Before the genocide in Gaza, Haidar Eid performed a rendition of Ahmad Fouad Negm's "If the Sun Sinks," a poem that beautifully mirrors the contradiction Palestinians now face between the ongoing horror and the hope for liberation.

This moment in Palestinian history is a combination of extreme pessimism due to the horror inflicted on the heroic people of Gaza by genocidal Israel, but also a moment of relative hope as the rising resistance is creating a new paradigm -- one of liberation.

Late Palestinian novelist Emile Habibi, in a different context, coined the term "pessoptimism" to express a contradiction between what Antonio Gramsci called "the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will." In the midst of the horror of the ongoing genocide, one loses the ability to come up with something creative: it is about survival, and survival alone.

But this is the darkest moment before the dawn. The late Egyptian poet Ahmad Fouad Negim beautifully captured this "contradiction" in his greatest poem, "If the Sun Sinks," which was composed by his comrade Sheikh Imam Issa.

We decided to perform it in Gaza before the genocide, not knowing what was going to happen to our homeland at the hands of the barbarians of the twenty-first century.