Ask yourself something honest.
When you hear the word Gaza, what comes to mind? Rubble, probably. Hunger. Children. Tents. A kind of helpless, aching sorrow that you carry for a few minutes before life pulls you somewhere else.
We have been taught to see Gaza as a place that needs saving. A wound the world must tend to. A tragedy to respond to.
But what if that framing is the problem?
What if, while we were busy feeling sorry, we missed the lesson?
There Is a Word You Need to Know
It is called sumud.
It comes from Arabic. It does not translate cleanly into English, which is perhaps the point. Some things resist translation because they resist reduction.
If you pushed for a definition: steadfastness. Rootedness. The quiet, iron refusal to be erased. But sumud is not stubbornness for its own sake. It is not gritted teeth and white knuckles. It is something warmer than that. Something older.
It lives in the mother who cooks a meal for her children the morning after her home was bombed. Not because she has moved on. Because she refuses to stop being a mother. It lives in the teacher who gathers students in a tent and opens a textbook, because education is not a luxury, it is a declaration. It lives in the shopkeeper who sweeps the glass off the floor and unlocks the door again, because closing it permanently would mean something he is not willing to accept.
This is sumud. And Gaza has practiced it, collectively, under conditions most of us cannot imagine, for decades.
The Smallest Acts Carry the Most Weight
Here is something worth sitting with.
Freedom, as Palestine understands it, is not delivered in one dramatic moment. No single march, no single victory, no single news cycle changes everything. What changes things is the accumulation of thousands of small, daily acts of refusal.
A child walking to school in a war zone is refusing. A woman replanting her garden after it has been destroyed is refusing. A poet writing verses by candlelight is refusing. None of these acts make headlines. All of them matter.
Gaza has become a global symbol not because of what was done to it, but because of what its people chose to do anyway. That distinction is everything.
What Happens When the State Abandons You
When the bombs stop and the cameras leave, ordinary life still has to continue. People still need bread. Water. Medicine. A sense that someone, somewhere, gives a damn.
In Gaza, when institutions failed and aid convoys stalled, communities turned to each other. Groups with names like "Reviving Gaza" were baking over a thousand loaves of bread a day for neighbours they had never met. "Water is Life" was hauling water from whatever wells still worked in the north and distributing it by hand. "Grassroots Gaza" was finding the neighbourhoods too small, too marginal, too forgotten for the big organisations to bother with, and showing up anyway.
One organiser put it simply: "Everything we do is carried out under siege, under bombardment, under starvation. And still we care for our people, with love, with accountability."
Read that again. Under siege. Under bombardment. Under starvation. And still.
This is not charity. This is not crisis management. This is a community that refused to outsource its own survival. That is a model. Not just for Gaza. For every neighbourhood, every city, every movement that has ever had to operate in the gaps that power leaves behind.
A Poem That Refused to Stay in One Language
Refaat Alareer was a poet and a professor in Gaza. Before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, he wrote a poem called "If I Must Die."
It was translated into more than 40 languages. It was read aloud in parliaments, on street corners, in university halls, in living rooms. People who had never heard of Refaat Alareer before read his words and recognised something in them.
That is what happens when a voice carries truth. It does not stay in one place. It does not need institutional support or a publishing deal or an algorithm to push it. It travels because it has to.
The global solidarity movements that grew around Gaza, from student encampments in American universities to protests in Jakarta and São Paulo, were not organised from a boardroom. They grew because Gaza's steadfastness became a mirror. People looked at it and saw their own struggles reflected back. Farmers. Migrants. Indigenous communities. Black Americans. They all found something in sumud that belonged to them too.
The Framing We Need to Change
For too long, the conversation about Gaza has been structured around pity.
What can we give? What can we send? How can we help?
These are not bad questions. But they position Gaza as passive. As a recipient. As a place that exists mainly to receive our sympathy and our donations.
The people of Gaza are not waiting to be saved. They are organising, teaching, writing, grieving, rebuilding and loving, all at the same time, in circumstances that would have broken most of us long ago.
Steadfastness in the face of injustice is a path to eventual freedom. That is not a platitude. It is a hard-won truth, earned through years of living it.
Three Things to Take With You
Embrace sumud. In your own life, in your own struggle, there is power in refusing to be diminished. You do not have to win every day. You just have to keep going.
Practice mutual aid. Do not wait for governments or institutions to fill the gaps. Look to your left and your right. That is your community. Take care of it.
Spread the voices. Share the stories. Not as tragedies. As testimonies.
Gaza is not tired.
Under siege, under hunger, under the weight of the world's indifference, it stands.
That is not a miracle. That is sumud.
And it belongs to all of us.