Tareq S. Hajjaj
Mondoweiss / October 7, 2024
I have lived through my own Nakba and understand why thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in 1948. I made the most difficult decision of my life and left Gaza, not knowing that what I carried might be all I will ever possess of my homeland.
We spent years inventing new ways of surviving under an Israeli blockade that had lasted for nearly a generation. We always nurtured the feeling that after long years of sacrifice and continuous struggle to achieve our freedom, we would be greeted by a light at the end of the tunnel. The Palestinian people were destined to end the occupation and wrest the right to live on their land and return to the lands of their ancestors.
But even after 76 years since the first Nakba experienced by our ancestors, those same ancestors who left Yaffa, Askalan, and dozens of cities and villages destroyed by Israel in 1948 before they resettled in Gaza, are now reliving the same fate. The massacres they have witnessed, if not similar to the ones they survived 76 years ago, are more criminal and bloody. But what is worse is that the same events they experienced during the Nakba is now being lived by their grandchildren.
There will always be those who will relive the Nakba or experience it for the first time as long as the Israeli occupation of Palestine remains.
I was born in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City. My father lived and worked there like every other father in Gaza who wanted to secure a future for his children. He died while resting assured that his youngest son’s future was secured.
The youngest among my brothers, I started a family of my own and furnished a house. A year later, I had a child who filled our home with joy. I was preparing for the future, already living my dream of starting a family, living in our homeland in a house surrounded by olive and lemon trees, with all my siblings and their families living in the same building or right next door. I already had good neighbours, a life full of memories, the scent of jasmine at the entrance of the house, and almond blossoms that freely entered our home in the spring. My mother used to sit in her house and watch the sunset, with almond blossoms at her feet, their bright colours like stars.
But my home became a bag I carried on my back after the Israeli army destroyed the neighbourhood where I was born and raised. The city whose streets I walked, whose trees I memorized, was now no more. I lived through several wars in that city already, somehow managing to survive like everyone else and move on with my life. But I did not survive this war. I learned too late that the bag that carried everything I owned might end up being everything I will ever possess of my homeland.
Forms of displacement
I could not risk staying in Gaza City, with a family that included my one-year-old child, my wife, and my elderly mother. Every time the Israeli army ordered us to evacuate one place or another, we would do so immediately. We spent months moving under fire.
In the first week of the war, we moved around different parts of Gaza City. Due to the power and internet outage, I would go every day to a cafe next to al-Shifa Hospital to work and return home. I would take the same route, and when I returned home, I would find that the route I took in the morning had changed in the evening due to heavy shelling and bombing.
My home was a short distance away, but I couldn’t go there. The only time I went home was to get some clothes and belongings, as I thought our displacement would be protracted; when I got home, several airstrikes fell nearby, and the house filled up with smoke. I left home without locking the doors. They remained unlocked until we learned that it had been bombed and razed to the ground by the Israeli army.
Everything I knew and lived with my entire life, all my childhood memories and my memories with my parents, the pictures hanging on the walls, and the steps leading to my home, all of it had turned to ash.
When the first warning to evacuate Gaza City was issued, I took my family and went to Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We spent over two months in the city, until Khan Younis was ordered to evacuate as well. We were displaced once again toward Rafah. I remained without my extended family, who were scattered across different displacement centers. Eventually, I was able to leave Gaza entirely.
I’ve experienced internal displacement within my country and forced exile abroad. I can now say with unflinching certainty that displacement within my country is much easier than leaving, despite the continuous bombing, massacres, hunger, and lack of basic life necessities. I learned the hard way that one’s homeland is irreplaceable.
Everything I see outside Gaza, I say to myself, Gaza deserves this — the roads and trees, the airports, the organized and illuminated streets, the freedom of movement. I have cried for a long time for people who continue to live their lives in displacement as a reward for escaping the Israeli killing machine.
All that remains of my homeland is the bag that I carry, the images of destruction on the news, and tears that do not stop.
Journalism in war
Being a journalist in Palestine without international protection and respect for your life is like working with the barrel of a loaded gun always against your head.
I lived amid the genocide for six consecutive months. I was honestly not afraid of death, even when my colleagues at Mondoweiss gave me the choice between ceasing to write at a time when Israel was deliberately targeting outspoken journalists, I chose to write and continue my work. My life was not more precious to me than the truth. But my greatest fear was being killed in the field and leaving my one-year-old child alone in a world that knows no mercy.
I had to live with these feelings of anxiety every time I went out to work on a story, or take a picture, or gather testimonies. It was the fear that my child would wait for me to return, staring at the door and using the word he had just learned — “Baba” — but that I would not open the door.
I watched as dozens of my colleagues were martyred. Had the war not separated us, I would have likely been with them in the field still, like my friends Rushdi Sarraj, Mahmoud al-Naouq, Hassouna Salim, and many other martyred journalists who were killed by Israel either while they were working or in their homes with their families.
Going out on a work mission was like going out into the unknown. I had to hide to avoid detection by Israeli drones that fired indiscriminately on civilians. They might drop a bomb on anyone and kill them, as happened with the journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, whose head was severed from his body by a missile. When it was necessary to go out in a journalistic uniform, I saw two different reactions from people. Some came to tell their bitter story, hoping their voice would reach someone and help them, and others stayed away from me for fear of being targeted. I did not blame anyone because I knew what I was doing was dangerous.
The road to diaspora
Now that I have lived through my own Nakba, I understand the reasons that drove thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948. I left my country to save my family’s lives. After watching my mother suffering from war day after day, eventually dying from a lack of medical treatment, and after searching the markets for days to find formula for my child, I made the most difficult decision of my life.
Even when I decided to leave Gaza, getting out was not easy or affordable. Palestinians had to pay vast sums of money to pass through the Rafah crossing, which the Hamas government in Gaza and the Egyptian authorities ran. With the help of friends, I was able to gather the required amount for my family’s travel, waiting 40 days after paying the money for my name to be added to the list of travelers. After that, my body left Gaza, but my soul and heart never left.
In the diaspora, I can’t own anything, neither house nor land. Not a picture to hang on a wall, or a sea that I can feel like I did in Gaza, my most important companion in times of anxiety that brought me peace.
In the diaspora, the refugee only owns his sorrows, which grow in abundance with every day spent away from home. In the diaspora, it pains me greatly that my son will grow up alone without his cousins who loved to play with him, without his aunts and uncles who looked forward to witnessing his first steps and say his first words. Everyone doted on him because he was the youngest child in the family. Today, it’s difficult to find a child his age to play with.
Should I blame the Palestinian resistance for the October 7 attack? Many international media platforms certainly do. They began their coverage of the war by blaming the Palestinian resistance. For them, the resistance was the instigator of the genocide, completely forgetting Israel’s long and continued history of meting out death and displacement since 1948 in defiance of all international laws and norms. For them, those same international laws that allow a people under occupation to engage in all forms of resistance to liberate their lands do not apply. The world’s double standards tried to portray Palestinians struggling for freedom as criminals who brought this upon themselves.
These are the same media organizations and countries that give unconditional aid to Ukraine and do not begrudge the Ukrainians their right to defend themselves. Yet they accuse the Palestinians, whose cause is far more just and who are attempting to reclaim their occupied homeland, of terrorism.
My house was bombed, my family was displaced multiple times, my mother died because Israel prevented medicine and aid from reaching Gaza, and my entire homeland is now lost to me for an indefinite period of time. But I do not blame the resistance, because without resisting the occupation, the Israelis will continue to shed our blood and carry out their genocide against us. Without resistance, there will be no one to stand in their way.
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Mondoweiss Gaza Correspondent, and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union
