Gaza Writes Back Read online

  The raw humanity, tenderness, and defiance in this collection of short stories by young Palestinians in Gaza stands as a testament to the resilience, moral fortitude, and beauty of oppressed and violated people everywhere. The writers are barely in their twenties and though their lives echo of bombs, bullets, and Israel's intentional programs to dismantle them, their stories teach us what it means to have an unconquered spirit and unbroken will. These are the next generation of Palestinian writers and intellectuals. We should all nurture their voices, lift them up, and read their stories then pass them on.

  —SUSAN ABULHAWA

  Author, My Voice Sought the Wind and Mornings in Jenin

  What these stories provide, more than anything, is a human side to a conflict that remains largely faceless to the rest of the world. These stories are about parents and children, neighbors and friends, all of whom share a common tragedy.

  Gaza Writes Back illustrates the power of the pen in offering a narrative that has otherwise been suppressed by decades of misinformation. It also takes a critical look within Palestinian society to highlight important issues.

  In a land where hope is the most precious commodity passed down through the generations, these stories provide a tangible platform for silenced voices to be heard and means towards gaining some dignity for a wounded nation.

  —RAMZY BAROUD

  Author, My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story

  These are stories that will give you for the first time the vivid texture of life and death as young Gazans felt them through Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9. These are intimate tales of devastation—sharp as a knife and unforgettable. Families, playmates, or the writers themselves, are maimed or killed in a flash by Israeli firepower, but this new generation is writing as a form of resistance.

  Here are poignant echoes of the stories of Ghassan Kanafani. (He was assassinated in Beirut in 1972, but his stories have never died.) Forty years on these new stories of children’s dreams and deaths are being written by nearly two dozen Kanafanis. The book’s skillful editor sets the context with a brilliant opening quotation from the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe: “Storytellers are a threat….they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit.”

  —VICTORIA BRITTAIN

  Author, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror

  These Gaza short stories should be required reading for all because they create awareness and awareness leads to understanding and understanding leads to change.

  —MICHELLE COHEN CORASANTI

  Author, The Almond Tree

  This collection of marvelous first-hand stories expresses as only good literature can the feel of life and death in Gaza. Here are moving, poignant snapshots of real experience which will haunt and fascinate the reader with their eloquence. It is time that Gazans spoke out against their dehumanization and the world heard them. Essential reading to understand what has been done to Gaza and how its brave people remain unbowed.

  —Dr. GHADA KARMI

  Author, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

  This volume of short stories marks the fifth anniversary of the infamous 2008–9 Israeli attack on Gaza, “Operation Cast Lead.” Our familiarity with what happened then does not lessen the power of the cruel lines etched into their writers’ memories, nor disguise their need to write and thus master the terrible realities of Palestinian life.

  For anyone who values the raw voice of human experience over the rarefied refinements of professional writing, these short stories will come as a shock. Instead of the sanitized and heartless statistics of the toll taken by those weeks, or the impersonal photographs and official reports that record the brutal attack and the occupation, we have lightly fictionalized intimate, personal accounts of the lived experiences. Though death, illness and horrific violence stalk every page, the stories and their writers shine through as strong, truthful, and sometimes even cheerful or romantic. Always, however, they clearly represent an unspoken determination to resist the violence, and a brave resolve not to surrender to despair.

  —JEAN SAID MAKDISI

  Author, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir

  Gaza Writes Back…takes us up close and personal into the minds of a young articulate Palestinian generation born stateless, under occupation, and growing into adulthood under siege in one of the world’s most oppressed and dangerous environments.

  This is a generation that is physically confined within Israel’s walls and emotionally scarred by Israel’s relentless bombings and incursions…. This book expresses anger at the uncertainty of life while the writers continue to cling to faith and hope….

  The overwhelming voices of young female writers and their refined eloquence and capacity to express dissent not only challenge our stereotypical perception of Palestinians and women in Gaza in particular, but they also challenge the norms within Palestinian society itself….

  This book is a promise of a change in societal norms and a positive sign of what is to come. Despite the horror, the frustration, the physical and emotional scars, the voices in Gaza Writes Back have not given up on their ambitions and have not resigned their dreams for a better future.

  —SAMAH SABAWI

  Palestinian writer, originally from Gaza

  ABOUT

  JUST WORLD BOOKS

  TIMELY BOOKS FOR CHANGING TIMES

  Just World Books was founded in 2010 by Helena Cobban, a social activist, veteran writer and researcher on world affairs, and member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Her goal in founding the company was to expand the range of the discourse in the United States and worldwide on vital international issues.

  The first titles that JWB published were in the field of diplomacy and public policy, focusing on the Middle East. In 2012, we added a new, more “cultural” dimension to our list with a memoir by Israeli-American peace activist Miko Peled: The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. In 2013, we published the award-winning cookbook The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, and then Susan Abulhawa’s poetry collection, My Voice Sought the Wind.

