October 8th: A Day of Anticipation

On October 7, the youths emerged from the heart of

the city and had their full say.

October 8 was supposed to be our day,

but it never came.

This is the story of the day that should have come.

On the morning of October 8, no one slept.

Squares filled from Tangier to Jakarta.

No one called for restraint. Everyone asked one

question: What should we do now?

In the West Bank, the land made room for the brigades and

the trench rifles were not alone. The hidden rope that stretched

from Gaza to Jenin became a rope of flesh and fire

stretching from the ocean to the Gulf.

On the third day, the Rafah crossing was thrown wide open.

No one-centimeter opening, no thousands

of dollars as the price of passage.

Flour, medicine, and fuel entered. Doctors

and journalists entered, and people entered in throngs. In the

first week, oil was cut off from every hand

that supplied the monster with bombs, and the markets trembled before

the homes of Gaza did.

In the second week, ambassadors were expelled,

embassy lights were extinguished, and normalization papers were torn up

on air.

The monster no longer had a neighbor smiling at it. The

bridges that fed it collapsed. Tomato trucks

returned to their warehouses, and the ports

and skies were closed to arms ships.

The monster went hungry for the first time in its life.

In distant streets, dockworkers refused

to load missiles, and the boycott became a habit,

not a season.

South Africa did not go to The Hague alone.

Fifty-seven countries went with it, bearing the names

of our children.

As for the monster, it looked around. There was no route

for weapons, no sky for its planes, no screen

to make it look beautiful.

For the first time, it sat and counted its losses,

not ours.

In that world,

flour did not become blood. People did not grind animal feed

to silence their children's hunger.

Entire families were not erased from the civil

registry. Our children did not learn the names

of prosthetic limbs before learning the alphabet.

The best people on Earth did not leave us, one after

another.

In that world, young men did not fight alone.

The eighth of October has not come yet, but it

is surely coming.