They told me who the enemy was before I ever met him. They told me what to fear. They painted pictures with blood and smoke, voices raised in anger, fists clenched in protest, and they called it evil. They showed me news flashes of burning tires, masked faces, rocks flying through the air and said, “these are the terrorists.” No questions, no context, just a name and a face to fear. And like many I believed them, not because I was cruel but because it was everywhere on TV, in the papers and in the quiet conversations people have when they think they know the truth. But the truth has a way of knocking on your door when you least expect it.

See, it is easy to believe a story when you never leave your neighborhood. When you sit comfortable in your living room flipping through channels thinking the world is too far away to matter. I was taught to see Palestine as a war zone, not a place where children play soccer in dusty streets. Not a place where mothers braid their daughter’s hair or fathers teach their sons how to be men with honor. No one told me about the smiles, the stories, the strengths. They just gave me explosions, sirens, headlines, and I accepted that. But something did not set right. There was a quiet in me that felt loud every time I saw another bombing labeled retaliation.

Every time I saw civilians turned into statistics, something in me kept asking, “is this all there is to the story?” So, I went looking for more and it did not take long for the cracks to show. The language alone told me who was supposed to be human and who was supposed to be feared. One side had defenders, and the other side had militants. One side had losses, and the other side had casualties. They never said the names of the Palestinian dead, unless it was to link them to some shadowy group. They never said they were mothers, teachers, poets and students, and grandparents. They never said they were human. And when I began to see that, really see it, I started to realize how deep the lie went.

I saw kids walking to schools passed checkpoints with guns pointed at them. I saw homes demolished in the night while babies cried under moonlight. I saw prayers whispered between walls, between bombings, between funerals, and none of them looked like terrorism to me. It looked like survival. It looked like people who’d been dehumanized so thoroughly that the world stopped blinking when they died.

That is when the anger came. Not with the people I was taught to fear but with the voices that lied to me. At the voices that made me look at a freedom fighter and see a criminal. That made me look at occupied people and think they are the aggressors. The anger was real, but it wasn’t aimless. It had a purpose. It pushed me to unlearn, to dig deeper, to listen, really listen to the ones whose voices had been silenced. And I tell you this, once you see humanity in someone you were told to hate, there is no going back. You cannot unsee it. You cannot return to your comfort, and maybe you shouldn’t, because that discomfort is your conscious waking up. That is the truth demanding space in your soul. They are called Palestinian terrorists but when I opened my eyes all I saw were people brave, beautiful, broken, unbreakable people, and that was just the beginning. I didn’t go searching for a revolution.

I didn’t set out to change my beliefs. At first, I just wanted to see for myself. The headlines, the debates, the sound bits, they started to sound the same, cold, distant and politicized. I was tired of being fed with opinions dressed up as facts. So, I packed my doubts with my suitcase and stepped into a world I had only ever seen through a screen.

Palestine was not a place to me, it was an idea, a word wrapped in controversy, a flash on the evening news. I needed to see it with my own eyes, feel the ground beneath my feet, hear the voices unfiltered. What I found wasn’t what I expected. From the moment I crossed into that land, everything I thought I knew began to shift. The air was heavy, not just with dust, but with something deeper, a kind of waiting. A tension that lives on people’s shoulders and silence, in the way they look past you before they look at you. But even in that tension, I saw something else. Something that did not make it into the headlines. Laughter, hospitality, a grandmother offering me tea in a village I could not pronounce. Kids running barefoot across rubbles like it was a playground. A man who lost his brother and still smiled when he spoke of hope. That wasn’t what I was told to expect.

They say, “you can’t understand people until you walk their streets”, and that is true. I walked in alleys scared by bullets, saw murals of martyrs on crumbling walls. But I also sat in living rooms where stories were told, not in anger but in love, where the past was not forgotten but honored. I listened to stories of forced evictions, of checkpoints that turned daily life into a gamble. I watched a father cradle his sleeping daughter while the distant sound of drones buzzed in the background, and it hit me. This wasn’t war. This was people waking up every day under the weight of occupation and still choosing to live. That is when the truth began to carve itself into my heart. Not in speeches, not in politics, but in quiet human moments. In the eyes of a young boy who asked me if the world knew what was happening. In the soft call to prayer echoing through broken streets. In the way people prayed with open hands even when they had nothing left to hold on to. And the more I saw, the more I realized how much had been hidden from me. Not just facts, but faces, humanity and dignity. I had been given fragments of the story, twisted and stripped from context.

I was told of rockets but not of siege, of resistance but not of repression and of fear but not of faith. I had been shown violence but not the violence of being raced. The journey did not change me all at once. It wasn’t a lightning strike. It was a slow unraveling, the kind that does not ask for permission. Truth does not wait for you to be ready. It just shows up, and when it does it does not care about your politics. It goes deeper than that. It speaks to your soul, and mine was listening. I came looking for answers but what I found was something bigger than facts, or footage. I found people who had been vilified for daring to survive. I found love in the ruins, faith in the fire, and slowly, piece by piece, I found the truth, not the one I was taught but the one that was always there, waiting for someone to care enough to see it.

