Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including most recently On the Contrary (2025), a study of the lives and literature of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Lababidi’s acclaimed collection, Palestine Wail, is available from Daraja Press.
Mercy surrounds the living and the dead, the visible and the unseen, the faithful and those who have forgotten faith. It breathes through creation as the pulse that sustains being. To prioritize mercy is to confess that every true act of justice must carry tenderness within it. Judgment without compassion turns to stone. Creation itself begins with a breath of mercy, and the possibility that the world can only endure through its renewal.
Israel: I write as a Muslim who believes that all faiths bend toward the same light through their distinct branches. These words are shaped by grief, yet are sustained by hope. They come in the spirit of an address, appealing to memory and conscience. You stand at a threshold between remembrance and forgetfulness—between fear and trust. Power can make a nation visible to the world; only conscience restores its soul.
The history you carry is immense. Centuries of exile and humiliation, of pogroms and ghettos, of systematic attempts to erase your name, have carved a scar into collective memory. The suffering of your ancestors is a grief the world must not diminish. Yet the question that now arises is how that inheritance is to be lived.
Pain can instruct the spirit or consume it. Survival alone cannot redeem what was endured. The covenant you were given was a call to service, a summons to protect what is sacred in creation and to remind humankind that holiness is inseparable from compassion.
The Qur'an continues to address you as Bani Isra'il, "Children of Israel," recalling the grace once entrusted to your hands. It remembers the prophets who walked among you and the revelation you were asked to carry. In those pages, memory without mercy becomes pride, and pride without compassion gives birth to blindness. True faith is measured by gentleness and in how we hold the lives entrusted to our care.
The children buried beneath that dust are not enemies. Their voices echo the lament of your ancestors calling from previous devastation. They do not ask for vengeance or victory, only recognition.
-Yahia Lababidi
Turn your gaze toward Gaza—toward faces turned upward amid the ruins. The air carries the dust of homes and the scent of extinguished gardens. The children buried beneath that dust are not enemies. Their voices echo the lament of your ancestors calling from previous devastation. They do not ask for vengeance or victory, only recognition: the acknowledgment that their lives are also fashioned from divine breath. To see them clearly would be to remember your origin.
Among you, there are still hearts that understand this truth. Soldiers refuse commands that wound the conscience, parents grieve across walls and citizens walk into the streets, though the air burns their eyes. There are circles of mourning where bereaved families share their pain so that it may not harden into hatred.
In such gestures, the moral pulse of your people remains alive. Their courage is the quiet continuation of prophecy. They keep aflame the fragile lamp of human compassion.
The story of Joseph bears witness to this mystery. In both Torah and Qur'an, his brothers betray him, throwing him into a pit and selling him into bondage. Years later, famine brings those same brothers to Egypt, where they kneel before a ruler they do not recognize.
When Joseph reveals himself, he does not punish them. Rather, he says, "No blame upon you this day; God will forgive you, for He is the most merciful of the merciful." In that moment, the wound of betrayal becomes the threshold of reconciliation.
Joseph's greatness was in restraint. He understood that the chain of injury breaks when one hand refuses to strike. That moment of mercy is the beginning of peace. You now hold a similar choice in your hands. The future will remember whether you perpetuate the wound or transform it.
Our traditions share a word for return: teshuvah in Hebrew, tawbah in Arabic. Each speaks less of remorse than of homecoming—the turning of the soul toward its center. To return is to remember the source from which we have drifted, trusting that the one who called us still waits with open arms.
This movement of return demands courage, for it requires the relinquishing of pride and the willingness to be remade. Such surrender is the truest strength.
A nation, like a person, begins to perish when it forgets the language of remorse. In freeing Palestine, you would free yourselves from the captivity of fear and the tyranny of unhealed memory.
- Yahia Lababidi
Some may fear that repentance invites humiliation, yet pride is the greater peril. Pride isolates the heart from grace. Mercy restores it. A nation, like a person, begins to perish when it forgets the language of remorse. In freeing Palestine, you would free yourselves from the captivity of fear and the tyranny of unhealed memory.
The peace you extend to others would become the peace that returns to your own spirit.
Among the voices that surround you, beware those that flatter and feed your blindness. They do not love you. Listen instead to those who remind you of your prophets and recall you to compassion. The patience of the world may be thinning, yet the patience of truth does not end. It waits quietly at your borders like light beneath a door.
Begin with what lies close at hand. Ease the siege. Release those imprisoned for conscience. Allow olive trees to rise again where bulldozers have passed. Let children learn Arabic beside Hebrew, so that they may hear another rhythm of the human heart. Such acts may seem small, yet they carry the weight of new beginnings. Each is a seed of renewal.
Justice for Palestine would not diminish your story—it would complete it. You would stand among nations as a witness to reconciliation, a people who endured immense suffering and refused to reproduce its cruelty. The prophets of Israel never spoke of peace through power. They envisioned a peace born of righteousness and humility. Their vision remains waiting for you to inhabit it.
Political time hurries, counting its hours in treaties and elections, in the shifting headlines of the moment. Sacred time moves differently. It is the wind across the desert that shapes the dunes without being seen. It is the patience that outlasts despair. The agony of Gaza belongs to the quick time of politics, where every hour costs a life.
The work of rebuilding trust belongs to sacred time, which measures in generations. Both are necessary. The end of harm must begin now, yet understanding will grow only through the long patience of hearts willing to listen.
The world is weary of funerals and words that arrive too late. Weariness, however, is not wisdom. Despair is only pride in another form, the refusal to believe that God may still surprise creation with mercy. The voice that spoke to Moses through fire and to Muhammad through light speaks through the human heart whenever it remembers tenderness. To hear it requires stillness. Only the quiet soul can receive that guidance.
Children of the covenant, remember what was asked of you: to bear witness to justice, to welcome the stranger, to choose life. Prophecy is a work renewed in each generation. Those who have known persecution are called to resist its repetition. To act with mercy in the shadow of power is to honor the faith that formed you.
Peace will not descend unbidden from the sky. It must be fashioned by human hands, guided by hearts that remember their divine origin. The gate to that peace stands open even now. Step through while there is time.
The world waits to see whether mercy will prevail over might.
