Hard Times Require Furious dancing

On 21 April 2026, the Embassy of the State of Palestine hosted a screening of Palestine 36 at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The gathering formed part of the observance of Freedom Month in South Africa, as well as a moment of reflection on Land Day and Palestinian Prisoners' Day.

Reflections were offered by Dr Naledi Pandor, Chair of the Foundation's Board, and Palestinian Ambassador to South Africa Hanan Jarrar. The room brought together diplomats, members of the public, and those in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

What follows is a personal reflection on the feelings and insights that surfaced for me in the wake of the film:

I think it was Alice Walker who once said that 'hard times require furious dancing,' and that is exactly what I did when I got home after the screening, haunted by the despair and the unrelenting decimation of my Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Palestine 36 traces Britain's settler colonial project, particularly from 1936 to 1937, in Palestine and the role this played in advancing Zionism. The project, from the very beginning, seemed designed to erase Palestinian life in all its forms, at any cost.

It was, of course, heartbreaking being left with images that still feel impossible to erase. But even more debilitating was watching it while knowing that what I had seen was only a fraction of one of the most unimaginable, recurring nightmares. Human atrocities unfolding in ways that leave writers, thinkers, and defenders of justice without language, without words, sufficient to describe the hurt, the horror.

And yet, that night, I danced.

Because I know how important it is to hold on to joy in the midst of devastation. There comes a moment after you have cried all you can, on your knees in the pews, at home, even in your cubicle at work, when you realise that hurt and anger cannot be the only forces that sustain a lifelong struggle. Instead, I have found softness and tenderness in remembering the simple joy of being alive, breathing, feeling, and returning to a love that remains, head and shoulders above all other emotions. A love that God gives. A love that sustains, that brings life, and that forms the root of formidable social movements at the heart of every revolution.

And so, I danced. Furiously, yes, oh so furiously. And I will dance.

We take breaths in between the raging storms. We mourn those we have lost, but we do not surrender to despair. Ours is to organise, to resist, and to continue showing up for one another. Those of us on the periphery, those not yet fully consumed by the destruction and the evil, those who have endured, carry a moral responsibility to our shared humanity, and to the humanity of Palestinians, to continue the struggle for restoration and for the soul of a world community.

We do this even when we know it may not sow any olive trees. We do it because simply standing by and watching the burning is not an option. Doing what is right has never been about the certainty of winning, it is about refusing to turn away. Because watching your neighbour burn, without finding any way to help, would be in transgression of what it means to be alive.

Noura Erakat's words "if you normalise genocide, you will have nothing left" linger with me. They speak to the fragility of our human conscience, and to what is truly at stake. And in moments when hopelessness begins to creep in, bell hooks reminds us that 'practicing love is how we end domination'.

But also, I feel anchored in what an unnamed author once proposed: 'if we can't save Palestine, maybe Palestine can save us'. Salvation lies, precisely, in the solidarities of striving.