Ziad

Politics, reading, writing. Views are my own.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

Tony Blair is the Balfour of 2026. Palestinians living in Gaza and across Palestine don’t need you as their new governor, nor do they need Israel’s genocide to continue. They need you to end the occupation, leave Gaza, and back the fuck off.

Oh, and Free Palestine a million times.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

Colonial plans come and go. Palestine remains.

2019: $50bn Trump’s “Deal of the Century.” Failed.

2026: Billions around Gaza. Tony Blair. Foreign control. Zero Palestinians. A UN show destined to fail.

They still haven’t learned: only Palestinians decide Palestine’s future.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@LowStudies I’ve been thinking about this since this morning. Old-school charisma still dominates when compared with the new clowns claiming to be leaders of the free world. Lavrov is the godfather of the old school.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC, gets the UN stage. Palestine is denied the hall.

He gets the hall. Palestine gets the streets of every continent and millions of free voices across the world.

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

[Ziad @Ziad836]

One year ago, I almost gave up. Today, I am still here.

Around this time last September, I was coming to the end of almost a year of trying to find a place for my PhD.

I had approached several universities in the UK. I met the academic requirements, but I was stubborn about researching the topic I believed in, and more than once I encountered the view that it was simply too sensitive or difficult to take on.

By September, I had almost lost hope. There were moments when I genuinely wondered whether I should let the whole thing go.

Eventually, someone gave me the chance.

One year later, I am a few months away from my first Mini Viva and upgrade, and I am teaching alongside the PhD. A year ago I was wondering whether I would ever even begin. Today I am standing in front of students while trying to become a better student myself.

Most days I am buried under papers, corrections and things I thought I had finished but somehow have to rewrite again. The more I research, the more I realise how much I do not know.

I still do not know what next year will look like. Funding remains uncertain. Someone here believed in me enough to help make this first year possible, and I will never forget that.

Maybe that is the biggest lesson of this year: life is built on uncertainty. Things that look permanent can change very quickly. People leave your life, and people you never expected suddenly enter it and change something.

I think about that personally, but also as a Palestinian. Realities can look permanent until suddenly they are not. I still believe in a free Palestine, and I still believe that investing in education and in the generations that come after us matters.

I remember one Palestinian student I was teaching as part of a group. At a conference, she looked at me with a smile, almost asking for a nod before speaking. She wanted to present what her research had led her to say about occupation, apartheid and racism, but she was hesitant.

I nodded.

And she said it, calmly, academically and with evidence from her own research. Anyone who disagreed had to engage with what she had actually found rather than simply dismiss her.

That moment stayed with me. Maybe that is part of what teaching should be: not telling someone what to think, but giving them the confidence and the tools to say what they have discovered for themselves.

During that difficult year, another meeting stayed with me.

Through a friend, I met Professor Conor Gearty, then Professor of Human Rights Law at LSE and the founding Director of its Centre for Human Rights. He gave me almost two hours of his time.

He asked me why, when I was already holding public office and following a political path, I wanted to do a PhD.

I told him that politics can very easily make you part of the system around you. For me, as a Palestinian, doing this was also about proving that I could research the questions I believed mattered, and that who I am should not be a reason for those questions to be shut down. I told him that I believed teaching future generations was one of the most important investments we could make for Palestine.

He could not supervise me because his field was law and mine was elsewhere, but he offered every support he could.

As I left, I remember him telling me that it was already too late to erase the Palestinian people or the Palestinian cause, and that a free Palestine was only a matter of time.

He passed away that September.

I never had the chance to tell him that I eventually made it.

Thank you to everyone who believed in me when the easier advice would have been to let it go, and to the professors across different universities in London who, for different reasons, I will leave unnamed, but who continue to support me quietly.

You know who you are. I have not forgotten it.

I do not know what next year will bring. A year ago, I did not know what this year would bring either.

We plan, and God smiles.

Sometimes leaving the rest in His hands is enough.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@laura8blum We shall carry it together until our people and land are free 🌹🌹

[Ziad @Ziad836]

Our Palestinian childhood, our beautiful rising generation, forced by a brutal Israeli occupation to grow up through pain and trauma.

[Hadidi @hdrnssr]

Children play what they see.

They play dress-up. They steal mommy’s makeup. They play house, weddings, doctors. They imitate the adults around them.

In Gaza, children play stretcher.

They carry dolls the way they’ve watched adults carry the bodies of their loved ones.

Children imitate the world we give them.

Look at what Israel gave them.
Look at what we allowed.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

Free Palestine. Two words. One unfinished demand.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

How can we forget or forgive? We grew up watching our Palestinian people in Gaza being killed, starved, and besieged for many years. It is too late to erase this from our Palestinian collective memory. Palestine will be free, whether they choose to accept it as a fact or not.

[Ash @bitcoins1stlady]

NEVER FORGIVE, NEVER FORGET

September 30, 2000

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@Mrresco2 🇵🇸🇵🇸

[Ziad @Ziad836]

To be Palestinian, to have Palestinian blood in your veins, is a nobility not of rank, but of spirit: to carry a message of light and determination, and to stand for the freedom and right to self-determination of every human being, without exception.

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@dolat_mai Free Palestine

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@TalentCoop 🌹

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@VxVMFDOOM Cream Cheese my most favorite

[Ziad @Ziad836]

@loveparisa 🌹🌹

[Ziad @Ziad836]

They can deny Palestine the UN podium, but they cannot silence the streets across the world. And one picture from the ongoing genocide in Gaza speaks louder than all their speeches.