I wrote last year of the ‘third way,’ and of the daily living being the test of sumud. It is a test I failed, perhaps because I didn’t have the kind of hope necessary for sustaining a constant struggle. It is not hope for this or that to happen, not hope for the far-off future. It is the kind of general hope you draw from people around you whom you love. It is the faces, on the West Bank and in Israel, that I love, admire, am proud to know, that have pushed aside my nightmare visions. And it is the strength of their humanity that makes me sure that it is not mere sentimentality to linger for a moment over the football truce between the Arab boys and soldier-boy. Our struggle is not senseless; it is not yet proven that good never wins the day.
–Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank
