Transcript
Nathan Goldman: Welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Nathan Goldman, the managing editor of Jewish Currents. This episode is a recording of a recent online event for Jewish Currents members, co-sponsored by the Beinart Notebook. Editor at large Peter Beinart speaks with Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Douma, three of the editors of the new anthology Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. This volume includes nearly 100 stories from people in Gaza, recorded both before and amid Israel’s ongoing assault. In this conversation, the editors discuss the collection and the process of compiling it and read some of the powerful testimonies it contains. If you become a sustaining member of Jewish Currents, you’ll get real-time access to events like this one, along with a print and digital subscription and much more. You can sign up now at JewishCurrents.org/membership. And with that, here’s the episode.
Peter Beinart: I’m really, really honored to be joined by three guests. We don’t usually have three guests at one time, but our three guests are all editors of a really important new anthology called Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. Let me introduce all three of them: Mahmoud Muna is a writer, publisher, and bookseller from Jerusalem. He runs Jerusalem’s celebrated educational bookshop and the bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, both of which I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting. Matthew Teller is a UK-based writer and broadcaster. He’s written on the Middle East for the BBC, Guardian, Independent Financial Times, and has produced documentaries for BBC Radio and World Service. And Juliette Douma is director of communications for UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She has extensive experience in crisis communications and emergency response and has served as head of communications at the UN Development Program in Baghdad, chief spokesman for the US Special Envoy for Syria, and regional chief of advocacy and communications for the Middle East and North Africa at UNICEF. I’m really grateful to all three of you. I will ask the initial questions, but people should please, as always, put questions in the chat, and I will be very happy to convey some of them.
PB: So Mahmoud, let me start with you. Maybe just tell me a little bit about how this book came to be, how you came to this idea of this really quite remarkable feat of—in the midst of this absolute destruction of Gaza—of reaching out and finding so many Palestinians in Gaza to write about their experiences, both over the last year and even before.
Mahmoud Muna: Thank you, Peter. It’s a great opportunity to be here with you. Let me start by saying, I think I talk for everyone here in this state of mind that we were all in last year—exactly 12 months ago, a couple of months into this—and we were all trying to reach out for our friends and trying to reach for our loved ones, the few that we knew in Gaza; checking on them, making sure they’re okay almost daily. And the conversations we were having with them started to shrink, getting shorter and shorter. Questions like, “How are you?” became a very difficult question to ask—and an impossible question to answer. So we were all struggling on how to maintain our relationship in the most humane way in times when things seemed to be lacking humanity. And I went back after Christmas, January, to my friends, and I started not to ask them, “How are you,” but to ask them, “Tell me more. Tell me more about your life, tell me more about your family, tell me about your work, about your neighborhood, about the environment you lived in.”
MM: For someone like me, who lived in Jerusalem for all his life, had no chance to go to Gaza, actually, I wanted to learn also about the Strip itself and the population. And I’m a great believer that people make cities. So if you want to understand a city, you should really understand its people. So that’s instigated, for me and for others, the need to write this book. I must say something else as well: In the beginning of the war, I was getting a lot of journalists and a lot of people who were coming to the city and hoped to go to Gaza to report eventually from within. But they all were blocked, and they all ended up staying in hotels. All of them were reporting about Gaza from their hotel rooms. And many of them were actually new to the Middle East. Everyone who stayed two nights in a hotel in Dubai became a Middle East expert, and they all were telling me about what happened, what should happen, what’s going to happen. Mostly male, white, middle-class people coming to tell me and lecture me about what’s going on in my country. And I was aware that the missing voice was the voice of the Gazans. We are not hearing their stories. So two things came together: My desire to reach out for my friends, and my desire to add this layer of humanity that was missing in reporting.
PB: Thank you. Matthew, can you talk a little bit about how you went about actually assembling this very large number of pieces from Gaza when people there are living in just unimaginable conditions? Can you just talk a little bit about the process?
Matthew Teller: Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s an incredible testament to the people of Gaza, the people that we spoke to, that they were, in the midst of this just appalling unspeakable genocidal situation, were able and willing to speak. There was a process in the first part of this year—as Mahmoud was saying, 12 months ago, and slightly less—when we were trying to get the book off the ground and looking for publishers. And we found a publisher in the end, a small publisher in London, independent publisher called Saqi, who has a long track record in fiction and nonfiction from the Middle East. So once we had the green light to go ahead, it was a process of activating the networks that all four of us, the four editors of this book, and also the publishers have.
