No matter what you ask, I have but one answer whispered to me by my ancestors. Because we are the people of the land. Because we are the keepers of our stories passed down to us from the olive trees. Because her rivers run through our bodies. And our grandmother's embroidered her landscape on our skin since 10,000 years. Because we settled her first horses, we sang her first ballads, and we harvested her wheat with love no matter who helped guns over us. Because our poetry watered her gardens since before she was ganan. Because we danced when she married the Mediterranean Sea, and we made her wedding cake, a tray of canafe from Nablus. Because we were always there. We are the Jews in the Christians and the Muslims. We lived, converted between religions, settled from pilgrims, left and returned, mixed with our conquerors, died by their swords, and nourished her soil with our bodies. But we never left. But we never left. But we never left. When Henry VIII sent Ann Bolin to the tower, we were in Palestine. When Marie Antoinette was marched to the guillotine, we were in Palestine. When Galileo gazed at the heavens, we were in Palestine. When Columbus got lost, pillaged and raped where he landed, we were in Palestine. When Queen Inzinga ruled the kingdoms of Andongo and Matamba, when Ginghis Khan broke through China's Great Wall, when the suffragette marched, when all of your history, it was us who were there, not in Europe, Russia, or Poland, or Brooklyn or Yemen, or Iran or Iraq, but in Palestine, continuously for millennia. Because we created her dances, we terraced all her hills and nestled our homes in her groups. Because we slept, eight, gave birth, Marie loved, aged, and died in her arms since time was fitted for a calendar. Because now she's under a foreigner's boot, her curves decapitated by urban planners. Her trees cut and burned by their hate, her body scarred and siphoned, dry, her pomegranate owned and caged, her zathar buried in concrete and her wild tumultuous history violently stuffed into a plastic box branded with a new name and an epic myth. They've killed her birds, taken our homeless and falafel hostage in a museum they built over the graves of our ancestors. But we know, and only we can tell her native stories, sing her native songs and dance for her, a promise from her children, determined to make their way back to the embrace of her son, Kisthills, and her orange and olive groves. To revive her desiccated rivers, that they might again roar with life as they did when our family was whole on her banks. We will always write our love letters to her, always sing and paint and sew and cook her favorite foods, and think and fight and cry and plant and harvest and celebrate for her our Palestine. We lean on each other, we count on our friends and repudiate the normalizers of our oppression. We persist, we exist, we are one nation, one history, one heritage, one people, determined and destined to go home.