When I asked my local guide why the statue was there, he shrugged and gave a one-word answer in Arabic: “Sumud.” St. George is regarded as a hero among Palestinians; one Bethlehem sculptor has described him as “a knight full of peace and grace, riding his horse and always fighting evil.”

“Sumud” often gets translated as “steadfastness” or “perseverance” (or misunderstood by Israelis as “clinging to the land”) but is more properly inflected with notes of audacity, conscience, and dignity. Palestinians name their kids Sumud, but other than that, a person doesn’t announce their sumud. It is attributed to them by others in the manner of chutzpah, moxie, or rizz. Sumud is both an immovable object and an unstoppable force; like St. George, sumud is a dragon slayer.

Arabic is spoken by around 400 million people across roughly 30 dialects, but sumud is a particularly Palestinian term—and it has been since 1978, when the PLO recommended sumud as a coping mechanism for the trauma of life under Israeli occupation.

The word recently gained international recognition while the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civilian-led convoy of more than 40 vessels carrying humanitarian aid, sailed from Europe in an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Italy and Spain dispatched navy ships to protect the flotilla, and leaders from Colombia, Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey condemned Israel’s military interception of the flotilla earlier this month.

A man waves a Palestinian flag to other activists aboard a vessel departing from Tunisia’s northern port of Bizerte on Sept. 14 to join the last boats taking part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, bound for the Gaza Strip. Mohamed Fliss/AFP via Getty Images

Raja Shehadeh, the co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, describes sumud as “watching your home turned into a prison” and choosing “to stay in that prison because it is your home and because you fear that, if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return.” In his published journal, The Third Way, he wrote, “Living like this, you must constantly resist the twin temptations of either acquiescing in the jailer’s plan in numb despair, or becoming crazed by consuming hatred for your jailer and yourself.”

A popular Western understanding of sumud is the way that Palestinians have responded to Israeli officials cracking down on displays of the Palestinian flag. Many people now celebrate watermelons for their natural showcase of black, green, red, and white—the colors of the flag. It’s a puckish subversion: In the age of social media, a watermelon emoji has reach where a Palestinian flag emoji gets shadow-banned.

Sumud is the way that a Palestinian refugee camp known as the most tear-gassed place on Earth turns gas canisters into jewelry for its gift shop. It’s the epic dream of the West Bank’s Rawabi, the first planned city in Palestine. It’s Handala, a cartoon symbol of a 10-year-old refugee who has had his back turned since 1973. It’s the determination of children in the West Bank to see the sea. Nearly half of all Palestinians are children—or were, at the genocide’s start. Every Palestinian birth is an act of sumud.

Sumud is also Husam Zomlot, born in a refugee camp in Rafah, becoming ambassador to the United States and then the United Kingdom. It’s the Palestinian tech start-up scene. It’s the journalists in Gaza who make recorded statements to be played after Israeli weapons finally come for them. Sumud unwittingly captured the world’s hearts for a moment in March when it manifested as an elaborate iftar banquet served in the rubble of Gaza.

This summer, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir posted a 13-second clip of himself taunting Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian political leader who has been imprisoned for 20 years. Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, combed the video to find one frame that she believed showed her husband’s strength and asked his followers to use that image in their dissemination of the encounter. That moment is sumud.

Wherever there are Palestinians, there is always sumud. Others might argue that Palestinian identity is defined by Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe that is used to refer to the mass slaughter and displacement of Palestinians through the founding of Israel in 1948. But a people’s darkest hour is rarely the hinge of its heritage.

Displaced Palestinians move with their belongings in the Nuseirat refugee camp area in the central Gaza Strip on Sept. 23. Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images

Palestinians are used to being misunderstood. Stereotypes portray all Palestinians as terrorists, rather than counter-terrorists fighting Israeli occupation and genocide. Sumud is the confidence in knowing that many of the people who call Palestinians terrorists are not terrorized by our weapons but rather by our very existence, by the Palestinian pulse that beats like a tell-tale heart under Israel’s papering over Palestine.

In our interconnected age, sumud is available to anyone online. It shows up in the name of outreach programs in U.S. churches, in a clothing label that sells Che Guevara sweatshirts, on a Finnish tote bag, in British song lyrics, and in a nonprofit fragrance sold in Oregon. Mashallah.

In fairness, the world is full of misappropriated foreign concepts—aloha, la brega, duende, hygge, ikigai, jugaad. And clumsy cultural exchanges are endemic to the West, where people buy knock-off empathy with catwalk keffiyehs, performative rolled Rs, or questionable Chinese tattoos.

Despite its Palestinian specificity, sumud reveals global truths. The United States and Palestine might seem like opposite worlds: the land of opportunity versus the land of occupation. But sumud is far from foreign to U.S. history. American sumud is the Chinese poetry scraped into the walls of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. It’s Emmett Till’s mother demanding an open casket. It’s First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy refusing to change out of her blood-splattered pink Chanel suit. (“Let them see what they’ve done,” she is said to have declared, in an accidental definition of sumud.)

American sumud is a motel-turned-civil rights museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It is spelled out in the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It’s a Puerto Rican flag draped bandana-style out of the Statue of Liberty’s crown. It’s the AIDS quilt being unfurled over the National Mall. It’s the presence of absence at the 9/11 Memorial. It’s the shoe collection at any Holocaust museum. And it’s painting—and repainting—rainbow crosswalks in Orlando, Florida.

American sumud knows that revolutions don’t start with chants or marches or even riots, but rather with the sacred, silent stillness of students sitting at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, or a 42-year-old seamstress planting herself in a bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

“My resistance is not to run away,” Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student who was recently reinstated at Columbia University after being detained for his activism, said last month. “It’s easier to distance myself and go somewhere else, [but] I choose to be part of a solution, part of a resistance, and part of envisioning what the future would look like.”

A displaced Palestinian woman plays with a child outside their tent near the seashore in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Sept. 29. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In a landmark year for global support of Palestinians, U.S. sympathy for Israel has fallen below 50 percent—to 46 percent—for the first time in the 25 years that Gallup has tracked this sentiment, as sympathy for Palestine reached an all-time high of 33 percent. That shift is in large part driven by U.S. revulsion at Israel’s brutality in Gaza, of which 60 percent of the U.S. public now disapproves, according to a separate Gallup poll. Jewish Americans are also overwhelmingly negative on Israeli violence and war crimes.

The global community, as well, understands sumud. “Tank Man” inching left and right alone against the Chinese military in Tiananmen Square. The odometer hitting its millionth mile in a freshly painted and polished vintage pastel Chevy in Havana. Or the hitokage-no-ishi, the human shadows scorched in stone, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Sumud is not a burden or a stain on a people. Humans have shared an instinct for sumud since our cave-dwelling days when we left handprints on walls. That art was not a matter of territorial ego; recent archeologists have discovered that they may have actually been testaments to family, community, and shared joy.

We’ve come a long way from those caves, but not as far as we like to think. Sumud is the eternal reminder of have-nots and how easily people mistreat those have-nots. It is the indictment of Israel’s brutality, of the U.S. government that funds it, and of the wider world that watches it with little more response than a wagging finger.

Yet Palestinian have-nots refuse to be-not. We are alchemists who transform leaden deprivation into Oscar gold. That is sumud: unapologetic ownership of the knowledge that a person’s very existence has power untouchable by brute force or craven cruelty. If the United States is the world’s melting pot, then Palestine is the world’s mortar, where humanity is crushed and pulverized into its essence. What remains is sumud.