MT: So, Mahmoud obviously has a huge network based in the bookshop in Jerusalem. Juliette has her network through UNRWA. She’s based in Amman, but she goes to and from Gaza all the time. Our fourth editor, Jayyab Abusafia, is a journalist, born and brought up in Jabalia in Gaza, who now lives and works in London. And I have a long connection with Palestine and working in and around the Middle East. So it was a case of activating our networks as best we could, as sensitively as we could as well, trying to stay aware throughout that there is a process that’s familiar to people in the region and elsewhere of exploitation, where journalists will come in and take a story and leave and never be seen or heard of again. And it was very important to us, obviously, not to do that and to try and get across the idea that this is a project of value, that we are also trustworthy as well.
MT: And many, many people did put their trust in us, which now is a responsibility. There’s a burden there that we feel in carrying these stories forward. I was interviewing people face-to-face in London and over Zoom in different cities in the US and in France and in cities in Europe as well, and also in the Middle East. Jayyab was in Cairo, also interviewing people face-to-face, and also on the phone as well. The same with Juliette. Mahmoud, too. Mahmoud was meeting and interviewing people in Jerusalem but also contacting people, initially through phone and through WhatsApp. That became increasingly difficult during the spring, when the bombardment got worse, and conditions deteriorated, and people were being displaced en masse, and connections were often dropping. And we very often found that we were contacting people, sometimes by text, sending questions, or making contact by text and then sending questions. And then people would choose to reply by voice note. Often, we would wake up in the morning, and there’d be voice notes overnight because that was when connections were most stable and when people were able to respond. Mahmoud tells this story about an interview that he was doing with a particular person when the connection fell. Mahmoud, do you want to take that?
MM: Yeah. I was interviewing in the afternoon, and the line was bad, and I was not hearing each other. And then, he said, “Look, call me at midnight, and I will move somewhere where there’s internet, and then we can have a longer conversation.” And instantly I was like, “Of course. That’s great. I’ll call you at midnight.” Only a second later, it occurred to me that someone is actually traveling at midnight, which is the peak and the most risky of time in Gaza at the time, in the dark somewhere, just to have internet so he can talk to me. And that sense of responsibility, I think, was harnessed in a way, in that moment and the feeling of trust that people are putting into us.
MT: So it was a process of gathering voices as best we could. There were also pieces that are previously published as well. There’s a poem by Mahmoud Darwish we included. There’s a short story by Ghassan Kanafani—we found the rights to be able to reproduce that. Very, very proud indeed to be able to bring that amazing story to a wider audience. That was written when he was very young, and when he was about 19, in 1956, he wrote a story called Letter from Gaza. Enormously powerful, incredible piece of writing from Kanafani. So that’s included as well. There’s a multitude of different voices that we tried to reach, specifically moving beyond the circle of writers and artists and poets who are often represented and who often are to reach a Western audience much better than the people we try to reach as well: shopkeepers, café owners, students, teachers, athletes, all sorts of different people from different walks of life.
PB: Thank you. Let me go to you, Juliette: What do you think are some of the stereotypes that people outside of Gaza have about people in Gaza that this book challenges? And even people who might think of themselves as sympathetic to Palestinians in Gaza and upset about what’s happening to them can sometimes reduce the people living in Gaza into very caricatured or flat stereotypes. And I’m wondering, Juliette, if you could just talk a little bit about some of the things that come through about Palestinians in Gaza that people outside might not think about.
Juliette Douma: Yeah, Peter, thanks for having us, and great to see everyone. One of the reasons I have the honor to join this project is precisely because of the dehumanization that happened very early on about the people of Gaza, a place that I was frequenting for the past year before the war started. I was based in Jerusalem back then, and I used to go at least once a month for a few days and fell in love with Gaza. The minute you cross the checkpoints, it’s literally a huge gate to the biggest open-air prison in the world. But the minute you’re done with the gates, you’re just at the coast of the Mediterranean, and you’re taken in by the hustling and bustling, by the donkey carts, by the fish that’s being sold, by the strawberries on display, by the beeping, by life. And that is Gaza. And so, when the war started, I think many reduced the people of Gaza and forgot that they were humans. And so, I think this is one of the reasons why this book is so, so important. It’s the people who do embroidery, the photographers, all these stories that I hope remind the readers that the people of Gaza are that; they are people who most of all love life and they’re very, very courageous.
