International Student/Young Pugwash Report and Reflections
ISYP Report & Reflections
This past year as well as the past few years have been particularly challenging as well as fruitful. The complexities and multitude of conflicts, existential risks and wars have challenged the ISYP leadership team on personal levels as well as the implementation of the work that we aspire to do. Nevertheless, ISYP has grown its leadership team and community, its outreach and work on diverse topics, which stands as a testament to our collective resilience and dedication.
As our mission statement, ISYP seeks to provide students and young professionals with opportunities to engage in cross-national dialogue and cooperation on issues at the nexus of science, ethics and security. ISYP takes an interdisciplinary approach to issues including nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. In tandem, ISYP creates a space for its members to develop personal relationships and to understand “the other”—thereby nurturing common understanding. Later on, as these individuals gain influence, their cross-national relationships become crucial for policymaking that promotes peace. These goals are pursued in the spirit of the Pugwash network’s founding document, the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which reads: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”
It has become ever more crucial as well as challenging to fulfil this mission. We thank you for your interest and support; and, despite the many disheartening developments worldwide, we are more committed than ever to advancing our mission and are eager to share our progress and future endeavors with you.
If you want to know more about who we are, what we have been doing over the past 5 years, which projects are ongoing and what new initiatives we will launch, please have a look at our ISYP Report as presented to the Pugwash Council on October 21, 2023.ISYP Report & Reflections
This past year as well as the past few years have been particularly challenging as well as fruitful. The complexities and multitude of conflicts, existential risks and wars have challenged the ISYP leadership team on personal levels as well as the implementation of the work that we aspire to do. Nevertheless, ISYP has grown its leadership team and community, its outreach and work on diverse topics, which stands as a testament to our collective resilience and dedication.
As our mission statement, ISYP seeks to provide students and young professionals with opportunities to engage in cross-national dialogue and cooperation on issues at the nexus of science, ethics and security. ISYP takes an interdisciplinary approach to issues including nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. In tandem, ISYP creates a space for its members to develop personal relationships and to understand “the other”—thereby nurturing common understanding. Later on, as these individuals gain influence, their cross-national relationships become crucial for policymaking that promotes peace. These goals are pursued in the spirit of the Pugwash network’s founding document, the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which reads: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”
It has become ever more crucial as well as challenging to fulfil this mission. We thank you for your interest and support; and, despite the many disheartening developments worldwide, we are more committed than ever to advancing our mission and are eager to share our progress and future endeavors with you.
If you want to know more about who we are, what we have been doing over the past 5 years, which projects are ongoing and what new initiatives we will launch, please have a look at our ISYP Report as presented to the Pugwash Council on October 21, 2023.
Abraham Initiatives
Dear Sherman,
It has been almost three months since October 7th and the start of the latest, longest, and deadliest war between Israel and Hamas.
In Israel, the ties between Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been tested. While the intercommunal violence the country experienced in May 2021 has thankfully not recurred, tensions remain high.
As an organization composed of and jointly governed by Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, The Abraham Initiatives has seen these tensions play out up close. Our staff is deeply committed to the cause of shared society, and they have carefully and delicately negotiated the feelings of their families, communities, and colleagues.
I wanted to end off the year with a story from Fayroz Alatayaka, who serves as our Safe Communities Coordinator in the Negev. Fayroz is a Palestinian citizen of Israel dedicated both personally and professionally to a shared and equal Israel. As we head into the new year, I hope you will find her words as inspiring and rejuvenating as I do.
I heard the siren on October 7th from Rahat. My house in the nearby village has no bomb shelter or safe room, and in a panic I jumped into a large hole that my uncle dug in the yard, covered with a concrete and iron roof. I know very well that this pit will not be able to save my life in the event of a direct impact of a rocket, but in the absence of real protection, there is no choice but to take risks to protect ourselves.
Since that morning, the rift around me has been deepening. My friend 'Aisha al-Ziadne is currently being held hostage in Gaza. My friends from all over the Bedouin diaspora in the Negev are facing a difficult economic situation as a result of the war. Our families continue to scatter the children between the rooms of the house to distribute risks in the event of a rocket falling.