  Just World Books is delighted that Gaza Writes Back now further strengthens our cultural presence. Later in 2014, we’ll be publishing a graphic-form memoir by the young Palestinian-American artist Leila Abdul Razzaq. Our publishing of timely, policy-related titles also continues.

  Visit our website to buy additional copies of Gaza Writes Back, to learn how to make bulk purchases for bookstores or citizen groups, and to learn about the rest of our list!

  www.justworldbooks.com

  Just World Books is an imprint of Just World Publishing, LLC.

  All text in this work and the author photos: © 2014 Refaat Alareer.

  Cover photo © 2013 Alyateema Almqdsia.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. Visit our website, www.justworldbooks.com.

  Typesetting by Jane T. Sickon for Just World Publishing, LLC.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

  Gaza writes back : short stories from young writers in

  Gaza, Palestine / Refaat Alareer, editor.

  pages cm

  LCCN 2013953421

  ISBN 978-1-935982-43-2

  1. Short stories. 2. Gaza Strip--Fiction.

  3. Arab-Israeli conflict--Fiction. 4. Palestinian Arabs--Fiction. I. Alareer, Refaat, editor.

  PR9570.G392G39 2014 823’.0108092

&
nbsp; QBI13-600198

  To Palestine, To Gaza

  And despite Israel’s death sentences

  Like lead

  Cast upon the head,

  Gnawing at our life,

  Clinging to it like a flea to a kitten,

  And stuffed in our throats

  The moment we say “Amen”

  To the prayers of old women and men

  Blocking their ways to God,

  We dream and pray,

  Clinging to life even harder

  Every time a dear one’s life

  Is forcibly rooted up.

  We live. We live.

  We do.

  Contents

  Editor’s Introduction

  Note About Some of the Words Used

  The Stories

  L for Life, by Hanan Habashi

  One War Day, by Mohammed Suliman

  Spared, by Rawan Yaghi

  Canary, by Nour Al-Sousi

  The Story of the Land, by Sarah Ali

  Toothache in Gaza, by Sameeha Elwan

  Will I Ever Get Out?, by Nour Al-Sousi

  A Wall, by Rawan Yaghi

  A Wish for Insomnia, by Nour El Borno

  Bundles, by Mohammed Suliman

  On a Drop of Rain, by Refaat Alareer

  Please Shoot to Kill, by Jehan Alfarra

  Omar X, by Yousef Aljamal

  We Shall Return, by Mohammed Suliman

  From Beneath, by Rawan Yaghi

  Just Fifteen Minutes, by Wafaa Abu Al-Qomboz

  House, by Refaat Alareer

  Neverland, by Tasnim Hamouda

  Lost at Once, by Elham Hilles

  It’s My Loaf of Bread, by Tasnim Hamouda

  Once Upon a Dawn, by Shahd Awadallah

  The Old Man and the Stone, by Refaat Alareer

  Scars, by Aya Rabah

  About the Writers

  Acknowledgments

  Editor’s Introduction

  Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all

  champions of control, they frighten usurpers

  of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit… .

  —Chinua Achebe,

  in Anthills of the Savannah

  Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland, and we love our homeland even more because of the story.

  This is the first book of its kind. Gaza Writes Back records and commemorates, in fiction, the fifth anniversary of the full-scale military offensive Israel launched on Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009, the so-called “Operation Cast Lead.” Written by young writers from Gaza, the stories included here present, in English, a much-needed Palestinian youth narrative without the mediation or influences of translation or of non-Palestinian voices. Gaza Writes Back comes to resist Israel’s attempts to murder these emerging voices, to squander the suffering of the martyrs, to bleach the blood, to dam the tears, and to smother the screams. This book shows the world that despite Israel’s continuous attempts to kill steadfastness in us, Palestinians keep going on, never surrendering to pain or death, and always seeing and seeking liberty and hope in the darkest of times. Gaza Writes Back provides conclusive evidence that telling stories is an act of life, that telling stories is resistance, and that telling stories shapes our memories. Sameeha Elwan, a contributor to this book, noted in particular that, “Cyberspace, as a newly centralized space in which the act of storytelling is constantly in process, provides scattered Palestinians with a place which holds new possibilities of forging new ways of belonging or place-making.”

  Stories and narratives, part of every human gathering, enable people to make sense of their past and relate it to their present; they can be the main thread attaching them to their past, and they can present the form of a dream yet to be fulfilled. Palestinians in particular have grown to cherish, and to seek, stories. Indeed, storytelling is itself a major theme of some of the stories in this book, because the writers know well that stories outlive every other human experience. No family gathering ever lacks one or more stories of those good old days when Palestine was the Palestine that current generations have not known or experienced directly. And since everyone has been subjected to stories and storytelling, there is a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word “occupation” is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation, and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with. These horrendous Israeli practices and many others, Palestinian writers—particularly the young ones—capture and materialize in the form of narratives in an attempt to make sense of the senseless context around them and in search of their Palestine. Theirs, while it sometimes is rendered metaphorically, can be a beautiful reality. Palestine is a martyr away, a tear away, a missile away, or a whimper away. Palestine is a story away.

