takes, it can take, you know, a 10 minute trip can take you two hours or so. So this is my grandmother's house. It's obviously in ruins. They live in another house now, but her street, her basement door is on one of the occupied streets that you can't walk to. And this is very common in Khalid. And like, sometimes they have to take ladders and jump off like their rooftops to get to the other side because they're not allowed to walk on that street. And that's what apartheid is. So even, yeah, even the street is limited to, yes, to Israelis. A Palestinian cannot walk on that street, cannot be on that street. And what would happen to a Palestinian if they're caught on that street? Oh, persecution, like that's no question. And that's really important to know that people living in the West Bank are not living, you know, freely and happily, as we said, Janine, there's always something. And Khalid, there's always something happening. There's always, you know, you get news that someone is, you know, they randomly came in the middle of the night and took him or, you know, there's always, there's always clashes happening. The settlers will throw rocks. They are equipped with guns. They have guns. There's no, and the IDF soldiers always have to protect the settlers. And also to give you a perspective,
settlers, their colonies are usually on hilltops. They look a certain way. They have red roofs. They look different than the houses that we have. It's very distinguished, you know, how it looks. Obviously, like the Palestinian homes, one thing that you notice going to Palestine, anything that looks organic is Palestinian. Of course. Anything that looks synthetic and not organic is most likely Israeli. It's just like, even the type of construction that Palestinian, the rocks that we use, the designs that we have, it just looks so in tune with the land itself. Of course. It looks organic. And it's so beautiful, like the arches and the details, the details, subhanAllah. I have a lot of pictures that show the real details of our land and our bloodline. You can see the next picture. So a lot of the, in the Khali, especially a lot of the stores and houses that were taken illegally were welded. So even if you have a key, they're welded shut. So this is kind of an image of that. They're trashed. They would go in, the soldiers would go in, they trash it. Soldiers would go in and trash it. So they like literally go in to the houses that are adjacent to all these roads and to the Israelis, and they vandalize them. Yeah. Right? SubhanAllah. They vandalize. Do they steal? They steal. They steal, of course. They steal, they vandalize, they take them. They genuinely believe that, like you remember that guy, Yacoub, Jacob from Brooklyn? So Sheikh Jarrah was not a very, it was, maybe it was a shock to a lot of people. It's not, it was not a unique situation. It was not a unique situation. He said, if I don't steal it, someone else is gonna come and steal it. That is pretty much the mindset of a settler. So settler colonism is, it's real. And so this beautiful house, this is my grandfather, Allah rahma,
that walked barefoot on his feet in the Nakba. So this is his house now. It was in Ayn Kadam, which is near Jerusalem. Yeah. So this house, we were able to visit. And when my parents visited it, they FaceTimed my grandfather before he passed away. And he literally, like he left at 14 years old and he was able to explain street by street, go here, go here, subhanAllah. And it was very emotional for them. So when this summer we went back to visit to see it, my cousins went and knocked on the door and a American lady from Boston now inhibits it, occupies it, subhanAllah. So that is, this is what settler colonism is. This is what the occupation is, you know. I don't have a right back to this place. My grandfather passed away without going back to his home. And we can see more pictures to show you that this is my grandfather's home. So see here, Allahul Wahid. This was written by my great-grandfather. And on top of it, the menorah. This was inside the house. So she looked at me and she was like, oh, and like, she doesn't know, right? Like she, which is crazy. It's crazy, you know, they're fed these thoughts of the Palestinians being savages and being these horrible people. And like, we, you know, or even this idea of like, what is Palestine? I don't, you know, they just don't want even acknowledge it. And this is the house of my grandfather, who fought his entire life to bring the message of, you know, we really need to reclaim our idea of what Palestine is, because we can't reclaim if we don't have the education. And I hope this is a clear message to everybody, inshallah, that, you know, on the outside, we know it's very hard. It's very hard to go on our daily lives, but we really need to learn what Palestine is, you know. Dania, this is a great time to talk about your grandfather, because he was a very special man. Yeah. May Allah give mercy to his soul. I feel like he's one of those people that actually did give his whole life to Palestine.