In the early days, my work as coordinator of the Safe Communities in the Negev project at The Abraham Initiatives also came to a halt. As part of the project, young men and women undergo training in personal security, learn to cope with emergency situations, and become acquainted with the relevant rescue organizations such as Magen David Adom and the Fire Department, in cooperation with the [IDF] Home Front Command. At a time when everyone's personal safety was at risk, we couldn't continue to be together. We had no safe place to gather, and in the shadow of the sirens, the women and young people couldn't come to the meeting.
My desire to find a bright spot in the great darkness led me to the "Jewish-Arab war room," led by Shir Nosetzky, CEO of Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, and Hananal Sana from Itach مَعَكِ (Ma'aki). The slogan "Partners in Fate" resonated with me. I was excited to see the joint mobilization for the benefit of the unrecognized [Bedouin] villages and the residents of the [Gaza] envelope alike, and I started volunteering every week. Slowly, I felt that a community was being created there. We all live in the same country, and all of us in Israel, Jews and Arabs, are in a state of emergency. I invited a women's group from Rahat, which participates in the Safe Communities Project, to volunteer with me and they responded enthusiastically. Like me, the women in the course felt that volunteering was a source of light amidst the darkness.
In recent weeks, the project I lead for The Abraham Initiatives has returned and even expanded. Together with the local councils in the Negev and the Home Front Command, we committed to focusing on "volunteering and contributing to the rescue of others." In addition to the women of Rahat, young groups from Hura and Kseife joined the volunteer work, and together we realize the values of Arab-Jewish work and partnership.
Despite all the pain around us, volunteering together and mobilizing women and young people gives me hope that we will soon live together in peace and equality. These shared hours are yet another reminder of what it means that we are all human beings whose lives intertwine, with dreams and the right to live in peace.
If you haven't done so already, please consider making an end-of-year gift to The Abraham Initiatives. To those who have given, thank you again for your generous support of our work—it means so much to all of us.
Best,
Jimmy Taber
International Development Director
American Friends of Combatants for Peace
Dear Sherman,
Usually, we write to you at the end of the year to share our highlights from the year that is ending and share our hopes and dreams for the year ahead. But this year feels different.
Someone that knows us well recently told us that to them, we are like the cabin crew that they look to in bad turbulence. They try to look for any signs of panic or concern in their eyes to know how they should react. Well, we are choosing to keep our heads up, and remain determined and hopeful while coming to terms with our present and reality. We are all still grieving, still mourning for those that we have lost, and still attending funerals and wakes in unimaginable numbers in both Israel and Palestine. We still look on in shock and horror as the people of Gaza are dying, suffering, and starved. And still, we are all denied any sense of security or safety, and we fear for our families, our friends, and our collective futures.
Butwe have power in our togetherness and take comfort from the small yet heroic acts that occur in our movement every day--the Israeli activists that are still traveling to the Jordan Valley to protect the Palestinian shepherds from the barbarity of the settlers and the impunity of the army, the Palestinian activists that speak out with such humanity and bravery, and our staff that keep our movement running despite their own sadness, instability, and pressures.
We also want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Without the support of the international community, nothing would be achievable, and there have been many proud moments throughout the year that we will look back on soon. But for now, we are focused on today, and the day after the war. What comes next for our societies and how can we begin to repair and recover from this horror?
One thing that we know is that we can't take our 'Togetherness' for granted. We have to work through a barrage of obstacles and dig deep to keep our teams united and not let our grief or anger overwhelm us. Combatants for Peace has existed since the Second Intifada in 2006, when it took the bravery and imagination of a few fighters to create something magical. We are looking back to our roots and asking for that same bravery and commitment to non-violence to carry us forward. Please join us in keeping up international pressure to insist on a political solution to end this conflict and stop the bloodshed now. We know that there is simply no military solution here, and nothing to gain from this empty loss of life.
We have updated our vision for 2024:
"We believe in a future where all people live in peace with
dignity, justice, and liberty."
It sounds simple, but we are a long way from achieving this. This is what we will strive for in 2024 and beyond, and what our organization proudly stands for. Please support this vision, use your voice to share our message, and stand with us as we prepare for the day after the war.
All that is left is to wish everyone a peaceful New Year. We hope for better days ahead for us all.
Our Way Forward - From Convisero's Dahlia Shaham
Our Way Forward - Captioned by Convisero’s Dahlia Shaham
At a time of great rupture
In the midst of a harsh reality
When the distinction between despair and hope
Is fragile and sometimes shatters into fragments
As violence rears its head
As human dignity is threatened by inhuman cruelty
We must remember there are some things we do not give up on
There are some values that cannot be shaken
We were all created in God’s image
And even in the hardest of times
There is a path we must walk
And we must walk that path together
For we are destined to live in this land together.
