There is – was – a little shop tucked into a side street in one of Gaza’s most popular neighbourhoods. The wife was an artist; her one-room shop was filled with cups and mugs and things painted on. For a small price, you could tell her your favourite quote from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and she would etch it delicately on a landscape of a tiny Palestinian village, drawn in blues and greys, intense and muted.
She would do it right there, while you waited, Gaza bustling by outside, sitting stock-still in her chair, a tiny, delicate paintbrush floating between her fingers. We talked for a while about the quote I preferred. The full version was too long for the circumference of the cup. In the end, we went with the first two lines: “He says: I come from that place. I come from here, and I am neither here nor there.”
I’ve been thinking about this since 7 October. Or maybe I’ve been thinking about this ever since I left Palestine many months ago, after my year there working with an aid organisation wrapped up. The last time I saw Palestine, she was disappearing in the rearview mirror, in the window of a plane. I said goodbye in pieces, never fully, because Gaza settles into your heart.
I’ve been thinking about the way, from the first day, the sheer aliveness of it begins to line your bones. Gaza is – again, was – full of businesses, vendors in the street, entrepreneurs in shops, wares spilling onto the roads, fisher-people on the sea, families fussing about.
The first time I went, there was a small group of kids sitting in plastic chairs in front of a family shop, reading books. Too embarrassed to ask, I looked up the figures that night: According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2020, the illiteracy rate among youth was about 0.7%. Gaza is – is! – full of ideas, despite what it is, or maybe because of what it is, which is a tiny spit of land cut off from the world that decided it would counter the world’s indifference by being all the more alive.
Almost immediately, it begins to fizz in the very depths of you: your heart, your blood, the things that make up essence. And your brain, as it takes it in, tries to make sense of man-made borders, of a reality only 40 kilometres long, chain-link fences and cement borders that have kept 2.3 million people locked inside for years.
Forget politics for a second. You look at it as a human being and think: “How is this a place we collectively allow? How is this even a place?”
The simple act of leaving, that first time, is when the rage also starts settling inside, in the extremities and in your core, in the places that matter to a human: your lungs, where you breathe, your eyes, where you see, your hands, where you touch. The simple act of doing that, leaving, which so many Gazans have never been allowed to do for the entire span of their lives – should they live long enough to count in the double digits – will trigger it. It will never feel like a faraway place again, no matter where you go, no matter how free you are.
Memories of a place
Smack in the middle of these weeks of overnight historians and unchecked biases, I have to start with honesty, my heart in my hands: I believe Palestine has a right to exist freely. And to be clear: I am anti-Hamas. I deeply grieve the loss of life on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the border. I am not an anti-semite, and I am resentful of the insinuation.
I don’t know why I have to say this, or actually I do: These days seem to be a potion of strong, deep emotions mixed with little reason, obfuscated facts, and forced connections between things that are unrelated by logic but that cause a strong reaction and trigger visceral, often legitimate, fear. I shouldn’t call it a potion. This is a poison, and we’re risking a genocide because of it.
I won’t offer a history lesson, both because I’m nowhere near qualified to attempt to understand, much less explain, a conflict of this resonance and complexity, and because we are a thinking species with easy access to a plethora of fact-based research from verified and reputable sources.
What I can offer are memories of a place I’ve lived.
I remember walking down a street in East Jerusalem on a peaceful weekend day and noticing a Palestinian mother rushing toward me, fixing her hijab as she guided her little boy along, head reflexively twitching back in fear, one arm over her child’s chest. We are the only two people on the street.
As she hurries by, she stops to urgently whisper something to me. I don’t speak enough Arabic to understand, and I apologise. Does she need something? I ask, and though I know she also cannot understand me, our body language speaks for us. She points back the way she has come, puts her hands up to my chest without touching me. A warning. The little boy with huge eyes next to her seems to want to melt into her skirts. She pulls him along, still speaking to me as she heads off, her eyes boring into mine.
The sun is shining, and this is my only way home, the same way I walk every day. Probably soldiers, I think. I smile at her reassuringly and continue up the hill, walking straight into an ad hoc checkpoint of heavily armed Israeli soldiers – the type that are always everywhere. They barely look at me – a clearly non-Arab woman dressed like the West – as I walk by.
It strikes me. What I have grown to regard with only cursory concern is the cause of visceral fear in the eyes of a woman alone with her child on a sunny afternoon. I was right: I am safe here, and she is not. But she is the one at home. She still tried to warn me.
A symbol that will stay with you even after you’ve left, when you’ve gone to those new places far away, is the separation wall, known also as the Israeli West Bank Barrier. In much of the West Bank, and indeed, even from Jerusalem, you’ll see it – about eight metres high, carving through the landscape, twisting and turning, over 700 kilometres in length.
This massive wall is considered to be a security barrier by Israel, which claimed it was supposed to be temporary when it started building it in 2002. In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that the wall contravened international law. Almost two decades later, not only is the wall still there, but it has been expanded. Pieces of it are now 20 years old. It isolates Palestinians. It adds an additional layer of control and division to the restricted mobility and checkpoints that are part of their everyday lives.
Here is what I want to share with you: On the Palestinian side of the wall, people have drawn beautiful art over the years – vibrant street art, a meshing of local and international statements. Artists, breathing colour into the cement that corrals them and cleaves them apart.
When I first moved to East Jerusalem, my Palestinian landlord – knowing I did not yet know the neighbourhood around me – left fresh bread at my door every day for the entire first week: delicious warm ka’ak, shaped like a ring the size of my head and dotted in sesame seeds. We used to eat it with halawa spread on top, bought from the shop down the street that made the sweet sesame paste every morning in their kitchen and would sell it to us in chunks.