MM: Maybe to complement what Juliette said, I’m going to read a small paragraph from Yousef AlKhouri, who’s a theologian in Gaza, who traces his family a thousand years to the church in Gaza. And he contributed a very beautiful original piece for us. But in the end, he’s saying “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. You can occupy Gaza, you can destroy Gaza, but you will never take it away from us. It is the same as in 1948, when the colonizers tried to erase Palestine from our memory and failed. Now they are trying again. We will not give up. We will not give in. We will always rebuild Gaza in our memories, in our imagination and in our hearts, until one day we will rebuild Gaza for real.”
PB: Beautiful. Thank you. Matthew, I wanted to ask you a similar question, to read or just to describe one of the submissions in the book that you found particularly powerful.
MT: Thank you very much, Peter. Yes, I wanted to drop in a few lines from also an original piece that was contributed to this book by Saba Timraz, who is a young woman, age about 20 or so. She was stuck inside Gaza with her sister for 184 days. Her parents happened to be outside on October 7 last year, and they survived together until the family could get enough money together in order to pay off the Egyptians, in order to allow them to leave. They are now in Cairo, and she contributed an extraordinary essay, defiant and resistant and full of fury, and I just want to read a few lines from that. Quote:
“Thank God I left Gaza after 184 days of this brutal war. I left Gaza, but it did not leave me. Rather, my attachment to it and my love for it grew. And still, we wait for the unknown, while Gaza continues counting the days. We now live in Egypt without residency, with no idea what the future holds. There are countless hurdles. I need to enroll* at a university here to complete my studies. My sister, who was in the eleventh grade in Gaza, needs to restart school. It is not easy to lose everything and start your life again in another country. I am a displaced refugee. My heart is broken. I am dead, but trapped in life. Has our life become a game, controlled by America and the occupier? They kill, destroy and do whatever they can to harm us, and then tell the world that they are the victims, and we are the monsters. We are an occupied people and have been since 1917. Our lands were stolen, our honour was violated, and the building blocks of our lives were destroyed. We want to be liberated and to live in freedom and dignity. We will not surrender our rights, no matter how long it takes.”
MT: Unquote. That’s just an extraordinary evocation of, for this young woman, what it means to be Palestinian, what it means to be from Gaza. But what I want to do, if I can—there’s a number of stories. There’s a particular story. Juliette mentioned the photographers. There’s a story about the pioneers of photography in Gaza in the middle years of the 20th century, the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, who they were, and how they set up. That’s a beautiful story. There’s a woman, Amani Shaltout, who Juliette knows, who we were put in touch with through Juliette’s network. She runs the United Nations Photo Archive in Gaza City, and she was displaced from her home. The United Nations facility was bombarded, and I sent her a number of questions by text, and she chose to reply by voice note. And this particular voice note, which I’ll play for you into the microphone of my phone, I find incredibly moving. She’s sitting in her tent, displaced in Nuseyrat—you can hear behind her voice the sound of the Israeli drones passing overhead. These are surveillance drones, and some of them are attack drones, where they will shoot and drop bombs from the air. And you can also hear, as she speaks, you can hear the bombs falling too. But she, as well as answering my somewhat stupid and irrelevant questions about what her favorite image is in the archive that she looks after, she also has a dedication to keep talking, to use me as a means by which to speak to the world. I find this extraordinary.
Amani Shaltout: Hi, and salam from Gaza. About my favorite images: My favorite images are those about education, particularly those that show children learning in open air or in the tents, where some of the pupils were sitting on the sand and they don’t even have seats. For me, these images show the desire and a need to change for better and a kind of a challenge to all of these tough circumstances. And that mustn’t be the fate forever. And as we used to say, that education is the passport for our better future and also makes us continue to be proud of our identity. Many, many thanks for you and for all those who stand in solidarity with Gaza. Really, really appreciated. And actually, what you are doing is a turning point in history.
