Palestinian Life, Creativity, and the Right to Be More Than Our Suffering
Diaspora & Belonging | The Diaspora Psychologist
Since the genocide in Gaza began, Palestinian life has been documented largely through images of death, destruction, and displacement. We have watched families disappear, neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and generations of history buried beneath the remains of homes. For many watching from the diaspora, the experience has been one of profound grief, anger, and helplessness. Yet, alongside these images, another story has continued to unfold, one that receives considerably less attention. Palestinians are still creating, imagining, celebrating, and finding ways to live.
Over the past three years, I have become increasingly interested in the ways Palestinians continue to create amid circumstances designed to make ordinary life nearly impossible. Artists paint on the walls of destroyed buildings. Musicians perform among the ruins. Children invent games in displacement camps, and families find ways to celebrate birthdays, weddings, and graduations. Across the diaspora, Palestinians organize cultural festivals, publish books, teach dabke, preserve traditional embroidery, and cultivate gardens filled with plants that remind them of home. These activities are often described as acts of resistance, and certainly some are. But I wonder whether we have become so accustomed to understanding Palestinian life through the framework of resistance that we sometimes overlook something far more ordinary: people are simply trying to live.
There is a tendency, particularly in discussions of collective trauma, to celebrate the resilience of communities experiencing extraordinary suffering. Resilience has become almost synonymous with Palestinian identity. We admire the ability to endure, rebuild, and continue despite unimaginable loss. But there is something troubling about a narrative that continually praises people for surviving conditions they should never have been forced to endure. Resilience can become an expectation rather than a recognition of human capacity. It risks suggesting that suffering is somehow redeemed by the strength it produces.
As a psychologist, I find this particularly important. When a community is repeatedly represented through its trauma, the trauma can begin to overshadow the complexity of its identity. Palestinians become refugees, victims, martyrs, or symbols of resistance before they are recognized as individuals with interests, talents, ambitions, and ordinary concerns. Even well-intentioned efforts to humanize Palestinians often rely on demonstrating the depth of their suffering, as though our humanity must first be established through tragedy.
But Palestinian life did not begin with the Nakba, nor is it defined exclusively by the violence that followed. Long before displacement became central to our collective experience, Palestinian communities were producing literature, music, architecture, agricultural knowledge, and traditions that shaped everyday life. Our ancestors were farmers, merchants, teachers, artists, and craftspeople. They raised families, argued with neighbors, celebrated marriages, and worried about their children. Their lives were not extraordinary because they endured suffering. They were meaningful because they were lived.
For those of us in the diaspora, this distinction matters. Much of our connection to Palestine is maintained through stories of what was lost and the continuing struggle for justice and return. These stories are essential, but they are not the entirety of our inheritance. We also inherit recipes, humor, music, family traditions, ways of gathering, and relationships with the land. When we plant za'atar, teach our children traditional songs, or gather around a table filled with familiar foods, we are doing more than preserving memories of a place. We are participating in a culture that continues to grow and change.
I have come to appreciate that cultural continuity does not require us to reproduce the past exactly as it was. Diaspora communities are constantly adapting, combining inherited traditions with new experiences and creating expressions of identity that reflect both where we come from and where we live. Palestinian culture is not a relic to be protected behind glass. It is alive, sometimes messy, occasionally contradictory, and wonderfully creative. It belongs as much to the children inventing new ways to express their Palestinian identity as it does to the generations who came before them.
This is also why I hesitate to describe every act of Palestinian creativity as resistance. Sometimes a painting is a political statement. Sometimes it is simply a painting. Sometimes a child dances dabke to affirm a connection to Palestine, and sometimes that child dances because the music is playing and dancing is fun. Both experiences matter. If every expression of Palestinian life must be interpreted through occupation and oppression, then those forces remain at the center of how we understand ourselves.
Liberation, as I understand it, involves more than freedom from oppression. It also includes the freedom to imagine, create, and participate in life without having every action defined by the conditions we are struggling against. It is the possibility of being recognized not only for what we have survived, but for who we are and what we hope to become.
I think about this whenever I encounter Palestinian artists, writers, farmers, educators, and young people whose work reflects a future they are actively shaping. Their creativity does not erase the violence, nor does it make the losses more bearable. It reminds me that Palestinian life continues to exist beyond the narratives imposed upon it. Our people are not waiting for the world to acknowledge their humanity before exercising it.
Perhaps what I want most is for Palestinians to be afforded the luxury of being ordinary. To create mediocre art, tell terrible jokes, pursue impractical dreams, and experience the everyday frustrations and pleasures that make up a human life. We should not have to demonstrate extraordinary courage to deserve safety, nor produce extraordinary achievements to justify our existence.
The world has seen more than enough images of Palestinian death. I want it to become equally familiar with Palestinian life. Not because creativity makes suffering more acceptable, or because cultural achievements somehow compensate for what has been destroyed, but because no people should be understood solely through the violence inflicted upon them.
We do more than just die.
We live, we love, we laugh, we create, and we continue to imagine futures that belong to us.