I won’t forget the day my Palestinian friends took me to Nablus to eat knafeh, the Palestinian cheese pastry dripping in sweet syrup. It is renowned all over the Middle East, but knafeh hails from this West Bank city. We feasted and laughed, though on the way home, the checkpoints again divided us: Even the Palestinians who had Israeli-administered ID cards that allowed them to cross the separation barrier had to go through a separate security screening from foreigners to cross through to East Jerusalem.
Nablus is once again one of the cities in the West Bank where violence and tensions are escalating as the Israeli military conducts raids and the Israeli government distributes additional weapons to settlers. When I think about what can define a place, my mind returns to knafeh, a marketplace on a warm day, and the way we tried to wrap the syrupy dessert in napkins to bring it home with us.
Symbols of the land
Learning a place is also learning what it loves. In Palestine, that means the deepest reverence for olive trees. I learned that families have curated olive groves for generations, that they are a major agricultural crop, that, for Palestine, the slow-growing and long-living tree is a symbol of their land and their people. The yearly harvest is often a multi-generational family event that includes celebrations of community and culture, and it produces much-needed income from olive oil.
Over the years, entire groves have been burned down by settlers, uprooted, and left to die. The destruction of olive trees is well documented throughout the West Bank, and many of the trees that have been uprooted were centuries old. Ruining these groves removes a source of income for Palestinians and destroys something alive that people are deeply tied to – trees they consider literal branches of their families.
Back in East Jerusalem, the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah has seen Palestinian families that have lived there for generations forcefully evicted from their homes late on winter nights, when it is cold and there is no one to bear witness. But the evictions also take place in the light of day, when people do see what is happening and do nothing to stop it.
At the airport, they ask me what I do. I tell them the truth. They smack a sticker on the back of my passport that marks me as high-risk and grin at me as they hand it back.
Walking through Sheikh Jarrah one morning after Israeli soldiers had found a group of Palestinian schoolchildren throwing stones at a building and “reprimanded” them, I realised my sneakers were tracking a dark colour across the sand. When I stopped to inspect it, I found the bottom of my sneakers wet with blood, and a small human tooth stuck in the space between the rubber grooves of one of my soles. I stared at it for what seemed like an age before it clicked that I had walked through the point where the soldiers had found the children that morning. I don’t know what happened to the children.
I am leaving from Tel Aviv, flying home, my ceramic mug from Gaza tucked into my hand luggage. At the airport, they ask me what I do. I tell them the truth. They smack a sticker on the back of my passport that marks me as high-risk and grin at me as they hand it back.
I already know that when I get home I will find a little piece of paper tucked into my suitcase saying it was “randomly” selected for inspection. The inside of my suitcase will be destroyed, shampoo poured all over the wood carvings I bought in Bethlehem. The outside of the suitcase will be perfect. When I walk past one of the guards, who has been carefully neutral to me the entire time, he sniffs at me and tells me I smell of dogs. But I will get home safe.
What I am telling you is my truth
In these weeks when saying anything at all gets insults thrown at you, my voice feels small, and I wonder how many of us feel this way. What is my voice in a sea of others better suited to speak to what is happening? I do not want to throw dirt in a playground full to the brim with mud and blood, where even media that claims to be unbiased is carefully not so.
In a podcast I listened to last week while driving to work, a historian attempting to summarise the history of the conflict flew over the 1948 Nakba by saying “quite a few [Palestinians] were displaced”. The Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic – saw 700,000 Palestinian Arabs expelled from their homes and the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages. It led to a state of permanent refugee status for many Palestinians and opened a deep wound that has never been allowed to heal.
So, yes, “quite a few” is not technically incorrect, but, if this were a magic trick, it would be a sleight of hand where your attention is purposefully drawn somewhere else. You’re removed from the context, and the trick is complete.
Last week, a friend in the United States called to tell me her teenage son was wondering why everyone on TV seemed to be telling him the same thing: who to hate. “What should I do?” he asked. “Read,” I told him. “And not just the stuff you like. Read it all. And if the media is blocked somehow, or difficult to access from where you are, or you’re being told what you can or can’t read, this is a good time to ask yourself why.”
As the quote often attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster goes: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the f***ing window and find out which is true.”
For me, part of the truth is seeing footage of areas of Gaza that used to house colourful startups and coding and professional skills training centres reduced to rubble. Where will those ideas go now? What about the kids reading books outside the shop?
Although what I am telling you is my truth, seen with my eyes, you can sense that my emotions are tied to this place, to the resilient civilians of Palestine. I deeply hope that it is clear that I am not trying to tell you that you should side against something.
My memories are a small offer of a moment, glistening marble memories of a culture that is human. But you can note my emotional resonance and not let me tell you what to think. You can find stories that reflect a different truth, another love (often the same love that transcends borders and fears nothing).
You can vary your news sources: Reading that 20 trucks of humanitarian aid have been let into Gaza is a beautiful thing, but it is also important to know the context – how that number compares to the 500 trucks, including around 100 aid trucks, that would enter Gaza daily before 7 October.
A trickle of humanitarian support is being allowed in, but Gaza continues to suffer increased bombings, a total siege that has cut off water and electricity and blocked the entry of food, fuel, and medical supplies, and, more recently, a near-complete communication blackout.
You can refuse to line your bones with rage, but also refuse to turn away.
In these deeply alienating days, when we feel small, consider how many people are speaking up for each other, how many are helping, how many are choosing kindness. You are smart, you are capable, and nobody gets to tell you what to think. In a world full of experts and insistent voices, be your own journalist. Look out the window.
“He says: I come from that place. I come from here, and I am neither here nor there. I have two names that come together but pull apart. I have two languages, but I have forgotten which is the language of my dreams.” – Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian national poet.
Edited by Eric Reidy.