MT: Extraordinary.
PB: Thank you.
JD: If I may say a few words about Amani: Amani is a testament to how dedicated and determined to live, and to continue, and to work are the people of Gaza. She’s a colleague of mine. She works in the communications department. And despite the fact that Amani was displaced several times during the war, she never stopped working. When I wake up in the morning, I see my inbox full of emails that Amani has done, and she’s never missed one day of work. And there are many like her: just dedicated, determined to live and to continue against all odds and despite the horrors that they’re going through.
PB: Thank you. Juliette, the same question for you: a particular essay in the book that particularly tests you.
JD: My favorite chapter, and Mahmoud and Matthew will not be surprised, is Lulu the cat. It comes early on, I think around page 47 or something. But that’s a story of a guy from Jerusalem who wanted to give a gift to his sister, who gets married into Gaza, to bring her favorite pet, which is the cat that they had in their house in Jerusalem. And getting the cat from Jerusalem to Gaza for the wedding becomes such a huge ordeal, back and forth—once it’s the wrong papers, once it’s I don’t know what. And then, the cat goes into the X-ray machine, and then he puts the cat, finally, in the taxi. And for those of us who love pets, this story really stayed with me. And also, because it’s something very simple, it’s taking a cat from one place to another. And cats and dogs around the world go in these little boxes and they travel on transatlantic trips, but to get it just 150 kilometers from Jerusalem to Gaza, it became such a huge story. So that’s my favorite chapter in the book.
PB: Thank you. Mahmoud, we have a couple of questions that I think are particularly well-suited for you as a bookseller. One of them is whether the book is being sold in Israel, and the second is whether it’s being sold in Arab countries. And then, related to that, what languages, if any, it’s being translated into.
MM: The book is published in the UK and is actually well-distributed. We’ve been getting photos from every corner of the world where the book is available. In fact, yesterday, someone sent a picture from a bookstore in China. It is well distributed throughout the world. Now, speaking about Israel/Palestine, we have copies at the Educational Bookshop, which is in East Jerusalem, which, of course, is Palestine, not Israel. But I have also had a request from two bookstores, one in Tel Aviv and another one, I think, in West Jerusalem, for a couple of copies. They wanted to try to have them. We’ll see. We’ll see what they will report. We’ll see what happens if they actually sell the few copies that they wanted to have or not. The Israeli chains—two Israeli chains, bookstores in the country—I have checked, they don’t have it. This is—for me, it’s not surprising. This is a very important book, of course, but there’s also another thousand important books that have been written on Palestine before that, which are very hard to find in the Israeli bookstores. And the Israeli publishers have been very, very, very selective (to be very nice to them) in the books that they pick up to translate and republish in Hebrew. This is beyond my control. I think it talks to, unfortunately, the deterioration in the Israeli civil society and in the publishing industry in Israel, on how they are also being part of the mechanism, if you like, or part of the apparatus on silencing Palestinian stories—and by extension, silencing the Palestinians. But yes, for anyone in Israel/Palestine, if anyone wants copies, reach out to me. I’ll be very happy to find you ways to get copies. Translation, we have been told that there’s already an agreement with a Bosnian publisher, so it will be coming out in Bosnian. We are now working to publish the book in Italian and French. Nothing to confirm yet, but this seems like something can happen. But the book is quite early in its life, two months. We welcome any leads on any other languages on which the book will be translated. The publisher is very keen and will make sure that there will be no obstacle for any other language that wanted to approach the book.
MT: Let me just throw in as well, there’s an aspect to publishing this book too that means that it’s open to anybody to take up to 10% of the content and to do what you will with it. So, the book is 336 pages. That means that there are 33-and-a-half pages that anyone can take from the book to translate into any language and to post and publish online or anywhere else, or make a movie, or make a TV show, or whatever you like, without the need for permission or fees or whatever. Obviously, if there are translation deals to be done, contact the publisher. But we want to emphasize that the book is platforming and amplifying the voices of the people of Gaza. And the more that they are amplified and platformed, the better. So, take those 33 pages from anywhere you like in the book, and translate them into any language you like in the world, and post them, please.
