From the emergency room in
I wanted to hear their voices which never fail to comfort
me in exile whenever I experience moments of uncertainty – even though I know
that they experience an extreme level of uncertainty at their end, in
At that moment, around 11pm
The radio was playing in the background and my dad would
interrupt the conversation, and both sounded distracted. Something was wrong.
“Bombings are everywhere. May God protect us and have mercy
upon us. If you were here, you would have thought it was the beginning of
another full-scale attack,” my mom said.
“The sky lights up and then a massive bombardment is heard, and within seconds another one, and another one,
shaking the ground underneath us. The walls feel like they’re falling down.”
My parents just celebrated the arrival of their first
grandchild. They called her Eliya, one of
“Eliya, bless her, is crying
non-stop as if she senses the danger. We can hear her screams from here as your
brother Muhammad and Asma [his wife] are trying to
comfort her,” my mom said in distressed tones. “We are panicking ourselves.
Imagine how kids are feeling this terror.”
The anti-allergy injection given to me in the ambulance was
making me drowsy, but the impact of her words made me switch back on.
This experience seemed to sum up the parallel realities
I’ve lived since since I left
Growing up in
And yet we learned to face our worst fears and continue to
live without internalising this horror as if it were
normal.
That is why resistance was a necessity in the face of this
life of uncertainty and dehumanisation.
Gaza is only a part of a much larger system of violence,
displacement and confinement designed by Israel, and funded and normalised by the so-called international community.
The reality in
Ever since I was old enough to understand the injustices
that surrounded me as a child, I woke up every day questioning how despite its
enchantment with human rights slogans, the world allowed this situation to
continue.
Thursday morning, I called my family as soon as I woke up.
My brother and his wife had a sleepless night with their 2-week old daughter.
My mom, who just got home from work, was eager to have a
nap after a restless night. She works as a nurse in Beach refugee camp, at a
children’s clinic run by UNRWA, the UN agency for
But instead she sat on the tiles by the garden door to let
her body soak in the coolness, as the lack of electricity in
As she sat there, she told me stories of the mothers who
came to the clinic.
“Several women told me that they had a sleepless night with
their children crying out of fear,” my mom recalled. “They were clinging to
them.”
Others said their children, including older ones, wet their
beds.
“May God help them,” my mom said shaking her head. “I
raised you all in extraordinary situations, and I worry Eliya
is going to grow up in similar conditions, if not worse.”
I was looking at my mom on the phone with one eye, the
other glancing at
Our conversation was interrupted by a troubled silence that
indicated there was more to be said.
I perfectly understood her without a word being spoken,
however. I remember how we barely expressed our emotions as individuals when we
were all in the same boat, experiencing the same violence.
We had no choice but to be strong for each other, and
support one another to keep moving forward.
Then my mother spoke about how most families in
“Our situation is heaven in comparison to other families
who are completely dependent on UN aid and do not have even one member with a
regular income,” my mom observed.
In addition, cuts to UNRWA funding
by the US and the Palestinian Authority’s withholding of salaries from
civil servants, are making people’s lives even more precarious.
My mother sounded agonised as she
spoke about the overwhelming situation and reflected that the challenges of
wartime seem almost bearable compared with the grinding aftermath.
“Precisely!” I said, in an
effort to bring some hope into the conversation. “What makes people go to
protest near the fence with
“Confronting and throwing stones at Israeli snipers lined
up behind the fence is a means of survival to escape this cycle of
powerlessness,” I said. I told my mother I thought it was an act of defiance
and dignity.
At least 120 Palestinians have been killed during
the Great March of Return protests that began on 30 March, more than
20 of them children.
“If only the world outside knew how we experience life. If
only they put themselves in our shoes for a second,” I added.
“The times when we lived under physical military occupation
were much better,” my mom said, interrupting me. She was referring to the
years from 1967 until 2005, when
I was confused and asked her to explain.
“We had confrontations then, similar to what we have
experienced at the Great March of Return, but from even closer,” she said.
“They would use their military power on us but we would have a brief window to
express resistance, which was somehow consoling.”
“We would stand in their faces without any fear, despite
our knowledge that they would eventually do what they are indoctrinated to do –
imposing roadblocks, curfews, house raids and detention campaigns,” my mother
explained. “We would stand tall in front of them as they attempted to kidnap
your father, or one of your uncles, scream at them and
curse them, eye to eye.”
“The Tamimis were every family in
Gaza, during the first intifada,” she said, referring to the West Bank family
of the teenager Ahed Tamimi,
renowned for its role in the village of Nabi Saleh’s unarmed resistance to Israeli occupation
and colonisation.
“I remember when the army broke into our house in the
middle of the night, soon after your birth, looking for your father. They turned
everything upside down and stole your father’s pictures and notebooks,” my mom
said. “We did not stand still as they ruined everything. We resisted. We pushed
them and threw our belongings which they had broken back at them.”
“But now they just drop missiles at us from their
warplanes, gunboats or tanks as we sit in our homes unable to confront them.”
My mother mentioned the pregnant mother
and her young daughter killed in their home in an Israeli
airstrike Wednesday night.
“They could have been any of us,” she said.
Whenever I talk anyone in my family, they say nothing much
has changed, as if time has forgotten about their corner of world.
But time did not forget them completely. They experience
time differently: through an innovative form of military occupation which has
turned
They experience the progress of time as a regression, with
resistance – not accepting their abnormal situation as normal – the only way to
break free.
10 August 2018
Palestinians
inspect the rubble of a building following an Israeli air strike
on
APA images