revolutionary love
In times of societal upheaval, with hatred and vitriol being spread like wildfire, it is vital to the human condition to remember why we continue to struggle for a better world. On this “Valentine’s Day” which many (correctly) argue has become about capitalistic displays of affection, getting increasingly expensive with each passing year, we need to reground ourselves in something different: revolutionary love. For decades, any movement working towards a different world has been rooted in love. Not the love of poems and romance novels, but love for land, life, and one another. This is revolutionary love.
In the Palestinian struggle for liberation, I think of love being taught in every aspect of Palestinian life. Love is our mothers spending hours in the kitchen making the most fragrant, delicious meals to be shared with the whole family and sometimes the whole neighborhood, comforting our cries after long days, holding our families together. Love is our fathers teaching their children how to pray, taking them on trips to the beach or the ice cream shop or to Sito’s house. Love is our cousins taking us to the pet store to buy us goldfish (even when their parents said no), love is gathering for a meal and the room being so loud you can’t hear the person next to you. Love is in the air you breathe, the cup of tea you will be offered everywhere you go, even the old market of Jerusalem where strangers invite you into their shop to tell you their family’s story, the trays of knafeh being served in Nablus, the kids jumping off ancient walls into the sea in Aqqa, love is in Jenin, love is in Haifa, love is in Yaffa, love is in Masafer Yatta, love is in Al Khalil, love is in the mountains and the sea and the desert.
This love is not unique to Palestine, but it is always regrounding to reminisce. Love is also in communities coming together, after witnessing the most unspeakable atrocities known to man, to feed, clothe, shelter, and comfort one another. Love is in resistance, it is in refusal to bend to systems trying to break us. In his article “Beyond Grief: To Love and Stay with Those Who Die in Our Arms”, Devin Atallah says: “What does it take to love our babies, our living, and our dead in the midst of isr-el's genocidal colonial conquest? … When can we release our tears and let them fall free? This is not grief. This is our revolutionary, Indigenous love fighting against the apocalyptic violence of genocide. And when we love like this, anchored in Palestinian feminist praxis, we live and die with dignity, and we become the freedom we are demanding.”
The love that fights against colonization and genocide cannot be described in a simple blog post, and its importance cannot be understated. Revolutionary love guides us to continue to push the struggle forward and to continue to show up for one another, even when we are exhausted. Love cannot bring back the 30,000 people who have been massacred in the last 125+ days, but love allows their memories to be our guide to honor them by struggling towards the world that they made the ultimate sacrifice to achieve.
Without a guiding sense of love, it would be impossible to continue to dream and imagine and work towards the better world that we so desperately need. On this Palestine’s (the correct way to celebrate Valentine’s) Day, we honor love despite hardship. We honor the love that has led Palestinians to fight for more than a century for freedom, and we promise to love in all of the ways that our ancestors and our families taught us. Revolution is love in action, and this love will never be in vain.
S O U R C E S
Devin G. Atallah (2023) Beyond Grief: To Love and Stay with Those Who Die in Our Arms, Institute for Palestine Studies; Devin G. Atallah (2024) Beyond Grief: Decolonial Love for Palestinian Life, Journal of Palestine Studies; Sarah Ihmoud (2022) Palestinian feminism: Analytics, praxes and decolonial futures, Feminist Anthropology; The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (2023) Love Poems by Poets of Palestinian Heritage, The Margins.
