Stories on the ‘Wall Museum’ of the Sumud Story House in Bethlehem
By Nick Moss
The settlers come, spitting more bile about camel jockeys,
Sand rats. They uproot the olive trees. After they’ve gone
The family gathers to replant the olive trees.
Troops come. At gunpoint push you out
Into the street. The night is slashed by tac-lights
That point the way. They bulldoze your home.
After they’ve gone, the family gathers
And begin once more to rebuild your home.
Sumud. To remain on the land is to resist.
When Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir was told that the deputy commander of the Bolani Brigade, who ordered the killing of 15 Palestinian rescue workers and the burial of their corpses in a mass grave (alongside the emergency vehicles in which they were travelling) had been dismissed, he called this a “grave mistake.”
Check back and you’ll find that before he became an elected politician, Ben-Gvir was a lawyer, not a failed, schmendrik, stand- up comedian. But there is a logic to his position, given that the state of Israel has killed over 54,000 in Gaza since October 2023, and felt no need to cover up its deeds at all, happy to leave the bodies unburied in the toxic dust that remains of what were their homes and shops and restaurants and schools and hospitals and mosques. (The schools and hospitals are, after all, all of them, full of terrorists.)
The burial of the bodies is the mistake, with its implication of guilt or shame. Of having something to hide. You can imagine Ben-Gvir singing along at home to Barbra Streisand and Robin Gibb — “we got nothing to be guilty of”. (If that sounds glib, I’d argue it’s less glib than contending that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, in a war with no rules of engagement to hold back the slaughter of the “human animals”, and with no humanitarian zones at all now, only kill zones.)
In his home Ben-Gvir has a framed photograph of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and injured 125 more at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. Ben-Gvir was exempt from service in the IDF because he was deemed a right-wing extremist. It’s quite a leap from that to being Minister of National Security. Hard to think of any other who’s made a similar move. Oh. Not that hard. US Minister of Defence, last Crusader standing (well…staggering…) Pete “Deus Vult” Hegseth. Behold a very, very pale horse, teeth bared and roaring…..come to haul Operation Gideon’s Chariot.
Netanyahu, cocksure, says a “voluntary transfer programme”
Will be set up, for those 2 million who do not want to wait around
For starvation or for slaughter. But “Gaza will be entirely destroyed.”
And soon you’ll be able to buy a timeshare in a gold-tapped
Condominium ,with a perfect view across Genocide Beach,
Where the dawn patrol surfs the blood-thick waves.
And we prattle about “never again” while that
“Never” echoes and repeats again and again and again
(And Bukele moves to house the newly-disappeared Latinos
In US-funded cells in CECOT)
And if in Gaza it comes to be impossible
To hold the line by living on the land
Then sumud is the duty of us all.
In the face of absolute reaction,
There must be absolute refusal
(grafitti’d on a Gaza wall
“To exist is to resist.”)
Against a 2nd Nakbah
Solidarity by all means now,
Or “Never again” may as well be
Any time at all.
Sumud is a Palestinian concept meaning steadfastness, resistance, and resilience
