I am not young and feel honoured to have lived to be an elder, alhamdulillah, consistently and continuously calling for justice and peace. But you know what, nothing seems to have changed and my children and grandchildren and all the amazing young people I’ve mentored cannot continue to be doing the same old thing I was doing 40 years ago.

We need to be doing things differently and can see how these young courageous ones are pushing forward with tremendous courage, making sure no more silencing their call for justice.

I have lived as a child, watched and listened to my elders share their lived experience, through wars, bombings, displacement, and the ceaseless, suffocating grip of occupation.

I have watched our people, both Palestinians and Lebanese, endure unspeakable suffering, generation after generation. And now, once again, the bombs rain down, and the world watches, as it always has—divided, indifferent, or worse, complicit.

What breaks my aching heart even more than the violence is the ongoing attempt to silence our voices.

From the colonised state of Israel, we hear the same tired demands for our protests to stop, for our resistance to cease. “Why don’t they just accept their fate?” they demand. “Why don’t they stop resisting and embrace PEACE?” they call out, as if PEACE is something that can be forced upon the oppressed by the very hands that have inflicted so much pain.

But to those demanding voices, I say this: enough.

Enough of your demands for quiet while our homes are destroyed, our children buried under rubble, our people forced into exile.

Enough of your cries for us to submit, while you continue to occupy our land, bomb our neighbourhoods, and deny us the most basic dignity of life.

You call for PEACE, but what you truly seek is our SILENCE, our SUBMISSION to an order that was never JUST, never FAIR, never HUMANE.

I have experienced and seen too much to believe in the kind of “PEACE” you offer. True PEACE is not found in submission to occupation. It does not come from surrendering our RIGHT to return to our homes, or from accepting the daily humiliation that comes with checkpoints, blockades, and military aggression.

True PEACE cannot be built on the graves of the oppressed.

You demand that we stop resisting, as though our resistance is the problem. But our RESISTANCE is not born of hatred or violence. It is born of SURVIVAL. When you have been stripped of your LAND, your FREEDOM, and your future, RESISTANCE is all that remains.

We resist because we have NO choice but to fight for our lives, for our children, for the right to exist in DIGNITY. We resist because to remain silent in the face of such injustice would be to die a slow death in SPIRIT.

I have lived long enough to see that those who call for our VOICES, protests to stop are often the same ones who refuse to see the ROOTS of this conflict. They refuse to acknowledge the violence that their state has unleashed upon us for decades, the violence that drives us to the streets in protest, that fuels our unwavering call for JUSTICE. They want us to forget our history, to erase the NAKBA, to pretend that the occupation is somehow legitimate. But we will never FORGET, and we will never STOP resisting.

To those who are tired of hearing our cries for justice, I sincerely request of you to ask yourself:

Have you ever known what it is like to LOSE your home, to bury your CHILDREN, to watch your people live under constant THREAT?

Have you ever known the PAIN of exile, of having your LAND taken, your culture ERASED, your very existence denied?

I ask because if you had, you would understand that no protest can ever be too loud, no cry for freedom too much. You would understand that resistance is NOT just a RIGHT—it is a necessity for SURVIVAL.

We will not stop raising our voices against the INJUSTICES we have suffered for too long. And we will not accept YOUR version of peace, which is nothing more than an EXTENSION of our oppression.

True PEACE can only come when the bombs stop falling, when the occupation ENDS, when we are able to live on our land with DIGNITY, FREEDOM, and SECURITY.

As an elder, the last 12 months have made me realise and acknowledge that I have carried the weight of this struggle for far too long. I have seen the faces of too many CHILDREN lost to violence, too many homes reduced to RUBBLE, too many lives shattered by the occupation.

But I SINCERELY still believe in a future where justice prevails. I still believe in a future where our VOICES will no longer be silenced, where our protests will no longer be dismissed as nuisances.

I have faith and hope and believe in a future where the world will finally LISTEN—not to those who seek to silence us, but to those who cry out for justice, dignity, and freedom.

Until that day comes, we will continue to resist. We will continue to speak our Truth, no matter how many try to SILENCE us. Because we know that our STRUGGLE is not JUST for us—it is for ALL people who long to live in a world where JUSTICE and PEACE are not hollow words, but a REALITY for every human being.

InshAllah justice will be served with peace, dignity and freedom for all. Ameen

In solidarity and with prayers for justice and healing,

Hajeh Maha Krayem Abdo OAM
Chief Executive Officer