Do you want to give us a little bit of a bio about your grandpa? Yeah, so my grandfather, Allah irhamah, he was, you know, he did dedicate his, so he did his education and he had an education, a master's in education, and he dedicated his life to the study of Al-Aqsa. And actually, this is the last book he wrote before. A lot of the information I got, Al-Alam Fi Madina, which was a book about the, the world is in a city, which is Al-Aqsa. And he dedicated his life to the study. Like he made, you know, all, like everything he did was to teach us about Al-Aqsa and this idea of reclaiming our, you know, our knowledge, because, and subhanAllah, even like just thinking about, like preparing for this session today and talking about this, like there's so much to unpack here, obviously. And it's a very detailed history, but we need to, and it's, we are, you know, on the outside, this is what we have to do. On the inside, they're fighting. God knows they're fighting. And their blood is, inshAllah, misk, and they are martyrs and in Jannah now. But it's our time to, inshAllah, to shine with our knowledge and to share with the world, inshAllah. Absolutely. We will, biidh Allahi ta'ala. I wanted to ask Sister Reem about, about the situation in Gaza. You know, I, can you explain to us, inshAllah, I know we have some, we have a few slides about Gaza, inshAllah, that we can go over. Let's show our viewers the situation in Gaza, inshAllah. I wish we can enlarge this, but Gaza is a very small area. It's about 365 kilometers. So, you know, in width, it's about 10 kilometers. Some area, like the widest area, maybe 15. In other areas, it's five. But on average, it's 10 in width. In length, I believe it's about 40 kilometers,
if I'm not mistaken. So it's a very small piece of land, and yet it's home to 2.2 million people, or 2.3 million people. So it's one of the most densely populated areas of the world. It's broken down to five, I wanna say cities, or areas. And so if I start from where Egypt is, the first one is Rafah. And then there's, towards the sea, there's Khan Yunus. And you'll hear those places. So I just want you to know where they are. And then from there, there's also Deir el-Balah, which is mid in the strip of Gaza. And then there's Gaza city itself, heading north. And then there's, so how many did I say? I said, Rafah is one, Khan Yunus. Deir el-Balah is number three, Gaza is number four. And then the fifth one is the northern areas, which is comprised, I believe, of four different areas. The Camp of Jabalia, Beit Lahya, Beit Hanun, and I think in Nesli, if I'm not mistaken, those four are the Mantiqt al-Shamal, like the area in the north. And that's where I'm from. I'm actually from Beit Lahya. But we're closer to the Mediterranean. We actually can see the Mediterranean from where we're at. So we're very close to the Mediterranean and very close to the border as well. I think seven kilometers away from the border with the occupying force of Israel. So that's where we come from. And the area where we come from is called As-Sulatan because everybody that lives in that village
is from the same family, As-Sultan. So when, I've been receiving a lot of interviews with the media and so on, and they asked me, well, how many cousins do you have in Gaza? And I'm like, eh, 250, 300. And they're like flabbergasted. Like, what do you mean? Well, I have 11 aunts and uncles and they have, each one has 11 children and each child has 11 kids. Like, subhanAllah, the one thing that we're blessed with as Palestinians is we love children. And so our families are huge. And subhanAllah, it just, the family keeps growing and growing and growing. So back to the map, this is basically what Gaza is all about. And so what happened recently, worst bombardment in all Gaza, no place in Gaza is safe, no place, no mosque, no hospital, no school, no building, nowhere is safe. I think they say there's something like 5,000 buildings that have been, buildings and homes that have been destroyed. So basically they come to a certain area and it's completely wiped, right? All the buildings, all square buildings, some of the most beautiful, prestigious places in Gaza, most expensive places of Gaza are no longer there. And what happened with my family that were sitting in their house, my grandfather's house, just bunkering down, hoping that this war will end, received leaflets that said, you better leave. And they weren't gonna leave. Like I know, the people of Gaza are the most resilient people ever. So they don't leave.