“Righteousness shall go before God, and shall make God’s footsteps a way”
[Psalm 85:14]
Please donate to Rabbis for Human Rights so that we can continue to build a way forward
RefugePoint’s Leadership Role at the Global Refugee Forum
The Global Refugee Forum (GRF), a quadrennial event taking place from December 13-15 of this year, is the main venue to drive and review progress towards the objectives of the Global Compact on Refugees, which include:
Easing pressures on host countries
Strengthening refugee self-reliance*
Increasing access to third-country solutions such as resettlement, family reunification, labor, mobility, and other pathways*
Supporting conditions in countries of origin that allow refugees to return home safely
RefugePoint is playing a leadership role in four multistakeholder pledges relating to two of these objectives: refugee self-reliance and third-country solutions (starred above). Additionally, RefugePoint leadership will be speaking in several official events at the GRF as well as formally announcing the multistakeholder pledges on family reunification and on economic inclusion and social protection, an honor reserved for the leaders in each of these areas.
Why is RefugePoint So Heavily Involved in the Global Refugee Forum?
The goals of the Global Refugee Forum align with RefugePoint’s strong agency-wide commitment to systems change. RefugePoint is leading the development of several multistakeholder pledges that are aligned with our programmatic priorities. Our engagement and investment in global initiatives such as the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative and the Global Family Reunification Network position us well to provide leadership and convene others to take collective action on these themes.
RefugePoint’s commitment to refugee-centeredness has informed much of our involvement in the 2023 GRF. RefugePoint and the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative are proud to have refugees and former refugees join our delegations to the GRF, and we are also supporting these colleagues as they have assumed prominent roles at the GRF.
See below for a comprehensive list of RefugePoint’s involvement in the events of the 2023 Global Refugee Forum.
Refugee Self-Reliance
Multistakeholder Pledge Leadership: The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, hosted by RefugePoint, is the lead coordinator in the Multistakeholder pledge on economic inclusion and social protection, in collaboration with the governments of Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, and United States of America, as well as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in Eastern Africa.
In Plenary: Kari Diener, Executive Director of the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, will be announcing the pledge in the plenary session.
Parallel High-Level Events: The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, and through it RefugePoint, is also helping to plan two high-level side events relating to refugee self-reliance: one on employment and entrepreneurship for refugees and another on social protection for refugees. The event on economic inclusion will be moderated by RefugePoint Board Member and U.S. Enterprise Executive Director of Alight, Nasra Ismail.
Third-Country Solutions
Resettlement
Multistakeholder Pledge Leadership: RefugePoint co-chairs the Friends of Resettlement Initiative (along with the Government of Australia and UNHCR), which has been responsible for developing the Multistakeholder pledge on resettlement.
Parallel High-Level Event: RefugePoint CEO Sasha Chanoff will be speaking at the Parallel High-Level Event on Resettlement, an event RefugePoint has helped to plan.
Family Reunification
Multistakeholder Pledge Leadership: RefugePoint is a member and advisor to the Global Family Reunification Network (FRUN), which leads the Multistakeholder pledge supporting refugee family reunification.
In Plenary: RefugePoint CEO Sasha Chanoff will be formally announcing the Multistakeholder Pledge on Family Reunification in the plenary session.
Speakers Corner: RefugePoint delegate Geeta Rahimi will be delivering remarks in a Speakers Corner focusing on Family Reunification. Geeta is a resettlement professional in the U.S. and the Refugee Congress Delegate for the state of Texas. She will be speaking about her experience of family separation and reunification and noting best practices and recommendations.
Linked Event: In coordination with the FRUN, RefugePoint will be co-hosting an evening reception on family reunification at the Red Cross Museum. The program will feature refugee leaders and senior representatives from UNHCR and the Red Cross and will be an opportunity to highlight some of the contributors to the multistakeholder pledge on family reunification.
Labor Mobility
Multistakeholder Pledge Leadership: RefugePoint is a member of the Global Task Force on Refugee Labor Mobility, which co-leads the Multistakeholder pledge on skills-based complementary pathways.
