In a land where the olive trees hold the echoes of generations and the dust remembers every footstep, steps toward disarmament unfold in Palestinian camps, with a first handover near Burj al-Barajneh. Leaders and mediators speak of unity, stability, and a path forward, while promises to broaden the process in the weeks ahead mingle with the weight of history and the stillness of crowded streets. The UN and refugee communities frame the numbers softly but insistently: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon carry their lineage in hereditary status, weaving a long thread of presence through a shifting map.

And yet, while metal leaves the hands that once held it, the soil of this region remains scarred by a deeper injury. Mother Earth bears the burden of cycles of extraction and conflict: rivers altered, terraces eroded, water and soil taxed by layers of displacement, siege, and insecurity. The attempt to lock away weapons cannot erase the centuries of dispossession, nor cleanse the land of the wounds inflicted when empires redraw lines on a map and call it order. The camps themselves—creatures of memory and endurance—stand at the edge of state control, living laboratories of resilience where healing must outpace fear.

This moment illuminates humanity’s colonial sins in stark relief. Borders drawn by distant powers, parcels carved out of ancestral fields, and communities made to orbit the mercy or the mercy’s denial of outsiders. The rhetoric of unity and peace can glitter like morning dew while the scars of empire—in land, citizenship, and belonging—persist. If we listen closely, we hear the harsh truth: the old habit of dividing people by place and lineage serves a system that profits from separation, from surveillance, from the policing of borders and bodies.

And then there is the hard engine of capitalism that underwrites both conflict and relief. A war economy sells fear while hawking control; aid becomes leverage, alliances are weighed in dollars and strategic interest, and the lives of refugees are counted in statistics rather than centered in justice. The planet pays the price when resources are weaponized and when care and livelihoods are treated as expendable collateral to the chase for power and profit.

Let healing begin with a different dream: a decentering of arms in favor of stewardship, a redistribution of resources toward the soil, the air, the children, and the elders who hold the memory of a homeland. May we finance restoration—of land, of livelihoods, of dignity—through systems rooted in solidarity, not siege. May the river of justice flow unimpeded, wounds be tended with collective care, and the courage to imagine a future where peace is not a fragile pause between wars but a living practice of ecological and social renewal.