"We Knocked Until Our Hands Broke" -- by Alaa Alqaisi -- May 23, 2025

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"There are nights when I press my ear to the wall and hear nothing but the sound of my own blood. No shelling — only that terrible stillness that comes after too much loss, when even the sky seems unsure of its color. I have learned that silence is not the absence of war, but one of its cruelest forms. It arrives after the bombs, after the headlines fade, when the world pretends things have returned to normal — but the rubble has not moved, and the dead remain unburied in the hearts of the living.

"I write these words from the ruins of memory, and from the edge of an ongoing catastrophe. I do not write as a detached observer or a distant intellectual. I write as someone whose hands have sifted through broken glass for signs of life. As someone who has memorized the names of children who will never grow up. As someone who still dreams, foolishly, that words can matter — even here.

"It is from this trembling place — this in-between of breath and burial — that Ghassan Kanafani’s voice returns to me, clearer now than ever. His question, posed more than half a century ago at the end of Men in the Sun, still echoes like a wound that won’t close: Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the tank?

"In that story, three Palestinian men — refugees of different generations and geographies — attempt to smuggle themselves across a border in the belly of a water tank. It is blistering hot. They are told to remain silent. And so they do. When the smuggler opens the tank at the end of the journey, he finds them all dead. Not a single knock. Not a cry. Just stillness. He breaks down, shouting into the void, “Why didn’t you knock?"

"That question has been asked again and again, by academics, by politicians, by those who read Kanafani from the comfort of distant capitals. It has become a riddle, a challenge, sometimes even a finger pointing in blame. But here — now — in the shadow of these collapsed ceilings and these orphaned shoes, I can only respond with a cry of my own: Ghassan, we did knock. We knocked until our hands broke. We knocked until the walls bled. And still, no one opened the door.

"And I say this now, from the depths of grief and exhaustion: O God, we didn’t just knock on the walls of the tank. We did far more than that. We waved the torn limbs of our children like desperate flags. We showed the world how our sons and daughters walk barefoot on scorched earth, how they go to sleep hungry and wake up haunted. We put our humiliation on display. We peeled back our wounds and handed them over to the cameras. We screamed through every outlet we had — in Arabic and English, in poems and press releases, in death tolls and testimonies. We screamed, Ghassan. And we got the answer. We got it loud and clear.

"The truth is, it wasn’t that they didn’t speak. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Even if they had pounded on the tank with all their strength, even if their fists had cracked the metal, even if their cries had reached every corner of the desert — the result would have been the same. No one would have come. Because the world never intended to listen. The tank was sealed, not just in metal, but in willful indifference.

"I look around me, and I see tanks everywhere — not of steel, but of silence. In every refugee camp where children grow up without shoes or schoolbooks. In every hospital reduced to a shadow. In every border that refuses entry to the displaced. In every official statement that pretends both sides are equal. In every room where the suffering of the colonized is called “complex.” We are still inside the tank. And still, we knock.

"After all these years, Ghassan, we have done everything your question feared and imagined. We did not sit silently in the tank. We did not wait quietly for death. We knocked — until our hands split open — but we also shouted into every void we could find. We wrote our suffering into essays and etched it into stone. We livestreamed our own erasure. We translated our agony into every tongue spoken by the powerful. We held up our children’s broken bodies — not to provoke pity, but to demand recognition. We offered not metaphors, but flesh. Not fiction, but fact. And still, the world watched — and did nothing. And now I understand what your story could not yet bear to say aloud: it was never about whether they knocked. It was never about noise or silence. Even if they had knocked, Ghassan — even if their fists had thundered against the iron until it rang like a bell of death — the result would have been the same. The tank was always going to be a tomb. Not because no one heard. But because those who heard looked away. Because abandonment is not an accident — it is a decision. That is what we’ve inherited from your question: not its urgency, but its futility. Even when we scream. Even when we show them everything — the blood, the bones, the names, the timestamped proof — the door does not open. The heat rises. The air thins. And still, no one comes."

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities. Adapted from Ghassan Kanafani’s "Men in the Sun".

https://arablit[.]org/2025/05/23/we-knocked-until-our-hands-broke/

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Think on these things... + act...

[Mosby]

1. Why didn't the Arabs accept partition in 1947?

Biggest mistake in the 20th century.

Imagine what would have been possible for them sitting next to Israel.

Unfortunately there are no do-overs.

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2. Roger that..,

TIA…