Parallel High-Level Event: RefugePoint CEO Sasha Chanoff and RefugePoint Board Member Nasra Ismail will speak at a High Level Side Event on Refugee Labor Mobility.
Linked Event: Both Sasha and Nasra will reprise their roles at a high-level evening reception featuring speakers from the whole society, including UN organizations and corporate leaders. Both events work toward RefugePoint’s goal of demonstrating a refugee-centered model for labor mobility for the world and for our partners.
George Orwell, Gaza, and “The Debasement of Language”
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell wrote these words, which come at the end of his essay “Politics and the English Language,” in 1946. He could be writing them from the grave today and thinking of ways in which language is being used in the context of the so-called “Israel-Gaza war.” “In our time,” Orwell says, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He is not alluding to falsehoods or fallacies, but to words and phrases that keep us from the facts, or from the effect the facts would otherwise have on us. His essay is about “debased language”: language that defends the indefensible by preventing us from thinking.
Day after day, as Israel has laid waste to Gaza, unspeakable atrocities have been spoken about in language that robs them of their horror. Israel’s relentless devastation of Gaza, the destruction of 40% of homes in the strip (at the time of writing), as well as hospitals and infrastructure, the blockade on fuel and electricity and other vital services, the killing, the maiming, the terrorizing, the aerial bombardment that has wiped out entire families, the mass displacement of 1.9 million people (at the time of writing), all this is indescribable.
Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. Perhaps we should remember this more often. Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss, and despair. This means suppressing the impulse to appropriate the facts for our agendas, or resisting the urge to smother those facts with words that cushion their impact, euphemisms that soften their blow. Sometimes we should just stand open-mouthed, without a political analysis falling fully formed from our lips. There are times when we need to stop talking in order to start thinking—thinking politically. Now is such a time.
Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. . . . Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss and despair.
Orwell writes in his essay: “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed …” Phrases do not have to be around for long in order to become hackneyed. A turn of speech can turn into a cliché almost overnight, provided there is a sufficient incentive. People will latch onto it with alacrity if it helps to conceal an inconvenient truth or to take cover from the implications of their own unbearable position. Take, for example, “humanitarian pause,” a phrase that has become a commonplace in the last couple of months. There has, so far, been one temporary ceasefire, which was towards the end of November 2023. But Israel could not be clearer about its intentions: to continue to lay waste to Gaza. And that is just what they have done, blasting whole neighborhoods to smithereens. Yet there are calls for more “humanitarian pauses.” How reassuring the word “humanitarian” is! But whom does it console: the people of Gaza or the people who utter the phrase? Sara Roy asks: “What does a pause mean in the middle of such carnage? Does it mean feeding people so they can survive to be killed the next day? How is that humanitarian? How is that humane?” But critiquing a mindless mantra or a hackneyed turn of speech is a thankless task. The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.
Sleep-talking can also take the form of stringing together stock items of vocabulary, “ready-made phrases,” as Orwell calls them, letting them “construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you.” Or, to put it differently, they make the act of thinking passive. They do this according to a kind of algorithm, dictated by a political ideology or program. “It is at this point,” Orwell observes, “that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” What could be more debased than a jargon that turns barbarism into justice, atrocity into progress, so as to get the facts to fit a preconceived frame? Consider this set of facts about the actions of Hamas or its allies during its incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023: around 1,200 people killed in “more than 20 different locations”; in kibbutz Be’eri alone, “at least 100 people slaughtered … dragged from their homes and murdered”; women “raped before they were shot”; over 200 people abducted as hostages, “including infants, children, and elderly people.” Here is how these horrific facts were reflected in the banner headline of a “progressive” newspaper two days later: “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.” In this headline, the horrific is turned into the heroic at a stroke. By a kind of verbal alchemy, civilian victims of the crimes committed on October 7th become mere tokens of a state: personifications of Israel, not persons in their own right. It is the Israeli state (“racist Israel”) that was raped, not individual women; the state that was murdered and abducted, not infants or children or the elderly. Similarly, an eminent Israeli historian, but coming to the defense of Israel, declared : “On 7 October Israel [itself] was raped …” You could say this is hyperbole, but it amounts to theft: stealing the ordeal of rape from the women who experienced it and transferring it to a theoretical entity, the state. To recall Orwell’s words: “the concrete melts into the abstract.” In the banner headline that I have quoted, the flesh-and-blood victims of horrendous acts are erased by a phrase “racist Israel.” Even Israel is not the ultimate villain or target, as the subhead, via a dubious historical comparison, explains: “Like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, the Palestinians’ surprise attack has humbled imperialism.” Jargon (“imperialism”) has the last word.