But when these leaflets come down, subhanAllah, it just means that you better go or else you're done. And they only leave when they receive these leaflets. So there has been so many wars that have come and gone to Gaza. Like if I was to very quickly go through it, since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, because of the Oslo Accord, there has been the 2008 slash nine war. There was the 2012 war. There was the 2014 war. There's the 2019 war. And then there's the 2022 war. So five major wars that, and maybe 2021, actually, there was something as well. So people that live there are only used to wars. So when my family received that, they went into UN schools within the area of the North, right? And these are schools that are close by. They've been there before. They know that. And that's what happened. Until less than 24 hours later, they received that forced evacuation to leave the North and head to the South. And that was probably the worst thing that they've ever had to go to. Because now there's complete chaos. They have to walk 30 kilometers on rubble roads, trying to carry whatever water, whatever mattress, whatever jacket, whatever children, right? And you gotta remember, there's no food, electricity, water, fuel. So there's no fuel for the cars. There's no cars to begin with. Very few Palestinians, Gazans have cars because they're unemployed.
And they live concentrated areas. So really they don't need to have cars. So they're walking, right? And 30 kilometers is a very long walk, right? So they couldn't do it in one day. So imagine the whole family, my uncle and all his kids and their children trying to make this move, and then it's dark. And now they have to sleep in the street until the morning where they had again, until they reached somewhere safe in the South into a UN school that's already populated because the people of that area have already gone to the schools thinking it's safer. So you come to schools that are already populated. You're trying to find a place, a classroom for yourself, for your family, to get everybody together with no food, with no sleep, with nothing. Like it is the, my family tells me it's the worst thing that they've ever had to endure in their whole life. And they've been through so many wars and they've been through so many devastations, but this was the worst. It's a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe, just imagine. And you know what makes it even worse? Is that, you know, in the beginning of the war, they label it as the war in Hamas, obviously, and all we're seeing is a war on civilians. And to prove that it's more of a war on civilians, the places that are populated mostly by civilians are what are being bombed right now. Like from universities to schools to hospitals. And not only that, even the people that are moving from the North to the South, that street was bombed and people were killed on the road traveling from North to South.
And then now as they went to the South, ever since the people moved to the South, they've been heavily bombing the South more than they were before. It is ethnic cleansing. It is ethnic cleansing. They, we, the world, the way I think the media is portraying it is, okay, everyone, all the civilians move from North to South so that we could only fight the quote unquote terrorists. But what it's looking like is move to the South so our bombs can kill more people. You know, they're even cheap with those. They want to maximize their efficiency and kill, like one would kill 10 people when everybody was spread out in their homes. Now you find a big apartment building that had 50, 60 people in it now has five, 600. So, so, yeah, la hawla wa la quwwata illa, it's such a sad reality and the world sees it and the world knows it. And we all need to do our job, just, you know, keeping everyone aware, keep up your good work, guys. You know, Wallahi, Sister Reem and Sister Dania, you know, everything that you're doing for the cause is valued and the law, you know, with Allah. And it's only a minuscule, a fraction of what our brothers and sisters are going through. And, you know, we could, but we could still do so much from where Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la positioned us. We are in America. We are in the bloodline of Israel. And to be honest, yeah, Israel without America and without all the money that's being poured on them, right, wouldn't be there. Perhaps we wouldn't have the situation that we have right now.
Perhaps we would have had peace a long time ago. But Israel is so confident that they're always gonna be replenished and, you know, get this military backing that they just continue with these military campaigns. And with our tax money, with our tax. With our tax money, with our tax money. So, SubhanAllah, we ask Allah to forgive us for that. You know, and the least we could do is speak out and use our position here to advocate. So, inshallah, wrapping this up, inshallah, before I ask Sirviya and Sister Dania to share their final comments, I just wanna add that, you know, every person that tuned in with us and every Palestinian should share this culture. Share your tradition. Let people know what you're about. Don't let it get lost. You play an integral role in this cause, inshallah ta'ala. So long as this cause is alive in the Ummah, we could look at the streets of every major city in the world and we know that it's still alive. And it's still alive because you didn't forget the way they thought that you were gonna forget. So, advocate and learn your history, learn from your family, ask your grandparents, ask your neighbors, ask a Palestinian and learn it. And then use any platform that Allah gave you, any platform, whether it's a Twitter account with a thousand followers or, you know, or an Instagram or YouTube channel. Use it and that is what you're doing for this cause, inshallah ta'ala, or the beginning. Yeah, it's part of the intellectual liberation, inshallah. Exactly, inshallah. We're contributing towards it. And I just wanted to ask for your final, inshallah, comments.
