Carl Stellweg With a few Facebook posts in 2018, Palestinian writer and activist Ahmed Abu-Artema from the Gaza Strip sowed the seed for the largest-scale peaceful Palestinian protest ever: the Great March of Return. Two years later, with hundreds of fatalities and thousands seriously injured, the harvest is bitter. But the Great March of Return has once and for all made it abundantly clear that the Palestinians will never accept the occupation. _________________________________________ Abu-Artema visited the Netherlands at the end of January 2020. The study association FFIPP and the Dutch Palestine Committee organized a public evening with him in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. Prior to this event, I met up with him. Borrowing his own poetic imagery – which perhaps we may, as he politely rejects the status of poet some media ascribe to him – you could call him a bird that recently escaped his cage, while still being unfree. A bird with a painful m