Letter 8: Organize, Resist, Love: A Letter to the Workers of the World

Letters From The Ground 8: Organize, Resist, Love: A Letter to the Workers of the World

From: Hind Hamdan

To Trade unions and labour-rights organizations,
To development practitioners and humanitarian workers,
To all engaged workers, across the globe,
To spiritual souls and light workers,

 

Dear ones,

My letter started to write itself during the rainy days of November 2024 as we were witnessing the genocide in Gaza and the war on Lebanon becoming more brutal. A feeling of rage mixed with pain and frustration was growing in me. I had to speak up. It was through writing these words that I avoided an internal explosion. Months later, the letter is being published and still resonates with the sense of duty that was behind it initially. Months later, my emotions are less intense to a certain extent - but they are deeply rooted in my soul, which from a transformative spiritual lens, is far more impactful. 

For a period of time I forgot how to smile. I cannot begin to explain how disarming it is to forget this essential act of existing: smiling. I write this letter to you now, after I read Zoukak Theatre’s ‘Letters from the ground’ initiative. The first letter shared was metaphorically situated under the rubble and came ‘from what remains.’ In what remains lies endless possibilities for a different world. In what remains, love is at the core of all actions. I am talking about radical Love. The kind of Love that moves mountains and changes realities. The kind of Love that is whole and not compartmentalized. The kind of Love that shakes unjust systems and breeds cultures of care. The kind of Love that brings back our united and interconnected strengths. The only kind of Love in fact.

I forgot how to smile when I was barely 8 years old. On April 18, 1996 I woke up to the pictures and videos of the first Qana massacre perpetrated by Israel with ‘its most moral army’ in the galactical universe – the heart wrenching irony is that a second massacre in Qana happened in 2006. In the fall of 2024, Israel deliberately destroyed the centre of the town and many houses and residential buildings, leaving it to bleed as she remembers in her womb the first massacre that traumatized her and those who cherished her. 

I forgot how to smile the day when Sobhieh, my nanny, whose family fled from Safad in occupied Palestine during the Nakba to Lebanon in order to seek refuge, told me about the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 near Jerusalem when Zionist militias attacked the village and murdered more than 100 Palestinians villagers in cold blood. She opened my eyes to what was her life as a child before she had to flee with her family. She was a child, just like I was. Although our lives are distanced in time, what remains is one reality: living with and under the same occupation and settler colonial entity. Sobhieh lived all her life in displacement, away from her ancestors’ land, stuffed into a life of promiscuity in one of many Palestinian refugee camps scattered across Lebanon. I will let you imagine what it means to be stuck in limbo waiting to go back Home, not wanting to fully settle because your soul’s only wish is to be somewhere else where you naturally belong.

This fall I forgot again how to smile. Waking up to the sounds of bombs rupturing dreams and homes. Erasing memories. Listening to the sounds of the spy drone ‘MK’ all day and all night long – that voice that keeps reminding me that I am being watched and heard. The ultimate panopticon. Waking up to the news of yet another massacre in Gaza. Another massacre in the South of Lebanon. Another massacre in Baalbek. Another massacre in the Bekaa. Another massacre in Chouf. Another massacre in Jbeil. Another massacre in Akkar. Another massacre in residential areas hosting refugees. Let me not start counting the ones happening in Gaza. Or the letter will turn red.

Imagine all those people, with similar lives as yours, with dreams and hopes, families and internal feuds. In the latest Israeli War on Lebanon, my friend Sara lost her pharmacy, her livelihoods and her home. She found herself displaced with her husband and children, living at her aunt’s whose son was killed by an Israeli airstrike in July. Another friend Imad hosted his elderly parents who are still living in need after they were forced out of their land by Israel and who are experiencing extreme and irremediable sense of loss. Jameela works as an emergency doctor and has witnessed the worst atrocities firsthand that are now nightly visitors during her sleep. She lost her brother to martyrdom. He was a farmer in the beloved South of Lebanon. She still chooses to show up for her patients, and for her land. Imagine, just imagine, at every airstrike, I ran to my phone to ask about her because she works in a hospital that is within the heavily bombarded Southern Suburb of Beirut.

Many of those people lost their jobs or cannot commute to them because they have been displaced to the other side of the country. Many of those women and men who, amid all this violence, still found the steadfastness and courage to bring income even if they have lost their loved ones, their homes and their lands. The process of othering us, of othering those people in the mainstream Western media and by ‘western’ politicians and spokespersons only reflects the vicious rationale behind allowing and accepting a genocide to continue for so long. But we are not nebulas of unidentified bodies.

