Vincent Lemire, Christophe Gaultier, and Marie Galpoin frame The History Of Jerusalem: An Illustrated Story of 4,000 Years around the narration of “Zeitoun or Olivia, whichever you prefer,” a 4,000 year-old olive tree overlooking Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives. Zeitoun begins welcoming the reader to the history of Jerusalem by telling us, “Hello! Shalom! Salam!” By opening the narration in this manner, Zeitoun highlights the multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious history of Jerusalem, a place where, as Zeitoun says, where everything connects, from the desolate desert and Dead Sea to “the fertile plain and the Mediterranean” to the space “between men and gods, between the world of the living and the world of the dead.” Zeitoun’s roots sink deep into the earth, nourished by rain and sun, and their branches reach towards the sky, gazing, from the top of the mountain, upon Jerusalem.

When I was in Belfast, I stopped into PaperxClips, a queer-owned, punky independent bookstore, coffee house, and community space. After ordering my coffee, I browsed the shelves, as I always do when I enter a bookstore, for something to read. Sipping my coffee, my eyes scanned the shelves, coming to rest on the cover of a zine depicting a woman planting a tree in the ground as another tree rises behind her. In the distance, we see a barbed wire fence and smoke billowing the ruins of buildings that appear to have just been bombed. At the top, the title of the zine, The Olive Tree, appears in both English and Arabic. I picked up the issue and flipped through it, seeing the editorial, the essays, the poetry, and the images, all of which highlighted the interconnections between British colonial rule in Belfast and the North of Ireland and the violence enacted against Palenstinians through Israel’s colonial machinations.

The first issue of The Olive Tree opens with Liana Mac Intyre and Salim Usman’s editorial that, like The History of Jerusalem, invokes the thousand year-old olive trees that dot the region. Specifically, editors detail Al-Badawi, an olive tree reported to be over 5,000 years old, near al-Walaja. Eva Quinn notes the importance of opening the issue this manner because through this framing the editors, as well as The History of Jerusalem, “share the story of Palestine but also embed its rich history and culture within it.” This situates the current moment within a much-larger historical context, something that we must do with everything. As Quinn puts it, we need to understand what the current occupation of Palestine and Gaza for what it is, calling it out, but we also need to remember the “rich history” of the region, a history that dates back millennia.

Of al-Badawi and the other olive trees, the editors write, “Olive trees are deeply rooted in Palestinian culture and in the land itself. . . . Their roots . . . represent Palestinian resistance, the trees’ strength to cling back to life despite endless attacks and replacement make them a beacon of hope.” This historic connection and spirit of resistance appears in each and every piece in The Olive Tree, starting with Adina’s “From the Holy Land” which details her and her family’s life in Gaza and her exile from her homeland even though she has a university degree in teaching. Adina concludes by writing, “For me, yes, I fled from Gaza because there is no peaceful place in Gaza, no safety. We do not have the rights, even if you have a certificate or a degree in university. There are no jobs. There are no opportunities for us to have jobs or to complete study. Even saftey, there is no safety. There is no safe life.”

Adina highlights, in her essay and reinforces in her conclusion, the displacement and statelessness of Palestinians. Remember, the United States does not recognize Palestine. One way to “eliminate” individuals, as we saw during the Holocaust, is to make them stateless. Timothy Snyder details this, as do many others, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Adina’s essay draws me to a recent court ruling in Louisiana where a judge rebuked ICE’s detention of Akram Mahmoud Omar, a 77 year-old grandfather who has lived in the United States for 50 years. Born in 1948, before Israel became a state, Omar, as a baby, endured the Nakba, he displacement and violence enacted by Israel on 750,000 Palestinians. Even though he is a “lawful permanent resident,” ICE detained Omar, and he a heart attack in April, culminating in open-heart surgery, while in detention. A judge ordered Omar’s release because ICE violated his constitutional rights, but ten days after his release, ICE, as The Lens writes, “seized Omar again and tried to whisk the still-recovering man onto a deportation flight the next morning.”

I came across Omar’s story on social media, and of course, all of the people in the comments proclaimed that Omar had done wrong. They wrote, “He had a lot of time to become legal” and “Wait . . . did he become a legal citizen in that time?” and similar responses. What these commentators fail to realize is the not-so-distant history of the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to countries such as Jordan and elsewhere The comments do not take into account Omar’s stateless status since the United States does not recognize Palestine as a nation. This status renders Omar and other Palestinians, at least in the United States, as non-entities, as less than people because they have no “homeland.” So, when I see comments like, “He should have become a citizen” or “Send him back home,” I get angry because individuals do not know history. They don’t know the history from 77 years ago, let along the 4,000 plus year history of Palestine itself.

The History of Jerusalem and The Olive Tree, along with works such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Nur Masalha’s Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, detail thus history, moving beyond the clickbait soundbites. The Olive Tree, for its part, highlights the solidarity between nationalists in the North of Ireland and Palestinians, which I have written about recently in various posts. It showcases that we must not think about events as separate from one another. We must think about them as connected, looking for the spaces where they overlap and create solidarity in struggles for freedom and identity. As Elia McBriarty puts it in “Language and Politics, A Study of Place Names” when discussing the ways that Isareli occupation stripped Palestinains of their language and British occupation stripped Irish of their language, “A colonial regime will use every tool in its arsenal to erase a people’s identity, and this is what we cannot let happen, as once a people’s language and identity has been wiped out, there is nothing left.”

I want to end with Alice Murphy’s poem from The Olive Tree that I quote in the title. It reminds me, in so many ways, of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” I plan to write more about this in the future.

If we must live: after refat alareer

If we must live
we must rise
to tell your story
to take your seeds
to fashion into matchsticks
and paper sheets
(make a fire that lights up the world)
so that the people left in Gaza
while cradling shrouds and empty plates awaiting help that never came —
and watched a world that stood blind
even to skin and bones
even to the murder of drones —
see the fire, the fure you made, burning across the sky
and know a revolution has started
that it’s not time to die

If we must live
Let it bring change
Let in be in your name.

What are some of your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.