On February 8, 2025, Shadi Barghouti emerged from a Red Cross bus that just arrived in a central square in Ramallah having made the short trip from the settler prison, Ofer. The bus slowly crawled through and into a cheering crowd of friends and family awaiting Shadi’s and forty-one other political prisoners’ arrival. His release was a part of what turned out to be a temporary ceasefire deal between Palestinian political parties and the Israeli state in the wake of fifteen months of the settler state’s genocidal war, agreed to through mediation nearly a month earlier consisting of several phases that included the negotiated release of Palestinian political prisoners. On that day, Shadi returned and fulfilled the hope of lam/jami’ shamil with his family, his people, and his homeland.

The wild mixture of emotions and the very concept of being able to gather together as a part of Palestinian return amid a genocide and in the very heart of the ongoing violence of military occupation is perhaps difficult to theorize. Imprisonment—like forced displacement—is a brutal tool of Zionist settler colonial violence. In the early winter months of 2025, some of these political prisoners—Palestinians who endured the draconian horrors of incarceration, made so much worse after October 2023—returned to home and homeland. This homecoming is a fulfillment of a prayer that asks for our gathering, coming together, and being made whole through the mercy and grace of God, lam or jami’ shamil. A concept far older and far more grounded in the land and people of Palestine than the brutal and violent century-long aberration of Zionist settler colonialism. This hope of gathering and coming together to be made whole is at the heart of understanding Palestine, Palestinian belonging and return.

Every freed prisoner, like every return, is an important story—and Shadi is no different. Among those awaiting him was his father, Fakhri Barghouti, known to all as “Abu Shadi,” himself released in a previous deal in 2011, in which 1027 Palestinians were released from Zionist prisons. Shadi descended the bus into Fakhri’s embrace, father and son held each other in spite of the pain shared between them (the Zionist military, mirroring the violence of the prison guards, attacked Abu Shadi’s home in the village of Kobar the night before, breaking his ribs). This was a remarkable moment where a family was able to physically gather in one place, outside of the smaller prisons, and in the homeland, brutally ruled through military occupation in the larger prison of Zionist settler colonialism. Decades of denial and mass imprisonment is part of their story—our story—in Palestine, just as their return to each other is part of our collective hope of ongoing return. Since Shadi’s younger brother, Hadi, was still in his mother’s womb when the Zionist military imprisoned their father, this was the first time this small family, a father and his sons were finally together and home with each other. They were able to gather, in Arabic, lam/jami’ shamil, and fulfill the ongoing hope of this prayer of being made complete with and through each other, defying the repression that is the violence of settler colonialism. The physical embodiment of a simple prayer of being made whole, lam/jami’ shamil is the practice and hope of the glorious inclusive concept of return through the mercy and grace of higher powers.

Drawing on the imagination of completeness that challenges the codified construction and brutal exclusivity of ethno-nationalism, the hope of lam/jami’ shamil is a lesson from Palestine about how world-making is possible. In spite of all of the violence visited upon the bodies and land of Palestinians and Palestine, we are sustained by the hope of gathering in completeness. The very concept of homeland in and for Palestine is a return of everyone to each other and to the land, without differentiation and exception—neither relying on nor defined by the confines of nation-state nationalism.^[1] As a prisoner returns to the arms of his father, as a refugee returns to the embrace of the land, and as a people return to each other and our homeland, to understand lam/jami’ shamil is to begin to understand how Palestinian ways of being not only resist settler  attempts at the annihilation of our peoplehood, but provide a valuable lesson in how to imagine the world we want to live in as we endure the cruelty of the world that has enabled the impunity of the ongoing nakba.

In Palestine, nakba is a century of settler colonial violence. Like nakba, shatat holds meaning beyond translation. Shatat is the result of the violence of the ongoing nakba. It is about forced transfer, violent displacement, dismemberment, and a denial of access to the homeland. As a noun, al-shatat is used to describe what some call a state of exile and a condition of diaspora. Unlike exile, shatat is not a finality or an independent concept, but rather the condition that brings about the hope and prayer of gathering as resistance. In his famous essay, “Reflections of Exile,” Edward Said punctuated the Palestinian experience as one defined poetically and politically by exile. His reflections on exile were perhaps a means to translate the Palestinian experience of loss and denial into a universal context. In the Nakba War, between the winter months of 1947, throughout the following year of 1948, and into the spring and summer of 1949, Zionist militias and the Zionist military violently forced nearly three-quarters of the Palestinian people from their homes and homeland. This violence, what Said considered the violence of exile and the Palestinian condition, is actually the making of al-shatat, a verb with a noun, the displacement/dispersion/destruction of our people through the violence of Zionist settler colonialism, a violence that remains ongoing. The most recent iteration and attempted settler colonial elimination of Palestinian life in Gaza is yet another violent phase and extreme intensification of these nefarious intentions.

Rather than reflecting on exile, I argue that understanding shatat as connected to lam/jami’ shamil reveals a concept that does more than bring the Palestinian experience into a universal, it helps understand world-making through understanding Palestinian ways of being. Lam/jami’ shamil literally translates to be under collective care, to be covered, to be nurtured, to be gathered and to gather. As a cure for shatat—lam/jami’ shamil is a collective verb that centers on being together. We move from and through shatat—this violent and seemingly never-ending break upon break—to come together. Like belonging, lam/jami’ shamil is to return, to understand that in all of the forms of shatat we endure, we do so as we work towards gathering and healing all that has been broken.

Notes

^[1] In the modern nation state formulation of ethno-nationalism, lam shamil (mis-translated and imprisoned in a narrow and juridical formulation of family reunification) has been manipulated and codified into a legal understanding of identity, a manipulation that actually contradicts the very hope and prayer intended in the sense of coming together belonging.