Writing about Gaza from exile is different. From inside Gaza, it’s almost effortless, and feels like visiting something you love, becoming emotionally charged, then pouring that emotion onto the page. From the outside, it becomes an act of attachment and longing for everything we write about.
I used to think that distancing myself from Gaza — a society that struggles with everything, even charging a mobile phone or having enough water in the morning — would mean distancing myself from its struggles. What happened was exactly the opposite. Being away, a product of my forcible displacement, made me more attached to it. Everything, even the most fleeting detail, now fills me with longing.
As a journalist, it’s true that the distance has made accessing information more challenging. Instead of leaving my home in Gaza and heading directly to the field — which could potentially be the entire Strip in a single day — I now face obstacles. I remember that for earlier stories I wrote, I was able to move from Gaza City all the way down to Rafah, or down to the central camps (Deir al-Balah and al-Maghazi), or to Northern Gaza (Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, and Jabalia refugee camp), before returning to my home base in al-Shuja’iyya. Anywhere in the Strip was within reach.
My reporting relied on face-to-face interviews with ordinary people, government officials, or anyone whose testimony I wanted to include. As a Gaza native, reaching sources was easy. Asking one person would lead me to another, then another. Until I reached the top of the pyramid and gained access to exclusive sources.
Obviously, in exile, I have to work overtime to make up for it. It requires building a network of relationships capable of doing work that a phone call alone can’t. It requires sending people on the ground to collect information, and often not in exactly the same I you would have.
I’ve been able to achieve a lot using this method. But there are still things missing. Despite repeated attempts to compensate through photos, videos, and exclusive interviews, something about capturing the external details of the scene isn’t available to everyone.
The accumulated longing and nostalgia, however, are what allow me to compensate for it. It builds up with every interview I hear or conduct, and with every background I see in the interview footage, marked by destruction and profound grief everywhere. I lived many of these emotions before leaving, and in that sense, I drew upon my own experiences. What I end up doing is writing a story whose events feel like they happened to me. I put myself in Gaza.
That’s the secret to writing about Gaza in exile: you have to be there.
After Savagery : Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization
Hamid Dabashi
…..Like millions of others around the globe, I am at once overwhelmed by the magnitude of terror that genocidal Zionists are capable of perpetrating on innocent and defenseless people. Neither the political nor the poetic urges, nor the secular or sacred citations that might come to mind can come to terms with what is happening in Palestine. Given the depth of this savagery, the vulgarity, and the cruelty we face, we must expose, I thought to myself, directly, the barbaric roots of what has sold itself as “Western Civilization.”
Israel is not a country, it is not a homeland, it is not a rooted culture. Israel is a settler colony, a moral depravity created by the West, enabled and empowered by the West. Israel is the most wicked evidence of the West. Israel is every atrocity ever committed around the world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the West in a nutshell, staged for the whole world to see. Since its very inception, Israel is the summation of the West, materialized and put on a pedestal. This book, therefore, is about making a crucial adjustment in our perception of Israel: It is not just a settler colony that the West supports, but it is “the West” in its very quintessence. It is the highest manifestation of the calamitous ideology of conquest that calls itself “the West,” exposing its murderous roots and occasioning the groundwork for the very metaphysics of barbarism that has sold itself to the world as “Western civilization.” Today, Gaza and the rest of Palestine is where the false premise of Western moral authority is buried. The world is liberated from that false consciousness.
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47142/Hamid-Dabashi,-After-Savagery-Gaza,-Genocide,-and-the-Illusion-of-Western-Civilization-New-Texts-Out-Now