#10 This Way.

Days before the genocide erupted, Rawa was itself at a sensitive turning point. After five years as a pilot organization that began in 2018, we were preparing to finalize an evaluation and shape our long-term model of organizing, working, and grantmaking.

Gaza has completely transformed us.

The conditions of genocidal war—producing deep human, emotional, and psychological shifts within us—forced us to see our work not as institutional or organizational labor, but as an urgent struggle, a necessary act of resistance in the darkest days of our people. They pushed us toward bold, rapid decisions, toward forms of flexibility we had never known before. They reminded us how the rigidity and traditionalism imposed on institutional work in Palestine had long alienated such work from urgent needs and from direct engagement with people's lives, struggles, and resilience.

The genocide also resolved a central contradiction. For many years, the ideas of "efficiency" and "productivity" were tied to their capitalist meanings, drawn from large corporations. At the same time, many civil society institutions adopted working models that permitted slowness and endless procedural delays. Gaza demanded a new, necessary understanding of efficiency and productivity: movement, engagement, and reflection emerging from within action itself.

When the genocide began, we found ourselves working in ways entirely different from how we had previously worked in institutions and organizations—or even in Rawa itself. We found ourselves returning to motivations and a spirit of struggle deeply rooted in the traditions of Palestinian community work, traditions that decades of dominant colonial-funding culture had nearly erased.

From this, we understood that what is required today is to transform this spirit into a living, continuous structure—one based on openness, change, and experimentation. We decided not to remain a "pilot" destined to end in a rigid institution, but rather to become an ongoing experimental journey that continues to open, transform, discard imported institutional traditions, and return to and rely on the deep well of community giving and intellectual creativity embedded in Palestinian culture and practice.

We close this year at Rawa while laying the foundations for a new experimental organizational structure: new forms and patterns of work, decision-making, collaboration and support; new ways of learning; and a search for new friends for the journey ahead.

At the end of this painful year, it brings us some comfort to feel that our path is bold, but full of beauty, more rugged, and far more liberated. And it warms our hearts to have you, friends of Palestine around the world, walking this path with us.   █