The Hardest Document a Person Can Carry

Picture from Unsplash

I am sharing this not as an attack on one university, but as a plea to every institution designing opportunities for Palestinians, refugees, and people living through war: please make space for those who cannot provide perfect documents under impossible conditions.

Sometimes the missing document is not a sign of incompleteness. Sometimes it is evidence of the very reality that makes the opportunity urgent.

A friend of mine once was about to die,

not in a metaphor, not in a poem, but under a sky that forgot it was sky and fell.

He survived. I don’t know how people survive what should have ended them, but he did.

He came back with dust in his lungs, with fear sleeping lightly in his bones, with a strange kind of laughter that only the nearly-dead understand.

Now he is trying to leave Gaza through a door made of forms: summer school, scholarship, motivation letter, deadline, hope.

And every time he almost reaches the other side, a small box stops him:

Passport Number. As if a number is the beginning of a life. As if a passport is more real than a body pulled from smoke. As if surviving a bombing is not already the hardest document a person can carry.

A friend of mine once was about to die, and now he is asked to prove he exists in the language of borders.

He has no passport. No office to go to. No easy way out. Only his name, his mind, his stubborn heart, and the dream that somewhere in Europe a classroom might open like a window.

I want to write to every university and tell them:

Here is his passport number: the house he lost, the night he survived, the applications he still sends, the poems he hasn’t written yet, the life that keeps insisting on itself.

A friend of mine once was about to die.

Please, let him live somewhere without having to explain why.

Picture from Unsplash By WanderLabs

My friend’s name is Hazem.

Please show solidarity with him, as someone who is still dreaming, applying, studying and trying to build a life beyond the borders that keep closing around him.

For Hazem, and for every Palestinian whose future should not be stopped by a missing passport number.