The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.
Moreover, in these two sentences (the headline and the subhead), Hamas’s onslaught is referred to as “Palestinian resistance,” regardless of whether or not this is how Palestinians themselves see it. The synonymy is assumed. But this is a matter for Palestinians themselves to debate and to decide, not something for a person or group in faraway Britain to decree. In this scheme of things, however, Palestinians do not count in their own right, any more than Israelis do. They count only as representatives of (to quote another phrase from the article) “the oppressed.” It is quite an achievement to write an article about the strife between Palestinians and Israelis in which Israelis and Palestinians come into the picture only as stand-ins for “oppressor” and “oppressed.” This article—and there are many others like it—is a helpful demonstration of how “the debasement of language” degrades political thinking. For thinking is not political unless it is grounded, and it is not grounded when, to quote Orwell again, “the concrete melts into the abstract.”
In the passage in which Orwell talks about “the defence of the indefensible,” he immediately illustrates the point with a scenario that is uncannily recognizable. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside … the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” Substitute “Israel’s right to defend itself” for “pacification” (and maybe “tents” for “huts”), and the picture corresponds to the here and now. Perhaps he really is writing from the grave.
True, President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rushi Sunak, and other world leaders who assert Israel’s right to defend itself, add that Israel should act within international humanitarian law (or “the laws of war”). But add is the operative word. The emphasis falls repeatedly on the former, giving the clear impression that the right of the state has priority over the human rights of the Palestinian population of Gaza: “Israel has the right, but…” The “but” is an echo of the refrain, “We stand with Israel,” which Biden and Sunak and other world leaders have declared from the start. (Or, as Sunak said, shaking hands with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, “We want you to win.”) The sound of the refrain, like background noise, never fades, even if we are not aware of hearing it. This too is how speech can confuse and mislead. Language is an instrument. And Biden, Sunak, and the others, are like a collective Nero, fiddling while Gaza burns.
What language can prevent, language can promote: thinking politically. This requires using words that bridge the gap between the concrete and the abstract, without either flinching from the facts or appropriating them for the sake of a cherished theory or agenda. Only thus can we broach the most political of questions, not least for Palestinians and Israelis: how to share the common spaces we inhabit, so as to advance the common good. This, apart from the diagnoses of linguistic malpractices, is what I take from Orwell’s essay—a prophetic blast from the past, which speaks powerfully to us in the present abysmal moment.
The VII Foundation Annual Report 2022/23.
Navigating Green Corridors in Ukraine
Click the photo below for the full essay (PDF):
Walcott Prize Winner - MOSAB ABU TOHA
THIS YEAR’S WINNER:
Arrowsmith Press, in conjunction with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and The Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, are delighted to announce that the winner of the third annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is Mosab Abu Tohafor Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear published by City Lights. The winner was selected by author Canisia Lubrin from a short list of twelve finalists.
About Abu Toha’s work, Lubrin writes:
Here is a book which revels at an impossible pitch, the potent will to live heart-first in confrontation with life under brutal siege. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a supertonic glossary of sorrows so extreme it bends the brace of language into fortifying, never-naïve, elegy. Toha’s meticulous, and often brief, lines thread his own breathing witness into a poetry of mighty resolve, insisting poetry itself be worthy of a Palestinian lament. Toha insists on these songs, holding each by their own powerful weight and bond, into this rippling of a future out beyond the page. This is a work of great restraint and abundant attention presented as always waiting in the routine arrangements of the day-to-day. Such grace and understanding, daring because necessary, necessary because how powerful it is to hear a voice cut so sharply through today. So haunting, so searing, and above all, so lit by Mosab Abu Toha’s vibrant—what else to call it?—love.
Author Bio
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. The collection won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Journal, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.
Abu Toha will receive a $2,000 cash prize. Established in 2019, the annual prize is for a book in English or English translation by a living poet writing in any language who is not a US citizen (green card holders welcome) published in the previous calendar year.
