Today is the one-year anniversary of the first day of the Gaza siege. Many of us can clearly remember the horror: the first bits of news trickled in and protests exploded around the world out of solidarity and, possibly, guilt for not having acted sooner. Day by day, the death toll rose; I myself can remember climbing out of bed in the morning in fear of the new numbers I would read.
We were uninvited spectators; that I knew. We had forgotten about our suffering Palestinian brothers until the very moment they needed us the most, and even then our passion [...]

When there is injustice done in the world, we usually hear only one side of the argument, the one that has the louder voice and almost always drowns out the voices of the other side. With the raging conflict between Israel and Palestine, we hear the side the world usually wants us to hear, the Israeli side – the ’self defense’, the ‘fighting against terrorism’ side. What is the other side thinking, what is their story? “Look Into My Eyes” by Outlandish is a song that embodies their story, the daily struggles of Palestinians. Its tunes carries the anger, the story, the questions of [...]

1.
Where has my language gone?
The poet searches for words to wrap around these times
Make them sense Make them pretty Make them useful
Words from the past haunt our conversations
Empire and Crusade
Plans and Centuries
All these words cleared understanding before
Fall heavy now
And weightless into this abyss of bad news
I have seen the photographs
Again words Prison Torture
Desperate for words I can write
That are not profane That are objective Read as rational
So people will not stop reading this self-conscious poem
So my parents will not be embarrassed
So Americans will demand the return of their own
Desperate for words I can write
So I can keep from becoming [...]

Imagine yourself immersed in a peaceful dream, in your warm bed, your siblings somberly sleeping in the room next to you… when you’re startled awake with a gun pointed at your face and policemen dragging your kicking and screaming mother onto the cold pavement outside. They’re screaming at you to get up and do as they say, telling you that the house you’ve lived in your entire life is not yours.
Early this morning, two Palestinian families were forced to endure this terror when they were violently evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem.
The Al-Ghawe and Hannoun families awoke before dawn [...]