We are people ready to resist your barbarism and our own

It is true that for a year, we have been exhausting ourselves trying to move you with the reality of an unprecedented genocide, fully documented, facilitated by the complicity and weapons of your governments.

But it is not about proving our humanity to you, for we no longer seek your validation.

We know ourselves deeply, in both our worst and best, and we know you possess nothing. No ability, no knowledge, no History, no additional information, no impartiality that would grant you the power to disqualify us.

We are none of what you call us—neither the "Third World," nor "developing countries" nor "terrorists," nor "barbarians," nor "civilized"—and we are not obligated to prove it to you.

We are people ready to resist, your barbarism and our own.

We are the men and women of Palestine who cling to an olive tree in front of tanks, who slap a soldier, who dig a tunnel with a spoon to escape from prison, who refuse to leave their land, who carry the wounded, who heal, whom no government, no movement represents, who in the exile of their dispossession repeat, generation after generation: I come from this village. The elders die, the children do not forget.

We are the men and women of Iraq, born under your bombs, those who, in a destroyed, devastated country, take to the streets chanting, "Neither America nor Iran."

Those who, from the heart of so-called "holy" cities, dare to say, "In the name of religion, the thieves have robbed us."

We are the men and women of Iraq whose bodies, made of flesh and blood, stand tall until they fall before armed militias firing live bullets.

We are the men and women of Egypt, who after a revolution accuse the euphoria of battles won that are not victories, those who rot in prison for an article, for a Facebook "status," who come out after years only to return because silence is not an option.

We are the men and women of Syria, who braved fear to overthrow a dictator who kidnaps, tortures, bombs his own people with warplanes and chemical weapons. Those whose country, now a battleground for all global powers, have been forced onto the roads of exile with no end in sight.

We are the men and women of Lebanon, who find ways to live with a corrupt, resigned state, a collapsed currency, without infrastructure. Those who make the struggles of neighboring peoples their own, who even wage war among themselves so that Beirut remains a land that welcomes resistance and exiles. We are those who, after 365 days of bombardment, still say, "We will not abandon Palestine."

We know who we are. Who are you? What are you capable of?

In trying to move you, we are trying to bring you back to a space where we hope to recognize you, where false arguments do not serve to justify the unjustifiable, where hospitals do not explode with their patients, where children do not die under bombs, where tents do not burn with their refugees, where a population is not imprisoned in a 360 km2 space for decades with the expectation that things will turn out fine.