To learn more about this book or to purchase it, visit: https://citylights.com/general-poetry/things-you-may-find-hidden-in-my-ear/
Submissions for the 2023 Walcott Prize are now open. To learn more, visit:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/walcott
The View from My Window in Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha
Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller
It is Thursday, October 12th, and half sheets of paper are falling from the sky in Beit Lahia, the city in northern Gaza where my family’s house is. Each sheet is printed with an Israeli military emblem, along with a warning: stay away from Hamas military sites and militants, and leave your homes immediately.
When I go downstairs, I find my parents and siblings packing their bags. Local schools, many of them run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, are already crowded with displaced families. But my uncle has called my mother to say that we can stay with his wife’s family in Jabalia camp, the largest of Gaza’s refugee settlements and home to tens of thousands of people.
My wife, sister-in-law, mother, sisters, and children travel to the camp by car. My older brother, brother-in-law, and I ride our bicycles. On the road, we see dozens of families, walking with whatever they can carry. Israel will soon tell more than a million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate immediately, an order that the U.N. calls “impossible.”
That night, around 8:30, a blast lights up the apartment where we have taken refuge. Dust fills every corner of the room. I hear screams as loud as the explosion. I go outside, but I can hardly walk because the lanes are filled with stone and rebar. My brother-in-law’s car, about fifty metres away, is on fire. Nearby, a house is burning. On the second floor, which no longer has any walls, I can see an injured woman hanging over the edge of the building, holding a motionless child.
The houses in Jabalia are so small that the street becomes your living room. You hear what your neighbors talk about, smell what they cook. Many lanes are less than a metre wide. After two days in the camp, on Saturday morning, my family has no bread to eat. Israel has cut Gaza’s access to electricity, food, water, fuel, and medicine. I look for bakeries, but hundreds of people are queuing outside each one. I remember that, two days before the escalation, we bought some pita. It is sitting in my fridge in Beit Lahia.
I decide to return home, but not to tell my wife or mother, because they would tell me not to go. The bike ride takes me ten minutes. The only people in the street are walking in the opposite direction, carrying clothes and blankets and food. It is frightening not to see any local children playing marbles or football. This is not my neighborhood, I think to myself.
On the main street leading to my house, I find the first of many shocking scenes. A shop where I used to take my children, to buy juice and biscuits, is in shambles. The freezer, which used to hold ice cream, is now filled with rubble. I smell explosives, and maybe flesh.
I ride faster. I turn left, toward my house.
Iwas born in Al-Shati refugee camp, which is one of the eight camps in the Gaza Strip. In 2000, just as the second Palestinian uprising started, my father decided to move us to Beit Lahia. When we arrived at our new house, there were no windows and the floor had no tiles. The water pipes in the kitchen and bathroom were exposed.
In 2010, my father took out a loan to buy the land next door. With my mother, he planted fruit trees—guava, lemon, orange, peach, and mango—and vegetables. As a hobby, he started raising hens, ducks, rabbits, and pigeons in the garden.
After I got married in 2015, I built my apartment on top of theirs. My wife and I could see the border with Israel out our bedroom window. My children could see our neighbor’s olive and lemon trees.
In 2021, when I returned from a fellowship in the United States, my parents generously refreshed my apartment, buying new plates, glasses, rugs, and a desk. They had shelves installed for all the books I brought back. They also had the ceiling painted with a pattern that I love. In the center is a big brown-and-yellow star, and around it are little triangles, circles, and a rainbow. The shapes and colors seem to embrace and coexist with one another, like strangers who share the same floor of a building. The moment I saw it, I knew how much love my parents had for me.
I expect to be the only person on my street, but as I approach my building, I am surprised to find my neighbor Jaleel. He has a cigarette in one hand and a watering can in the other. As he waters his strawberry plants, he tells me that his wife and sister-in-law are inside, doing laundry, filling water bottles, and stuffing food into plastic bags. His family is sheltering in a school. It has no clean water and the toilets are dirty, but they have no other options.
I am relieved to find my building still standing. I walk up the stairs to my third-floor apartment, stopping first in the kitchen. The fridge and freezer doors are open, just as we left them. There has been so little electricity that everything perishable has started to rot. But the bread is holding up.
I go into my library, where I normally work on my poems, stories, and essays. I have spent hours here, reading writers like Kahlil Gibran, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Karr, and Mahmoud Darwish. Everything is coated in dust. Some of my books have fallen off the shelves. A window is broken. I take some candy out of my desk drawer, for the kids.
