Steve France
Mondoweiss / September 15, 2024
The new book Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture seeks to push back against the dehumanization at the heart of the Gaza genocide by illuminating the human spirit of a place under attack.
DAYBREAK IN GAZA
Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture
Edited by Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia
336 pp, Saqi Books £14.99
A successful genocide requires dehumanization of the victims to overcome any qualms of conscience on the part of the perpetrators and to numb the watching world. As Israel seeks to finish its long war against the Palestinians of Gaza, it has spewed tropes of dehumanization at a fever pitch. But the Palestinians in Gaza have doggedly resisted this even as they have been treated worse than animals. They know that their humanity is and always has been the key to survival and resistance.
Palestinians know also that the world, and especially Americans, must be made aware of their humanity – and humanism – for there to be any hope of international intervention. This is the objective of Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, a new compilation of writings from within the genocide by Gaza’s poets, authors, doctors, scientists, teachers, students, farmers, shopkeepers, children and their parents, etc. The writers share their pain, grief, and dismay – and their love of their captive homeland.
Lead editors, Mahmoud Muna, who runs Jerusalem’s celebrated Educational Bookshop, and Matthew Teller, author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City, write that the book is “an attempt to amplify marginalized voices and illuminate hidden histories to evoke the [human] spirit of a place under attack.” The voices pierce our defenses, each in its own way, providing glimpses of the personal resilience and courage that collectively explain Gaza’s incredible toughness.
Still, “Gazans don’t want to be called superheroes,” the novelist Mahmoud Joudeh writes. The danger of the superhero label, he warns, is that it “eases the consciences of onlookers and justifies their failure to support people in need. Superheroes need nobody, but we are the opposite: we are people just like everyone else.”
Joudeh’s essay is one of almost a hundred personal accounts in Daybreak that expose the dehumanizing lies on which Zionism’s narrative of erasure depends. The book belongs on the shelf of all friends of Palestine, and all believers in human rights, as the fate of Gaza will have a global impact on the future of human rights and morality – not least in America.
Throughout, one can sense the writers implicitly arguing, “We are human, just as much as you, dear world.” They recall small, poignant pleasures of their pre-genocide daily lives in Gaza’s unique refugee community, simple moments we can all relate to. Despite residing in what has long been termed an “open-air prison,” Palestinians found ways to feel glad to be alive there after the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 invasion and occupation, and even during Israel’s cruel, pre-October 7 siege.
“My daily routine was amazing,” Noor Swirki writes. “I started [by] walking beside the sea on the Corniche. After work I’d go to the gym, then spend the evening with my children and friends. We had visits, outdoor activities . . . places to go – we had too many things to do, in fact.” Then she recounts the torments of her current genocide “lifestyle.”
Leila Haddad, author of The Gaza Kitchen, recalls how on summer evenings Jundi Street used to “fill up with families out for a stroll, enjoying the breeze from the sea” and visiting Saqallah’s, the famous pastry shop transplanted from Jaffa after the ancient city’s population was driven out practically overnight in 1948. Even simple pleasures required breaking the siege. Pistachios were prohibited contraband that had to be smuggled in through the tunnels.
In a sort of “let me count the ways” love letter to his Gaza, Ebraheem Matar, an ICU doctor, lists among many things he fears are lost to him forever, “to sit again in that café that serves that amazing coffee and Nutella cake and feel like I’m in the most beautiful city in the world . . . buy fresh fish as soon as it comes out of the sea . . . listen to music with friends while talking, laughing and mocking the world until the morning comes.”
The sea is praised often, along with Gaza’s blue skies and warm sun and sand. Yousef AlKhouri’s mother would say: ‘At least in the evenings, after your dad finished work, we could go to the beach. He’d smoke his cigarette, we’d drink our coffee, and then we’d go back home.’ She said it felt like going to heaven and coming back to hell.”
