The hands that opened and wrote the "Red Gate" of freedom

Today the very name of Gaza is the strongest and most deserved symbol of freedom, the most blessed place where free people live, resist and are martyred. In this place, everything that the hands of these valiant people have touched, everything they have shed their blood upon, everything they have come into contact with while drawing breath, becomes a symbol. Could any literature written for these people be more striking, more eloquent than what they themselves have lived?

With their truths that open humanity's eyes, as if each had stepped out of a verse of scripture. Each like an apostle, a companion, a saint, coming out of the history of the prophets: would such people not turn every setting they live in into a sacred place as well?

The 7th of October is no longer just one day among days; it is an hour of the call to prayer, in which God awakened this ummah, over which the earth of the dead had been spread, solely to be servants to Him alone. The Al-Aqsa Flood became a name that points, beyond the Al-Aqsa Mosque to which it symbolically alludes, and beyond the Flood of Noah, which was the beginning of a second birth for humanity, to its own reality and its own act. The Al-Aqsa Flood is a call to salvation for all of humanity. Who could carry the message of the valiant men of Gaza, who with their blood-stained hands opened the doors of an order in which people are bound, enslaved and confined by visible and invisible chains, more beautifully and more effectively than they themselves?

No one can liberate, or above all persuade to be liberated, people enslaved under visible and invisible chains merely with literature, merely with orations. To be able to become free, a person must first see that he is not free. To be saved from servitude to fellow human beings, he must first become aware of the servitude he is rendering.

The famous lines of the poet Ahmed Shawqi, whom we might call the Akif of Egypt, "Freedom has a red door / Only hands stained with blood can open it," found their greatest symbolic value, among the other lines of the longer Damascus Nakba poem to which they belong, on the tongue of Yahya Sinwar. When Sinwar uttered these words while continuing his jihad, slipping through the ruins of Gaza, he gave them their strongest real effect. From this hour on, these words belong less to Ahmed Shawqi than to Yahya Sinwar and the struggle of his comrades in the cause. A magnificent symbol that named that struggle, attached itself to that struggle and became the strongest expression of that struggle.

Is that not what a symbol is, after all? The moment when two parts of the same whole, separated from one another, perhaps having lost one another, find one another and are reunited.

It is so. The magnificent struggle waged in Gaza, the lives of the bloody hands that open the red door of freedom, is a manifestation of truth whose literature can never be more effective than the thing itself. Yet we must not remain silent on the grounds that nothing better can be done anyway. The human memory is afflicted with forgetfulness. Events that are witnessed but not conveyed, not recounted, have a right over us. Gaza has a right over everyone. Human beings have denied even many signs, even verses, the moment they saw them. Then at least some people must bear witness, must narrate and convey. Perhaps those who are not here, who did not witness, will understand better than those who are here, and draw better lessons.

Our esteemed friend Süleyman Ceran set out to compile the Memory of Gaza through these witnesses, and has produced a very valuable work. In a three-volume book to which he gave the umbrella title Kızıl Kapı (The Red Door), he had a total of Turkish and Gazan writers write testimonies about the moments of Gaza's memory that manifest as Human, Symbol and Place. In an interview he expressed his expectations of this effort as follows: "That Gaza be talked about... That the Al-Aqsa Flood process be understood and not forgotten by young people... That the Muslims of Turkey act in complete consensus on the issue of Gaza... With this work, to give Gaza both economic and moral support..."

Under the HUMAN heading are described people who have grown to giant stature inside Gaza and stand out with the level of the noblest of creatures, such as Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Deif, Saleh al-Arouri, Abu Ubaida, Khaled Meshaal, Khalid Nabhan, the surgeon, the doctor, the nurse, the journalist, Umm Usama and Umm Hudhayfa; and also people such as Habermas, Walzer, Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu, who with their balancing policies became accomplices to genocide and sank to the lowest of the low.

Under the SYMBOL heading are words such as the tent as the silent resistance of the refugee, the Merkava turned into rags in the hands of the valiant, Gaza, the red triangle, the rubble, the sniper, birth, medicine, the lenses looking at Gaza, the wall, time in Gaza, the empty pot, flour, the key of return, Sinwar's chair, the negotiating table, Al Jazeera TV, the Qur'an, thorn and carnation, gauze, the Gazan lemon cake, canned food, the Gazan father's plastic bag, swaddling cloth and shroud, olive roots, Rim's earring, the bird drawing, Yasin 105, Yahya Sinwar who made a staff out of a stick, shrapnel and a slice of watermelon. Each of these is like a signpost of a noble resistance and struggle within this process. They have been written by very valuable authors and put on record.

In the book titled PLACE, together with Gaza, are the places where each performance of a great struggle, of humanity's exaltation and its debasement, was carried out. Places that witnessed what happened. Gaza as the bloody carnation on the shore. Rafah, Jabaliya, Shuja'iyya, Beit Hanoun, Khan Younis, the neighboring door, Netiv HaAsara, the Netzarim Corridor, the tunnels woven with determination and opening onto honor, Al-Shifa Hospital, Al-Ahli Hospital, the last hospital of the north, the doctor's room and the resisting song, Sde Teiman as Israel's Guantanamo, Palestine Square, the rubble, the mosque, the Gaza school, the Tabi'in school, the World Central Kitchen, Relax Cafe, recycled weapons and social media, the street, Ankara, South Africa, the Garden of Lilacs. Each of these names is a place where events unfolded, a stage on which the ups and downs of humanity could be watched in their most extreme forms.

While the valiant men in Gaza try to open the red door of freedom with their bloody hands, they are doing their part as it should be done. But the argument presented by the editor of the books, Süleyman Ceran, as the rationale for the book is very striking and very true. Opening this door is not only their responsibility. In the resistance against the occupation, "outside Gaza the ranks are scattered. There are those who openly take their place in the ranks of occupying Israel when they ought to be in Gaza's ranks; and there are those who, even if not openly, indirectly support the occupation by choosing neutrality, silence, unresponsiveness, ignoring, not seeing. Those who belittle the popular support given to the Gaza resistance, who poison that support by developing fatwas or entirely different arguments, putting political interests first, are also contributing to the occupier's side of the scale. No step taken for Gaza, no sentence uttered, no boycott carried out, no action, even by a single person, can be belittled; all of them are links for the resistance. The links must come together and form a chain within a certain discipline. The positions must be consolidated; the spontaneously formed teams of words must turn into squads, from squads into companies, and then into battalions. Battalions of words will in time become a division, an army corps and then an army. For Gaza and all the Islamic lands under attack, it is a necessity to build an army made of words, sounds, colors and feelings. Kızıl Kapı is a work written by 93 authors to serve this aim."

You too can join this work, published by Ekin Publications under the editorship of Süleyman Ceran and joined by the testimonies of 93 authors, by obtaining it.