#saint levant

You and your family live in peace with your neighbors on a land your ancestors have lived with for thousands of years. Your home wasn’t bought—it was built by hand, stone by stone, by the people whose blood and stories shaped this place. They built it so your family would always have somewhere to belong.

Your days are shaped by the worlds around you: the marketplace full of music, goods, and familiar faces; the churches, mosques, and synagogues that have stood for generations; the fields of olive trees whose roots run deep into the earth, older than any modern nation.

You run by the river and the sea, past wildflowers that bloom every spring. You grow up with animals—camels, goats, sheep, cats, dogs— all part of the rhythm of your life.

This place is not just where you live. It’s where your memories live. Where your ancestors are buried. Where the seeds you plant will one day grow.

And then one day, someone arrives and says it’s all theirs.

Not just your house—the one your family built with their own hands. Not just the marketplace. Not just the religious sanctuaries. Not just the fields, the trees, the river, the sea. Not just the animals you raised or the flowers you planted. Not even the soil itself—the soil from which the olive trees grow.

They claim every part of your world, and insist that your family and friends—people who have lived here for centuries—are suddenly strangers on their own land.

You are forced out. Your home is destroyed—with your stubborn grandparents still inside, refusing to abandon the place their parents and grandparents built. New homes rise for people who have never lived here, never tended this soil, never buried their dead beneath these trees.

Your family is torn apart and killed. Your village is erased. Your animals are gone. Your trees are gone. Your house is gone. Your neighbors are gone.

And still, they insist it was all theirs before.

-ˏˋ Marwan Abdelhamid (2000) ˊˎ

Marwan Abdelhamid ( galerie )