What you would like to tell the viewers, inshallah, before we end the stream, bi'ithnillah. You know, with that being said, you know, to combat settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, that's very active as we see, there is, you know, many avenues of resistance. And, you know, my simple and your mere existence is resistance, alhamdulillah, you know, saying I'm Palestinian, as we said, you know, can raise eyebrows. And my grandmother, my grandfather, mashallah, he wrote books, he talked, he did that. My grandmother on his side was an artist and she is still alive to this day, mashallah, she's 92 years old. And she took upon herself, her way of resistance was through art. And, you know, she tells us, you know, these paintings are and, you know, she wants to leave behind these paintings and to make sure that people see what Palestine constituted. So this is her, one of her paintings, and she's painted hundreds of pictures and they're all of Palestine. So she painted this picture, which we have in our house. It's very detailed. And she tells us about these streets. I used to come here on our field trip, we'd have picnics here around, you know, behind Masjid al-Aqsa and Qubbat al-Sakhra. These are paintings from her memory and from pictures. And she still actively paints now. And she's actually, she just finished a project that she was doing. And these are the paintings of documenting the villages that were wiped out in the Nakba. And, you know, she wants to leave evidence to the world that the Zionists committed these crimes, these war crimes during those years. And, you know, she wanted to draw these villages, you know, these armless villagers that had to flee their homes. And we see this old lady, and this is not a picture that's foreign to us. We see this now in Gaza, you know, these, every single city had a name, every single village had people,
every single village had people who had names, who had stories, who had dreams, as we see in Gaza now. And, you know, we have to find our resistance. We have to find, well, how we can liberate Palestine from the outside as it's liberating in the inside, inshallah. Well, it's not too far-fetched, Sister Dania. You know, Israel was created from the outside, and Palestine can be liberated from the outside as well. Inshallah. Inshallah to Allah. Outside and inside. Outside and inside. For my final words, really, I want to pull from the resilience of the people of Gaza. When I call my aunt, and they don't have any news, they can't even connect with themselves. Like, they're so displaced, nobody knows where anybody is. So when I finally connected with my aunt, she said, what do they say out there? I said, Amto, they say that they want to push you into Egypt. She goes, huh, we die here. It's one death. We die here, and it's over. We're not going anywhere. That resilience for, you know, a woman that's 70 years old is incredible. You know, I speak to my young cousins, and they say, you know, we're not going to go anywhere. It's either we go as a shaheed, or we survive. There's no other option. And they sit every night waiting for death. That certainty, that tawakkul alallah, they keep saying, all the world is against us, but Allah is on our side. And that's enough. That certainty, that iman is amazing for all of us to learn from and to aspire to have, inshallah. They're leading that way of tawakkul. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make us all from those that trust in Him, inshallah ta'ala.
And I really, really want to thank you again for joining us. The beautiful pictures and the memories of your families, inshallah. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to give all of our families safety over there. May Allah protect them from all evils and from the bombardment of the occupation. My mom and dad are there, your cousins are there, your family's there, grandparents are there. Subhanallah, this is the story of every Palestinian. So if you are not Palestinian and you're tuning in, then go to a Palestinian and just give them a hug, man. Wallah, it's going to do the world. Just to tell them, hey, you know, I understand what you're going through. And I just want to let you know that I'm there for you, and I'm with you, and I'm praying for you. That just means the world. Jazakumullah khair. Thank you so much. And we'll end it over here. As-salamu alaykum.
Welcome back!
Bookmark content
Download resources easily
Manage your donations
Track your spiritual growth
1 items
1 items
1 items
25 items
50 items
9 items
