And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children…It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people, they became balls of pale white light.
—Omar Al Akkad,
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
I try to imagine what it must be like to be a Palestinian right now, to witness another Nakba (catastrophe) — unfold in real time from a street far away in a peaceful town in the mid-Hudson Valley in New York, and to wonder which friends and relatives have been deracinated from their homes in Gaza, or gravely wounded, or buried under rubble. Was it the same for Jews in the diaspora as the Warsaw Ghetto was obliterated? Such an imagining is both necessary and futile. Necessary to remain sane and empathetic. Futile because the killing juggernaut could not be stopped. The Jewish Holocaust continued unabated, the promise of a Palestinian nation-state has not been realized, and Khartoum has been over-run by descendants of the murderous Janjaweed militia. How far back in time do we have to go to find such genocidal killing sprees at their source? How far forward in time until they end? Razan Sadeq-Keyes, resident of Huguenot Street in New Paltz has created an installation next to her house that asks us to reflect on the ongoing devastation in Gaza even when it’s uncomfortable. “I have several Jewish neighbors and they have all been very supportive,” she told me in a recent telephone interview.
It took ten days for Razan to write a script for a piece of agitprop theater that was performed by friends and colleagues on the grounds of her house on Halloween. A resident of Huguenot Street since 2021 with her American-born husband and now two young children, Razan, who works for a tech company, does not have a background in theater. “I felt like a vessel as I was writing,” she told me. She participated in the performance holding her baby, and describes the emotional sensation as “embodying grief.” After the performance, the “set,” a replica of a tent in a refugee camp, remains standing.
When her father registered her as a citizen of Palestine in Nablus in the West Bank 25 years ago, Razan could not have understood what it meant. But she does now. “If Palestine is ever a country, I will have citizenship there,” she says.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Hudson Valley One.
Join the family! 