  Operation Cast Lead

  Operation Cast Lead was deeply traumatic for all of us who were in Gaza at the time. But looked at in perspective it was only one in a series of very deadly assaults that the Israeli military, and before 1948 the Jewish militias in Palestine, have launched against Palestine’s indigenous population. In the fighting of 1947–48, the Jewish and Israeli forces assailed Palestinian villages and towns both inside and far beyond the borders that the United Nations had “given” to the Jewish state, and they drove out as many Palestinians as they could from the areas they brought under Israel’s control. In 1956, Israel invaded Gaza and all of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, visiting many terrible massacres on the people of Gaza. In 1967, Israel invaded Gaza again, and also the whole of the West Bank including East Jerusalem. It held these areas under the temporary situation that international lawyers call “foreign military occupation”; forty-five years later, it still holds them, controlling the populations of both areas under the iron grip of military law. In the West Bank, the Israeli authorities have implanted more than 600,000 Israeli civilian settlers into the area in direct defiance of international law. Around Gaza, it has maintained a tight siege, punctuated by eruptions of savage and deadly violence. For many years, Israel’s well-armed military battled Palestinian freedom fighters and sowed terror in Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon. Its secret services have assassinated Palestinian intellectuals and suspected leaders in Beirut, Tunis, Norway, Malta, Dubai—and many times in the West Bank and Gaza… .

  Even when viewed through the lens of this history, the impacts of Israel’s Cast Lead assault on Gaza were far-reaching. The death and destruction that Israel indiscriminately flung upon the heads of the Gazan people caused more than 1,400 deaths, more than 5,000 injuries, and the destruction or severe damage of more than 11,000 homes and innumerable industrial buildings, shops, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. The sudden deaths and bombing, and the first scenes of the torn bodies of scores of police cadets, left scars in the souls and hearts of all Palestinians and of free people around the world, as social media outlets allowed for the first time minute-by-minute coverage. More and more people around the globe started mobilizing for Gaza. And more and more people started writing. The strikes that claimed the lives of hundreds of police cadets, school children, and civilians also kindled a grand passion among many Palestinians, especially in Gaza, for writing.

  During the offensive, Palestinians in Gaza realized more than ever before that no one, no matter who and no matter where, is immune from Israel’s fire. Israel cast lead indiscriminately hither and thither, aiming to melt not just our bodies, which it did, but also our allegiance and our hope and our memories, which it could not do. Twenty-three days later, the people of Gaza rose to dust themselves off and to start an arduous journey of rebuilding houses and infrastructure, and reconstructing what the missiles had dispersed and scattered. Twenty-three days of nonstop Israeli hate and hostility—and Gaza rose fr
om it like a phoenix.

  The people who queued at the morgues and bade farewell to their loved ones days later queued at bakeries that did not raise their prices, and went out to the grocery stores that also did not raise their prices. And they came back home to distribute what little they bought to the people who were unable to buy because they did not have the money. The people of Gaza were never this close before. Gaza was now more deeply rooted not only in the hearts of every Palestinian, but also in the hearts of every free soul around the globe. Gaza stood head and shoulders above all else. Gaza never stooped. Gaza taught us to fight oppression with what little we have, by any means necessary. Gaza taught us never to kneel, and not even to think of it. That is why we produced this book: to honor this feature in Gaza. But this is not to romanticize war. War is by all means ugly. “There was too much pain in those twenty-three days, and some of us who wrote about Cast Lead, did so to heal some of the pain caused by the horrendous memories. And no matter how beautiful the spirit of resistance that overwhelmed us, this beauty should never override the ugliness of pure injustice,” as Sameeha Elwan put it.

  Many swore to fight back, many others swore to cover their backs, and some Gazans took to their pens, or their keyboards. They swore to expose Israel’s aggressiveness and write, in English, so that the whole world could get to know the so-called “only democracy” in the Middle East, that two years before 2008 had, with the help of the Western powers, smothered a newly born democracy in Palestine. These bloggers and activists are the ones who made this book a reality. And like any society, Palestine is not perfect, something the stories touch upon. In addition to addressing occupation issues, the stories also have social purposes, as they never fail to point the finger of accusations, usually symbolically, at aging Palestinian leadership and certain undesired social conventions.

  This is not to suggest that Palestinian fiction writing by emerging young writers is reactive; it’s rather a very creative, proactive response: to resist in words the horrible situations imposed upon them. The time was ripe for this wave of writers to emerge. They have the tools—an excellent command of English and social media skills—the motivation, the enthusiasm, and most importantly the understanding that “writing back” to Israel’s long occupation, constant aggressiveness, and Operation Cast Lead is a moral obligation and a duty they are paying back to Palestine and to a bleeding, yet resilient, Gaza. In addition, writing back is an act of resistance and an obligation to humanity to spread the words to the whole world and to raise awareness among people blinded by multi-million-dollar Israeli campaigns of hasbara (“persuasion,” or more accurately, disinformation.)