He continues: “People think of [the sea of Gaza] as a friend, someone you can go and talk to, tell your stories and your worries to share your burdens and know that you won’t be betrayed. … Even now, the first thing people do when there is a pause in the bombardment is go to the beach.” Similarly, Tahani Ghayad, writes, “I used to love gazing at it, as if the sea were reciprocating my emotion, soothing my soul and comforting me.”
Now, however, even the beloved sea, like the blue sky, brings death every day. Dr. Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, a physician with Medical Aid for Palestinians, tells of a break in the bombing when people accepted the “kind invitation of the sea.” He saw many of them “wading into the water with their shower gel and joy. I stop to admire the scene and to learn resilience from it. … Suddenly, I hear engines rising. As I look across the water, I see two gunboats racing towards the beach. As they approach the fishing boats, they open fire. Everyone is terrified and tries to get away.”
The gunners in the gunboats and the killers in the killer jets: they are the people many Americans relate to and take seriously; and never think of as terrorists. Israelis aren’t considered terrorists either when they block food, water, and medicine from reaching dying Gazans. There is always an exonerating explanation or excuse even if we don’t know exactly what it is. The situation is complicated, we are told.
Our distorted but enduring mindset is such a mind-boggling absurdity that architect and anthropologist Khaldun Bshara prefaces his discussion of the restoration of the fine old buildings of Gaza with a wry jab made by fellow contributor Reem Abu Jaber: “We, in Gaza, are fine. But how are you? What about your conscience, values, everything? We’re concerned.”
AlKhouri writes, “We have been misrepresented as bloodthirsty, illiterate terrorists, but we are not. We are a beautiful, life-loving, caring community that will host you, feed you and protect you. The world needs Gazans – people who refuse to give in to despair, who will always find a way to prevail.”
“You cannot erase Gaza,” he concludes. “You can occupy Gaza, you can destroy Gaza, but you will never take it away from us.”
Still, the human fear of dying and disappearing presses hard.
“I am Ahmed and I am afraid that I will die and become a number . . . before I complete what I have to write.” So ends the first entry in Daybreak, from the diary of Ahmed Mortajay on October 13. At a mere 387 words, his contribution is scarcely more than could be squeezed into a “message in a bottle” cast into a vast sea. It picks up the cry of Gazans from before the genocide — “We are not numbers” — their bid to cut through the world’s apathy in the face of the suffocating siege that Israel inflicted on Gazans after 2006 and that led to the October 7 Hamas breakout.
The fear of dissolving into a number recurs. “If the next bomb is for me,” Heba Almaqadma writes, “I will be a number to add to the number of people killed in the genocide – and then I will be forgotten.” An earlier “Genocide Joe” – Joseph Stalin – would have understood, having allegedly said that one death is a tragedy, while a million are just a statistic.
How many Americans will read Daybreak in Gaza? How many will allow themselves to see that “Operation Iron Sword” isn’t a mere spasm of violence? It is Israel’s end game: Destroy all vestige of Palestine. Never mind being a pariah state. Erasure of the Palestinian “tribe” was always the vision of the settlers’ most revered prophet, the rabbi-politician Meir Kahane. For him, becoming a pariah state was an acceptable price to pay — even a badge of being God’s Chosen People.
Hiba Abu Nada of Khan Younis was also a prophet when she wrote in her diary: “Before God, we in Gaza are either martyrs, or witnesses to liberation and we all wait to learn where we will fall. We are all waiting, O God. Your vow is true.”
That evening an Israeli airstrike killed her with her family.
Two days earlier, she had written, “If we die, know that we are willing and steadfast, and tell of us that we are people with a rightful claim.”
Daybreak in Gaza has delivered her testament.
All the different voices rise up, some into the sky like flaming kites, unstoppable gliders, or a swarm of bees; others more like determined turtles, swimming up onto arid sands, overcoming all obstacles, giving birth to the next generation.
Steve France is a journalist and lawyer (now retired) living in the DC area
