Palestinian resilience in Gaza is not a slogan—it’s survival

For 21 months, the war on Gaza has unfolded with such grim visibility that it's almost become background noise. A crisis so vast in scale, so intimate in suffering, that we run out of language long before the facts. And yet, the most staggering part isn’t what we’ve seen. It’s what’s been allowed.

The images of flattened neighborhoods, the mothers cradling children in white shrouds, the wounded screaming for help outside blown-out hospitals—none of this has been enough. Arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. Accusations of genocide. Starvation as warfare. Still, the war rages on. And somehow, Palestinians continue to exist. Continue to speak. Continue to resist being turned into ghosts.

To scroll past Gaza is to perform an act of quiet violence. The longer the war continues, the more the world becomes fluent in avoidance. You can feel it—in diplomatic hedging, in media euphemisms, in the sterile language of “conflict” and “casualties.” But Palestinians aren’t confused. They know what’s happening. They’ve known since 1948, when hundreds of thousands were forcibly displaced in what they call the Nakba—“the catastrophe.”

This isn’t the first war. And to many Palestinians, it doesn’t feel like a new one. It’s the same campaign with new weapons, newer excuses, and even more complicit silence. And that silence—especially from governments who pride themselves on defending international law—feels like betrayal. But also like history repeating itself.

When Palestinians talk about sumoud—the Arabic word for steadfastness—they aren’t making a political statement. They are describing how they stay human when every system around them demands otherwise. Sumoud is not Instagrammable. It’s not a TED Talk theme. It is getting up after your child has been buried. It is walking through rubble to find a loaf of bread. It is boiling weeds to feed your family because aid trucks haven’t come for weeks.

It’s the decision to stay when staying means suffering. And leaving might mean never coming back. The Western world often romanticizes resilience—as if survival through horror is a kind of strength worth admiring. But in Gaza, resilience is not celebrated. It’s endured. And that distinction matters.

What does it take to watch people die and still question their right to live? That’s the question Palestinians are left asking—not just of Israel, but of the world. Of media institutions that minimize Palestinian grief. Of global leaders who condemn violence but sign arms deals. Of everyday citizens who can name the capital of Israel but can’t name a single Palestinian poet, painter, or mother who has lost a child this year.

It’s not just the bombs that dehumanize. It’s the disbelief. The refusal to let Palestinians be full, complex, grieving, hoping people. The refusal to imagine them as more than a statistic or a problem to be solved.

That refusal is not new. It began when the world failed to enforce UN Resolution 194 in 1948, which gave Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. It continued with every settlement built, every olive grove seized, every court case dismissed. And today, it reaches its most grotesque form in the plan to force Palestinians in Rafah into closed camps—camps from which they cannot leave.

Call them what they are. Concentration camps.

What does it mean to have your humanity made conditional? To know that people mourn your death only when it fits a political timeline? Palestinian grief is often only legible when it is sanitized or tragic enough to go viral. But what about the daily griefs? The missed birthdays. The burned books. The homes demolished for the third time.

What about the girl in Gaza who can’t finish her degree because her university was bombed? What about the grandmother in Hebron who hasn’t walked her own street in ten years because settlers guard it with guns? These aren’t dramatic moments. They are the background hum of occupation. And they are often the hardest stories to tell.

The ICC’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant over “the war crime of starvation” may mark a historic shift. But Palestinians are not waiting for justice to be handed down. They have learned, over generations, that the law bends toward power, not righteousness. If history tells us anything, it’s this: when Gaza is eventually opened, when journalists and human rights groups return, the world will once again pretend to be shocked. But Palestinians will not be shocked. They will be exhausted. They will carry the memories. And they will keep telling the truth.

They always have. And when those stories surface—of what it felt like to be starved, to be silenced, to be bombed in your sleep—they won’t just haunt Israel. They will indict all those who knew and chose not to care.

It’s easy to imagine Gaza as exceptional. But Gaza is not an anomaly. It’s a warning. In Hebron, a city of more than 230,000 Palestinians, just 900 Israeli settlers control the Old City—with the protection of over 1,000 soldiers. Streets once filled with families are now lined with checkpoints and locked doors. Palestinian shops sit abandoned. Freedom of movement has become a privilege, not a right.

This is not sustainable. And yet it continues, because enough people with power have decided that stability for settlers is worth more than dignity for the displaced.

For decades, some believed that time would wash away the Palestinian cause. That generations born in refugee camps would assimilate, relocate, forget. That the ache for return would dull. That land, like memory, would eventually become negotiable.

They were wrong.

Palestinians today remain deeply attached to the homes they—or their grandparents—were forced to flee. This attachment isn’t sentimental. It’s structural. It shapes their sense of identity, family, and future. A future that doesn’t begin with peace talks or aid packages, but with recognition. Recognition of harm. Recognition of rights. Recognition of what was taken. And until that happens, resilience is the only option.

There’s something unbearable about asking a people to be strong for 77 years. It turns resilience into labor. Into performance. Into something that excuses the absence of protection. Palestinians don’t want to be admired. They want to be free. They want a life that doesn’t require them to prove their humanity over and over again. A life where their suffering isn’t debated in comment threads or edited out of news cycles. A life where they aren’t expected to be symbols, but simply people.

The war will end. And when it does, some countries will pretend they didn’t know. Some leaders will express regret. Some institutions will open inquiries. But Palestinians will remember who stood with them. And who stood silent. They will remember the governments that shipped weapons instead of aid. The outlets that sanitized their grief. The neighbors who turned away when their homes became gravesites. Reckoning won’t arrive as apology—it will arrive as a truth that can’t be denied.

Because when a people survive what was designed to erase them, their memory becomes a mirror. And history doesn’t forget what silence made possible. Gaza has been inhabited for 4,000 years. Empires have come and gone. Occupiers have tried, and failed, to erase it. Israel’s current campaign may destroy homes, schools, hospitals, but it cannot destroy a people’s will to live.

And that’s what makes sumoud so threatening to those who try to dominate it. It is not just endurance. It is imagination. The belief that a future still exists—even when the present is on fire.

What’s happening in Gaza reveals who we really are. What kind of suffering we recognize. What kind of victims we believe. What kind of world we are willing to live in. If we can’t look at Gaza and name what’s wrong, then we’re not just failing Palestinians. We’re failing ourselves. Palestinian resilience is not a slogan. It is a moral reckoning. And it will outlive us all.