Now imagine those people smiling. Imagine what lies behind that smile. And all the loved ones who forgot how to smile. Imagine their smiles that hide within their layers all the stories they have lived and the people they have loved, and potentially lost. But, in their smiles, also lies the existential strength and abundant love they hold within.

Then I remembered what a smile means. A smile is the most basic tool for resistance and represents kindness and radical Love. A smile reminded me of my humanity and of the values that guide me. The moment I remembered how to smile, life was brought back into my veins and I perceived the beauty and necessity of still finding moments of simple pleasure and connection. As we smile, we resist. As we smile, we confront our oppressor and we cherish the land we belong to. As we smile, we exist. We live on. 

When Netanyahu stood up in front of the UN Assembly and described the axis of curse and the axis of blessing, he claimed that Israel is fighting on behalf of all the ‘free people’  in the war against the ‘forces of darkness’. I would like to tell you that we are fighting for life, values and belonging. We are fighting for indigeneity. We are at the forefront of the battle against the supremacist, profit-obsessed, interest-based, ultra-capitalistic, fascist and intrinsically violent Zionist system.

Dear ones,

We are one.  

We are already witnessing what it means for fascists to take power in Western countries. It means oppressive surveillance systems, police brutality, control over the freedom of expression and direct attacks on human rights with worsening working and living conditions. Isn’t it time to ring the alarm and look at how interconnected we are? Isn’t it time to see how the system we live in always creates a polarized other and vilifies it in order for it to reproduce and reinforce its hegemony? Isn’t it time for you to stand up, speak up and not waver against small moments of pretended comfort? 

What if we realize that what is happening in one region is already manifesting itself in other regions, under different disguise but within the same destructive oppressive and violent energy.

The unbearable repercussions of the current globalized systems of production are being exponentially felt today. For instance the rapid (and somewhat accepted) increase in child labor and the deterioration of working conditions are some examples of what the future holds, should things remain as they are now. However, such examples are also being largely exposed because there are people who care about other human beings and about the future of their own communities. We do have a choice and it is an urgent one to make.

In my work with trade unions, I hear stories of forced labour across the globe, some of them blatantly visible in countries where workers rights are openly abused. Other stories are hidden and happen underground in countries that appoint themselves as Humanity’s morality, like some of the E.U. countries.

How is morality defined when these same countries build most of their economies on selling weapons to a genocidal entity and to countries with serious human rights violations? How is morality defined when these same countries allow the exploitation of workers on the supply side of the value chains? 

Indeed, when I imagine the world I want to live in, I cannot but think of the future of work amid the robotization of supply chains and how the current system is deliberately pitting workers against each other to break the power they would yield should they decide to organize and show solidarity. Workers are being robbed of their livelihoods, replaced by a robot to gain efficiency, without being given an alternative. 

I have seen trade unionists in the West working day and night to speak up against the genocide. Their voices were silenced and their livelihoods were severely damaged. They however were aware of the options available and they made a choice. For them, we have to act. For them, we must engage. For instance, on May 10, Norway’s largest labor union fully backed the boycott and divestment from Israel.

The fact of the matter is that we are now at a crossroads: either we accept to let go of certain acquired privileges and potential ones (that we are striving towards under the current system i.e. the carrot) and organize ourselves around values that resonate with our souls. Or, we accept the fatality of becoming robot-like, working under increasingly poor conditions and with less rights, in order to pay taxes and consume, each in their own bubble. We accept to wake up every day with a small layer of our souls tarnished, going to work and consuming, knowing that our taxes are funding the system that is oppressing us, funding entities that are exterminating us.

Both scenarios require confrontations – although not similar ones. In one scenario, it would lead to mutual destruction and an incessant spiral of violence. In the other scenario, the one I flow in, acts of confrontation are an option amid many others that can coexist because their raison d’etre is liberation.

Here comes the time to choose.

Undeniably, there is one possible option. 

Beloved ones, it is time to act. You have an honourable past of showing up, in different ways. You have demonstrated the courage you have within yourselves at multiple times.

Now, more than ever, we are calling upon your courage. 

In the words of Maya Angelou, the most important virtue of a leader is courage. Because courage begets consistency. Without courage, there is no consistency neither in our actions nor in the sustainability of our other virtues.

In radical Love,

Hind Hamdan