There is a difference between watching something happen and standing in the middle of it. Between hearing about struggle and breathing in the air where that struggle lives. What I witnessed on the ground wasn’t just politics, it was people trying to survive a reality that would break most. No headline could capture it, no documentary could fully translate it. Because it is not just the visible thing, the checkpoints, the demolished homes, the barbed wire, it is the invisible weight that people carry every single day.

I remember the first checkpoint I saw. It was not like the movies. It was slower and colder. A line of people, old, young, sick, students, all waiting. Not for justice and not for fairness. Just to pass. Just to go to school or work or doctor’s appointment. Soldiers stood with rifles slung casually across their chests, barely looking at the people whose lives they held in their hands. And the people waited, not because they accepted it, but because what choice did they have? You could feel the exhaustion in the silence, and the way people did not flinch anymore. That is not peace. That is survival under pressure.

Then there were the homes, some half standing, some completely gone. Walls blown out; furniture scattered like bones. I met a woman who lived in a tent next to a rubble that used to be her house. She offered me bread and smiled. I asked her, “how she stayed so strong?” and she said, “we don’t have the luxury to break.” Her son played beside us, drawing dirt with a stick. That boy did not know what playgrounds looked like. His sandbox was the ashes of what used to be children. That is what hit me hardest. They grow up too fast in Palestine. I saw a girl, maybe 9 or 10, speaking to a journalist in perfect English about occupation, about checkpoints, about her dream becoming a doctor, so she could help her people. That is not what a childhood should be, but it is what it becomes when every school morning, maybe your last, when drones hum overhead like mosquitoes, always watching, always reminding you that you are not free. I saw boys carrying books in one hand and stones in the other. Not because they wanted to fight, but because sometimes that is the only language left when no one listens. They don’t throw stones to destroy, they throw them to be seen. To scream out into a world that seems to have gone deaf. The media shows you the stone, never the tank. It shows you the fire, never the funeral that came before it. And still somehow there is beauty.

I saw people plant flowers in the cracks of broken sidewalks. I heard music drifting from a window in a bombed-out building. I watched a couple get married under string lights in a refugee camp, dancing to a future they weren’t sure they would have. There is defiance and joy here in continuing to laugh, to love, to worship when everything around you say, “you shouldn’t still be standing.” This isn’t a conflict. That word is too clean, too symmetrical. This is oppression, one sided, systematic, intentional and it’s rapped in silence by those too afraid or too comfortable to speak up. But when you walk those streets, when you set in those homes, when you look into the eyes of people who have lost everything and still offer you tea, you begin to understand something. These are not victims waiting to be saved. They are survivors, fighters, souls carved from resistance and Grace. And once you have seen that, there is not turning away. Because the reality on the ground is not just about suffering. It’s about a strength! A strength the world tries to ignore but can never erase.

There are moments in life that don’t ask permission to change you. They just do. They slip past your defenses, past the logic, arguments, and they hit you in that quiet place where truth lives. For me that moment didn’t come with a loud bang. It wasn’t some dramatic encounter. It came in silence, in stillness, in a moment so tender so human that it broke something open in me I didn’t know was closed. I was sitting with a family in Gaza. A simple home, bare walls, no electricity, a few cushions on the floor. The father had taken orphans from the last bombing. He barely had enough for his own children, but he made space, made room.

That night they invited me to break bread with them. The food modest, rice, olives, a little team. But the warmth, the welcome, you would have thought I was royalty the way they treated me. They did not ask where I came from, they didn’t ask what I believed, they saw me as a guest and that was enough. As we sat together, the call to prayer echoed through the night. No electricity, no lights. Just stars and the voice of faith floating in the darkness. And I watched as the entire family rose to pray. No one told them to, no reminder no pressure. Just a deep internal rhythm guiding them to their prayer mats. I didn’t understand the words, not then, but I understood the feeling, the way they stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes closed, hearts open. The way the youngest child mimicked the motion with the innocence only children have. It hit me like a wave.

These people who had lost so much, who had lived every day under siege, who had no guarantees of tomorrow, still prayed with gratitude, still believed, still stood before their creator with peace in their posture. That kind of faith, that kind of peace in the middle of chaos, I hadn’t seen anything like it. I didn’t pray that night, not physically, but something in me bowed. Something in me broke. And from that breaking, something new began. It was like my soul leaned in and said, “pay attention! This is the truth.” I had seen so much pain up to that point. I had seen blood on the pavement, mothers screaming at checkpoints, children carrying trauma in their tiny bodies. But it was in that moment of prayer, in the stillness, in the faith, in the quiet dignity that I realized what I was really witnessing, it wasn’t just a political struggle. It wasn’t just occupation. It was a spiritual war too. An attempt to strip people of their humanity, their identity, their ability to warship, to dream, to simply be. And yet they refused to break. That’s when something shifted in me.

