you think of the case of Palestine, by which you mean the case of Palestine, by which you mean the grammatical case.

you think of the case of Palestine because you think of the difference that case makes in the framing of Palestine: war on Palestine, war in Palestine, war by Palestine, war with Palestine, war for Palestine.

you think of grammatical case because you are a translator and you think case is the beating heart of meaning itself, the hidden work of making words relate to other words.

you think of the case of Palestine because you think of how often you encounter it in declension, as object rather than subject, as waypoint rather than origin.

you think of the case of Palestine because you have encountered, for seven months and of course for so much longer, so many instances of Palestine vanished into semantics, of how the style guides of propagandists and imperial stenographers disappear subjects, how they spirit up “the Palestinian people” but seldom Palestine, how they resort to passive voice, the pulitzer-prize winning linguistic acrobatics whose sole purpose is to obscure and thereby exonerate the culprit.

you think of the phrase israel/Palestine, israel slash Palestine, emblazoned on news chyrons, headlining the so-called “coverage,” if you could call it that, of the “conflict,” if you could call it that, headlining the obituaries of Palestine’s martyred writers, headlining the reports and the press statements of organizations that are otherwise “respectable,” if you could call them that.

you think about the work that goes into making israel slash Palestine a commonsense, a whole empire brutalizing and bombing the world over in order to preserve this lexical gesture, an entire media-literary apparatus conscripting the cultural capital of its most middling writers in the service of this declension, this move to innocence which attempts to make Palestine unthinkable on its own, as if Palestine is always already marked by settler violence, as if Palestine must always exist in declension by its occupier.

you think of unthinking that declension, of what becomes thinkable when there is no case of Palestine but Palestine itself, Palestine the nominative, Palestine the infinitive, Palestine the infinite possibility.

you think of what happens in this unnaming, unsaying, unconjugating, undeclining, of what happens when, as Mohammed Abu Lebda writes, you “let go of the titles they bestow upon you,” of how Fady Joudah’s untitled poems absent what warrants absence, unsay what is said and say what is unsaid, to “refuse what the war wants,” to stand “against the word,” of how the infinitive form of Palestine becomes a safe harbor, a refuge for Wisam Rafeedie’s “trinity of fundamentals” of love, revolution, and life

you think of Hiba Abu Nada, one of Gaza’s many martyred writers, in whose last poem she “grant[s] you [that] refuge, in invocation and prayer.”

you think of Refaat Alareer’s invocation, that “you must live,” and you think of Hala Alyan’s invocation, that “if you say Gaza, you must say Gaza.”

you think of the pluripotency of these reparations, the notion that anything is possible when Palestine is written by Palestinians.

you think of the many Palestinian writers exiled or martyred, but also the ones who remain, all authors of Palestine past present and future, all exercising in writing the right of return, a return to land and a return of land to Palestinian authorship and authority.

you think of how Palestine is unmaking fascism and ruining empire, of how Palestine is teaching you to hone fearlessness on principle and principle on hope, to commit with Ghassan Zaqtan to “what life made of me and what my hands made of it,” to be guided, as Adania Shibli writes, “towards imagining how to live better,” but more urgently you think of the rightful return of Palestine to the authorship of Palestinians, of how these acts of writing dawn forward the horizon of the Palestinian right of return to Palestine.

you think of the Palestine the Palestinians are writing, proclaiming soundly and roundly that “we are not numbers,” and you arrive, suddenly and all at once, to the clear and simple and nevertheless revolutionary truth of Palestinian writers writing Palestine:
Palestine lived, Palestine lives, Palestine will live.