Of Walls and Wails: The Unbroken Yearning for Justice in Palestine
Whereas the Jew stands before the Western Wall, whispering with fervent devotion, “Next year in Jerusalem,” the Palestinian Arab faces a different monument: the cold, gray concrete of the West Bank barrier and at Gaza strip, a jagged scar slicing through ancestral lands. This wall, bristling with barbed wire, stands as a mute witness to dispossession, its every block a testament to homes, orchards, and fields wrested away by the Zionist project decades ago. As a writer who has walked these lands as a pilgrim, this writer have stood before this barrier and felt its weight—not just of stone and steel, but of lives interrupted. In its shadow, one can almost hear the quiet, unyielding cries of those yearning to return, their voices rising like prayers, not from ancient shrines alone but from the hearts of the displaced.
This concrete barrier, for many, has become a new Wailing Wall, its surface a canvas of anguish and defiance. Graffiti and murals—declarations of freedom, pleas for return, demands for dignity—scar its expanse, each spray-painted word a sacred cry as potent as any whispered at Jerusalem’s ancient stones. These are not mere slogans but the weight of generations denied their place, a secular yet hallowed echo of “Next year in Jerusalem,” urgent and unyielding. The wall is more than a physical divide; it is a monument to absence, to longing, and to a human will that refuses erasure.
In Gaza, this same longing finds a fiercer voice, piercing the blackouts and enforced silences that seek to smother it. The UN’s declaration of famine, gripping 2.1 million souls since late August 2025, lays bare the scale of suffering. Yet the Palestinian multitudes—deemed expendable in the occupier’s ledger—roar for justice with a ferocity that drowns out crafted narratives. Every iron sword, brandished as “defense,” rusts under the flood of righteous anger. In Gaza City, where 51 lives were snuffed out in 48 hours of airstrikes on residential havens between September 19 and 20, 2025, and 85 more fell in the days that followed, the dispossessed refuse to forget each crater, each sniper’s taunt from the watchtowers. A UN commission’s searing verdict names this not mere war, but a systematic annihilation of Palestinian life, etched in rubble and resolve.
Should any soul ask, “Is this biblical?” let no scripture’s verse obscure the raw truth: the starved, the cornered, the dispossessed do not yearn in vain. As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2025, from a U.S.-imposed video-link exile, “We will not break.” From the West Bank’s graffitied barrier to Gaza’s bombarded streets, the cries for justice—whether whispered in prayer or scrawled in defiance—are the pulse of a people who endure. The walls, both ancient and modern, bear witness not to myth but to the living, who demand the world heed their flood of hope and rage.