OPINION: Why we read the names of Palestinians killed in Gaza

I had the privilege to participate in Santa Fe Witnessing For Gaza: A community endeavor to read 68,225 names of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023, continuously over five days and nights, beginning on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

Joining not as representatives of any organizations, but as individuals, some 250 people gave two hours and more to read names and to bear witness. By 9 p.m. on Oct. 6, 60,000 names had been read. About 50 people then gathered for a concluding ceremony, in which each person was given two pages of names, totaling 116, to read simultaneously and aloud. Our voices hummed in the night, as we brought our collective mourning to a close, followed by silence and the haunting melody of a violin. By the time we finished, we had read another 5,800 names, mostly of children and babies. What follows is a slightly lengthened version of the thoughts I shared at the end of the gathering.

For two years now, out of rage, grief, helplessness, we have held countless vigils and mourned the many thousands of Palestinian dead. We have read out their names, sung, prayed and stood in silence. And now, I ask myself, what about the living? What do we say to those who still survive, who stay alive, who live? Hard as it is to say the names of the dead, it is even harder to speak of the living, to understand the enormity of their loss — of parents, children, siblings and cousins, entire extended families, loss of limbs and staying alive to bear the loss. It is overwhelming to consider what it means to survive, be alive, live, in Gaza. Or live here in safety, while loved ones, dead, missing and living, remain behind in Gaza.

So I try to protect that small and fragile place in my heart that carries hope for the living, that holds faith in sumud — the Arabic word I recently learned that means steadfastness, toughness, resilience.

Between death and despair, it is there all the time in Gaza. Palestinian artist Hossam Madhoun writes of sumud, of the resilience and resourcefulness he witnessed in Gaza:

“... A young boy growing corn and onions outside his family’s tent, a makeshift cooking system using coal to make mana’eesh, a family building a home out of the parachute material used in aid drops, the clowns and jugglers of the Free Gaza circus entertaining crowds of displaced Palestinians, 15-year-old Hussein Al-Attar creating a gadget to power lights in his family’s tent in Rafah using wind energy, a man in a displaced camp making a meal in the style of TikTok videos, a recipe composed of 95% percent aid package contents, 5% love and resilience.”

Sumud breathes in those who struggle, adapt, create, invent, who dare and fight to survive, and then to live. Every act of survival, and of life itself, is an act of resistance to genocide.

We mourn lives lost, whole universes lost. But let us also pray for the living. Let us walk away tonight, with the hope that by strength of their resilience, those who survive the horror of this genocide, will find a way to then live. To live in this world, with the pain and trauma of indescribable loss, and the courage to yet continue living. To live in this world as resilient human beings, in dignity, in safety and in peace.

The participants left this ceremony of closure with a remaining page of names in hand; they will each find their own time, in a chosen space, public or private, to read those names, to grieve their deaths and to say, “We will not forget.” Never again can this happen, to any people, to anyone.