I had come thinking I would observe, maybe understand, maybe sympathize, but I didn’t expect to feel it so deeply. I didn’t expect to be chained and I definitely didn’t expect to see Islam, not as an idea, not as a religion I had heard about from a distance, but as a living, breathing force of resilience, of love, of submission. Not to fear but to something higher. That moment didn’t just open my eyes, it opened my heart and it asked me a question I couldn’t ignore, “If these people could hold on to their faith in the middle of hell, what am I holding on to in my comfort?”

I didn’t have the answer then, but I knew this: I wanted to understand that kind of peace, that kind of strength, that kind of faith. And from that night on, I wasn’t just a witness to their story. I was being written into it. I had heard the word Islam all my life on the news and passing conversations and documentaries that always seemed to focus of war, conflict and control. It was a word that felt distant, foreign, heavy with assumptions I never bothered to challenge. I thought I knew what it meant, I thought it was about rituals, rules, maybe even fear, but all of that changed in one moment. Not in a mosque, not in a debate, but in the stillness of a night that held more truth than any book I had ever read. What I saw in that moment, the way that family stood to pray, the peace on their faces, despite the chaos surrounding them shattered every lie I had been fed.

It wasn’t just about religion, it was about presence, it was about resilience that came not from anger but from surrender. Not surrender to oppression but to something greater. I watched them pray in the dark, the only light coming from the stars above, and I realized they had something I didn’t. Something I had never understood. Something I had never even searched for.

Certainty! It was the kind of certainty that doesn’t depend on circumstances, it does not fade when bombs fall or when food runs out or when the world turns its back. It’s a certainty rooted in faith, not blind faith but faith born from live struggle from knowing that there is purpose even in pain. That no active injustice goes unseen by the one who sees all. I saw it in the way they stood, the way they bowed, the way they whispered, “Allah-hu-Akbar” with hearts that have seen more loss than most of us could endure and still they called God Great, and for the first time I understood what that meant. It wasn’t about fear or submission in the way I had always thought. It was about freedom, real freedom, the kind that can’t be stolen by soldiers, or borders or bombs. The kind that lives in your soul, untouched by the noise of this world.

Islam in that moment was not just a religion. It was a lifeline, a source of dignity, a compass pointing to hope when all signs say there should be none. I had never seen such love wrapped in such simplicity. The way they shared food, the way they cared for one another. The way they smile despite it all. It wasn’t performative, it wasn’t for show. It was genuine, it was Islam in action. Mercy, generosity, gratitude, sincerity and all of it flowing from a place of trust that no matter how hard life got, God was near.

I started to see the Quran not as a book of rules, but as a guide for survival. For beauty, for justice. I saw prayer not as a task but as a conversation. I saw fasting not as punishment but as discipline. A reminder of what matters. Everything I saw as restrictive suddenly looked like freedom. Because it was based on truth, on alignment, on peace. Not as an absence of struggle but as strength within it. Islam in that moment meant home, a place the soul returns to when the world goes cold. It meant identity, not one forced by culture or society but chosen in the deepest parts of the heart. It meant balance between struggle and ease, between this world and the next and it meant justice, not just in law but in how you treat others, how you treat yourself, how you stand even when the world tries to knock you down.

I didn’t become a Muslim in that moment, but something inside me did. A seed was planted, a light turned on and I knew I could never go back to the way I saw the world before. Because now I had seen Islam not just with my eyes, but with my heart. There is a difference between watching and seeing. Watching is passive, it is what you do when you flip through channels or scroll through headlines. It’s what lets you witness tragedy from a safe comfort of turning it off when it gets too heavy. But seeing, really seeing, that takes courage, that takes heart, that means stepping into someone else’s pain. Not to consume it but to understand it. To feel it. To be moved by it, in a way that makes silence no longer an option.

Too many people are watching what is happening to Palestine and calling it awareness. But awareness without action is just another form of apathy. It is not enough to say, “that is sad” or “that is unfortunate”, and then go on living untouched. Because what is happening over there isn’t just a political issue. It’s a human one. It’s a test of our collective morality, and failing to speak, failing to act, failing to even care is choosing a side, whether you realize it or not.

I have seen the truth with my own eyes, I have looked into the faces of mothers who buried their sons. I have heard the quiet strength in the voices of fathers who still teach their children to love in a land that taught them to fight. And I have felt the wight of a story that has been twisted, buried, denied for far too long. So, this is a call for not just to hear but to listen, not just to look but to see, see the people, see their humanity, see beyond the headlines, beyond the labels, beyond the convenient lies. Because once you truly see, you can’t unsee. You can’t stay comfortable in your silence. You can’t keep pretending it is not your concern.

You don’t have to be Palestinian to stand for Palestine. You just have to be human. You just have to care enough to let the truth in. And when you do, when you allow yourself to feel it, it will change you. It will wake something up inside you. Something brave, something honest, something necessary. This is not just about them. It is about us. About who we choose to be. In a world that is begging us to care, don’t just watch. See. And once you do, act (speak up)!