Editor’s Note: The article is part of our series Gaza Diaries which shares firsthand accounts of Palestinians who lived through the 11-day Israeli attack on Gaza in May 2021, and are now dealing with its aftermath. You can read the entire series here.
“I would never have children as long as I am in Gaza.”, those were my friend’s words years ago that keep haunting me every time I think about how bad the situation in the Gaza Strip is. Her words come to me when I realize that life here is all about surviving; waking up, eating, working and then going to sleep. In other words, keeping our heads above water. This is the scenario for the lucky ones, since there are thousands who don’t have the luxury of enjoying the beauty of a mundane day. Her words also occurred to me during the last aggression while bombs were falling over the heads of the children of Gaza, and now when we are dealing with the aftermath of it.
Speaking of children, another friend of mine that I have known since she was single told me that before she had her three daughters, she never felt afraid for her life. “What is the worst thing that could happen to me? Die? Well, it will be the end of another journey. But after I had my children, fear found its way to possess me. I am always terrified for the lives of my children. When they are bombing, I keep moving them from one area of the house to another, I cover them with my body, I pray for them to live and for me to keep protecting them.”
We have no children in my house, but we have a cat. She is the sassiest diva you can meet. This might sound silly to some of you (those who don’t have any pets), but our number one priority during the 11 days of aggression was keeping her safe. Every time she heard a bombing she would run under the bed and stay there for hours. She would give us confused looks asking us about what was happening. Powerless, we would hold her tight and tell her the everything is going to be ok.
Some children experienced this situation for the first time. Ahmad, the five-year-old son of a woman I know begged his mother to “call them and ask them to stop killing us….I am so scared.” I saw a picture on the news of a woman showing how her kids went to sleep that night, with their thumbs in their ears to stop the noise of explosions, and their tiny bodies under the blankets thinking they would save them.
Sadness, fear and surrender are all strong feelings that you sympathize with, and as a Gazan, I definitely empathize with as well. However, nothing shakes my soul and heart harder than hope in the darkest of times. My colleague shared with us that, three hours before the Eid al-Fitr started (the celebration marking the end of Ramadan – which started one day after aggression started) his daughter was wearing her Eid clothes and was ready to celebrate. Before the aggression, she said that despite COVID-19 she will celebrate, and after the bombings she said that despite the aggression she will celebrate. It hurts me to recognize the fact that we, the generation of 30- and 40-year-olds, might have experienced some happy times and occasions. But those children haven’t, and we are not sure if they will ever do.
Having lived through the Intifada, various escalations and four wars, I have realized that what doesn’t kill you does not make you stronger, it makes you more vulnerable. After I heard the first bombing, it all came back to me, years and years of post-traumatic stress disorder and a list of many lost dreams and hopes and goals. It all took me back to my friend’s words about not having children while in Gaza. She did leave, she left her prestigious job, her close friends and all her life behind her to start another one. Years have passed since she left. She recently had her second child, and according to her, she couldn’t be happier.
One terrifying thing I heard was that we, as Gazans, don’t qualify for being people with post-traumatic stress disorder, because simply we are living in a long-term ongoing trauma. For years and years, we have been experiencing unimaginable events without having the chance to grieve, without being able to pour out some of the sadness that fills our hearts, and without being able to have a decent life.
For 11 days, I managed to stay strong, as much as I could. For eleven days, I worked hard on maintaining a solid front. However, when the ceasefire was announced, or to be more accurate, when it started at 2:00 am, I collapsed. People were happy that they were safe, but I was sad…. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, I wanted to go down to the streets, not to celebrate, but to mourn the loss of the children who died, of the dreams that were stolen, and of the many lost hopes.
It is weird that during the first couple of days of the aggression, over five hundred children were reportedly born. The monthly average of newborns in Gaza is over 3,000. For me, having children is a sign of hope, of a need to last and for memories to be passed over from a generation to another. Is that what is happening? Are people of Gaza full of hope that they keep having children?!
I sit down and think about what the future is holding. What is waiting for us? A full generation of people who did not have the chance of living a normal life, and for the coming generation of young, full of hope, girls and boys who are dreaming of a better one.
What is next?
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Cracks in the Israeli Consensus | by David Shulman | The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com)
Cracks in the Israeli Consensus, by David Shulman, New York Revview, July 1/21
The latest round of violence in Gaza has led to the reemergence of the Palestinian national movement—as well as more skepticism among Israelis about repeatedly making war on Hamas.
“Looking back on the latest round of fighting in Gaza, one can’t escape the grim sense of déjà vu. How many such rounds have there been? I can’t remember. Worse, eerie and compulsive repetition suits the way many, perhaps most, Israelis—including, it seems, the higher echelons of the army and intelligence services—tend to think about Gaza and Hamas. On the surface, the primitive logic goes like this: Hamas is a murderous, barbaric organization that wants only to kill as many Israelis as possible and is continuously building up its military capabilities to that end. In practice, the only useful way of dealing with Hamas is therefore to pound it to pieces once every few years (or months), thus reestablishing what the Israeli army and government fondly call ‘deterrence’ (it’s their favorite word).
“The trouble with this approach is that it never works. To revert to the army lingo, which Israelis hear every night on TV during episodes of fighting: deterrence is inherently entropic; the passage of time inevitably erodes it. Hence the need for that periodic pounding. Moreover, the time lag can be remarkably short. The army is already saying that another round of warfare in Gaza could break out soon.
“If we go a little deeper, a more deadly vision emerges. As several astute commentators have suggested in the last weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategic plan, shared, implicitly, with sections of the Israeli right, was to keep Hamas alive as a constant threat to Israel.
“Ensuring that the Palestinians remain divided between the ineffectual remnants of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the extreme Islamicists of Gaza is one way, possibly the only way, to allow the Israeli program of annexation, domination, and expulsion on the West Bank to go forward.(cont’d)
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“This policy has worked, to a point, as anyone who drives through the West Bank today can see. Roughly half of the available land reserves in Area C (over 60 percent of the West Bank, where all the settlements are located) have by now been allocated to Israeli colonies and their continuous, violent expansion. I experience the ever more intrusive tentacles of the occupation, in the form of vicious settlers and mostly hostile soldiers and police, nearly every week when my fellow activists and I are in the Palestinian territories to protect, as best we can, Bedouin shepherds and the small-scale farmers and herders of the South Hebron hills. Levels of settler violence against Palestinians and human rights activists have increased exponentially over the last several months.”
In the occupation system, settlers are above the law.
The narrative that has underpinned the double game, self-defense, has taken hits in public opinion with media coverage of the Gaza War. What new narrative will emerge and will it support the boogeyman defense? If the border protests resume will they enable self-defense claims or will it be more clear who the victims are? What will replace the double game when it finally collapses? Will the young horse Biden left tethered, “equality” get ridden or will it be the older stallion “nationalism”?