Finally, I go into the living room. As always, the windows are open. I wish I could close them, especially on freezing winter days. The shock wave that follows explosions, however, would shatter the glass—and who now has the money to repair windows in Gaza? The curtains, which blow madly toward me during bombings, flutter in the breeze.
I sit on the couch and stare up at the colorful shapes on my ceiling. They still shine with fresh paint. Three lamps dangle down at me—two that are connected to the electrical grid, and a third that runs on battery power, for when the electricity goes out. None of them are working now.
Afternoon comes with an unusual heat. Outside, instead of the usual sounds of motorbikes and ice-cream trucks, I hear the whirring of drones. There are no students coming home from school, no cars taking families to the beach, no birds chirping in our garden trees. I hear ambulances and fire trucks, news on the radio, and sporadic blasts, which sometimes become incessant. All mingle in a strange new soundtrack.
A fly seems to be stuck in my living room. There is not much point in shooing it, but I open the window all the way, pulling the curtains aside. Then, suddenly, an explosion shoves me back. It shakes the earth, the house, my heart. Books tumble from my shelves.
I grab my phone and take some pictures. Two bombs have landed about fifty metres from each other, perhaps two kilometres away from where I am standing. Have they hit a farm, a tree, a home, a family? It is not only the explosions that kill us but also the smashing of houses that used to protect us from the elements.
Birds soar into the sky; one falls before rising. Maybe a stone has landed on its back. Who will dress its wounds? We barely have doctors for people.
I return to the couch. Notifications on my phone share breaking news: “Two big explosions in Beit Lahia. More details soon.” I wonder what has happened to the fly. Perhaps it was a warning to both of us: don’t move.
One idea in particular haunts me, and I cannot push it away. Will I, too, become a statistic on the news? I imagine myself dying while hearing my own name on the radio.
I remember a day in 2020, when my wife and I experienced a snowstorm in Syracuse, New York. People came out of their houses, wondering aloud whether the electricity had failed. I think of how my wife and I smiled. I told her, “If they were to live in Gaza, they would spend most of their time outside their houses, wondering.”
I’m still looking at the ceiling. No flies anymore. I make some tea but forget to sip it. Now dust from the two explosions is settling on the couches, rug, and table. I close the windows a little, leaving some space for air.
I have forgotten to mention the dogs barking. I don’t usually hear them, but since the Israeli attacks have escalated, they have been making noise. At night, they seem to cry.
The ceiling appears to be staring at me. I shut my eyes. When I open them, the big star, the circles and triangles, and the rainbow have not moved. The way they cling to the ceiling reminds me of a baby on its mother’s breast. For a moment, I wish that I were a baby.
I hear another blast but don’t see any smoke. Panic runs through me. When you can’t see the explosion, you feel like you’re blind. I think of the refugee camp where I left my family, imagining my seven-year-old daughter, Yaffa. She never asks me, “Daddy, who’s bombing us?” Instead, she cries and tells me, “Daddy, it’s a bomb! I’m scared. I want to hide.”
I call my wife, Maram. She tells me that everyone is “fine.” Our kids “are watching videos on YouTube,” she says. That’s the only thing that can distract them from the explosions.
From the kitchen, I fetch twelve eggs, some beef and chicken, and the bread. I don’t take any pots or pans, for fear that Israeli drone operators would mistake them for guns or rockets. I take an extra charger from the library. Before I can leave, I notice the pile of books on my desk. It seems to be waiting for me to take one, to carry it to the garden for an afternoon of reading among the fruit trees. How I wish that I could drink some lemonade or guava juice now.
More notifications are lighting up my phone. Sometimes I decide not to check the news. We are part of it, I think to myself.
I catch my breath on the couch one more time. I cannot take my eyes off the ceiling. I imagine it falling in on me, just as so many homes have fallen in on so many families in the past seven days, killing them in the rubble of their own rooms. What will kill me? The little triangles? A piece of rainbow? The brown-and-yellow star?
Then I ride back to Jabalia camp, feeling the eyes of bystanders on my plastic bags of food. I can see from the way they look at me that they, too, would like to return to their homes and fetch what they need.
As I approach “our” house, I wind through streets that are strewn with stones and shrapnel. I ride slowly and carefully, hoping that my tire won’t burst under the weight that I’m carrying. Families are walking around, and children are playing hopscotch in the lanes. I can only imagine their panic at the sound of a tire popping.