MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO

The Resilience of Gaza: A People and Culture Enduring Ontological, Epistemological, Physical, and Cultural Genocide

Before you kill them, call them names— deprive the soul of shape,
unlace the face from meaning. No empathy for a bitch,
no humanity for a terrorist, no memory for the native
whose map no longer fits.

Before you kill them, strip language from their tongue,
rename Deir Yassin, Majdal, Al-Qarara into syllables of conquest.
Erase the inflections of olive trees and the syntax of exile.
It will free you from the burden of recognition.

For centuries, the land breathed many names: Philistines,
Mamelukes, Christians, Muslim Arabs, Jews— one people,
many prayers. Samson buried beneath a mosque—
his myth woven into Gaza’s dust.

Before you kill them, say they never existed.
Call it a land without people, give it to a people without land.
Rename memory as rage. Call resistance fanaticism,
barbarism, irrational fury in the face of invisibility.

The British dressed conquest as stewardship,
Zionists penned manifestos in peace-talk dialect.
In 1948, Palestine was not just erased— it was overwritten.
In Gaza, the gateway, Egyptian boots once stood in 1948.
By 1987, Gazans no longer waited— they led the Intifada,
forcing history to return to its origins.

Before you kill them, break the mirror.
Distort the face, rewrite the name,
burn the lineage, demolish the shrine.

Destroy Rashad Al-Shawwa’s archive,
level Al-Qarara’s memory,
bury Refaat Alareer’s pen,
silence Sham, Leila, Sufyan.
Erase the song before it can be sung,
the verse before it’s recited. It makes it easier.

Call their museums empty, call their artifacts myths.
Unteach their histories, unbuild their universities.
Bomb the Roman tombs, shatter Byzantine pots,
unwrite the scriptures etched in stone.
Label ancient mosques irrelevant,
churches collateral, faith expendable.

Before you kill them, strip culture from breath.
Displace not just bodies, but books.
Silence not just lives, but lineages.
Make Gaza memoryless, a strip of land 6 kilometers wide—
but 5,000 years deep.

But you forget— the soul is not confined to coordinates.
Gaza is not a strip of land, it is the pulse of eternity,
the echo of prophets and poets,
a whisper that defies silence. 
The culture and spirituality of a people whose faith cannot be caged,
whose language outlives the tongue,
whose memory outlasts erasure.
Their resilience does not bend,
their joy is defiance, their song is survival.

Gaza is the culture of optimism in the face of engineered despair,
the heartbeat of hope where oppressors thrive on hopelessness.
It is the undying spirit of humanity— a light that refuses to flicker.

Gaza is the breath of God throttling the fire of Iblis,
the wind that douses every flame of arrogance.
It is spirit forged in sacred fire,
a testament not of defeat, but of rebirth.

And before you kill them— know this:
you cannot kill a people whose truth is older than empires,
whose love is stronger than walls,
whose presence cannot be unmade.