JD: I saw someone asking about where the book is available in this part of the world. So, I live in Jordan. The book has touched down in Jordan around a week ago, and we are in touch with the publisher, asking where the book will be available in other parts of the Middle East. And that’s a work in progress. And in the US, the book is available in Barnes & Noble and such in hard copy. And then, you can download the book to read on Kindle. I think from Saqi, the publishers, you can download—or probably from Amazon, you can download it. For Arabic, we have a few people who are interested individually to translate some chapters, or maybe, hopefully, the full book. And we’ve put in a couple of pitches here and there in publishing houses in the region. Given everything that’s happening in the region, we’ve not yet received a yes from any of them. But we will keep trying because I think this book—and also Matthew’s first book on Jerusalem—they’re both absolutely critical to have around this part of the world. Also because most people in the region have never been able, never been allowed to go and visit Palestine, let alone Gaza.
PB: Yeah, I guess actually, Mahmoud, that played into the question I wanted to ask you, which is: This strange and awful situation, where most Palestinians who spent their life in the West Bank or in ’48 Israel or somewhere else have never been allowed to go to Gaza. And so, as a Jerusalemite Palestinian engaging with all of these people in Gaza and reading about life in Gaza, what most affected you about the similarities of Palestinian identity and culture and experience? And what struck you about differences because of different geography and, of course, different historical experiences? This experience of fragmentation has now played itself out for so many decades for Palestinians.
MM: Yeah, I mean, the book has been a little bit of a journey for me myself, of learning about part of my homeland that I never visited—and by design were denied to visit. In all honesty, it also speaks about how we—in a way, Palestinians have been manufactured in a way that we also separated into these entities. West Bankers, Jerusalemite Gazans, and different ID systems and different checkpoints, privileges and so on that actually didn’t allow us to meet Gazans and, of course, also limited Gazans from coming to the West Bank and Jerusalem to also tell us about their culture, their stories, and so on. So, I’ll share a few, but there’s plenty.
MM: One, I knew that there were Christians in Gaza, for example, but I didn’t know that there are Armenians in Gaza. And I’m grateful for Matthew for continuing to dig this story up and highlighting the contributions that the Armenians have done to the photography in Gaza as much as they’ve done to other cities around the Middle East. I have many friends in Jerusalem who come from the African communities, for example, but I never knew that we also have another community of Gazans who are also of African descent. Food, for example. I knew about our knafeh being different than the one in Gaza. I was very lucky to have people bringing some of the knafeh from Gaza for me in Jerusalem. But the whole cuisine in Gaza (based on seafood, of course) is something that we are denied to know about. On that note, maqluba is celebrated as the main Palestinian dish, but here, we make it with chicken and meat. I have learned that in Gaza, they do it with fish, yet I have never tasted it, actually. So those are the things that really surprised me. Everyone I talked to spoke about how beautiful Gaza is as a city. That’s also beyond my eyes.
MM: Everyone has talked also about the sense of freedom. And this—this has really shocked me fundamentally. People in Gaza actually feel a sense of freedom more than what we feel in Jerusalem, which is—I always talk about it the other way around, because my ID card allows me to travel within the country. So, I thought, I am actually the one who has a sense of freedom. But the lack of checkpoints within Gaza makes the people of Gaza’s ability to move within the Strip freely, and that gave a sense of freedom for them because they can move from north to south all around the coast freely. Whereas in Jerusalem, every two, three kilometers, you have a checkpoint ‚or you have a block, or you have a road, or you have a wall, of course, and so on. The thing that didn’t really surprise me is people’s hospitality, people’s ability to—it sounds like a cliche word, particularly at this time of genocide—but resilience, or at least to be resourceful and live the difficulty, but also find ways in which you can keep your humanity, keep your smile, keep your humor. There’s a lot of humor that we have seen coming out of Gaza during these times as well. And the cosmopolitan nature of this trip, between all these ethnic groups, if you like, that are citizens of Gaza, and together bringing this lively identity that I always celebrated as Palestinian cosmopolitan identity.
PB: I wonder if (this is for either Juliette or Matthew): Was there a particular story, or even a particular joke or something that captured this humor, this ability to laugh, even under these unimaginable conditions, that really sticks out for either of you?
JD: It’s a very unique bunch of people, the Gazans. And it’s about the love of life, and it’s beyond survival. Maybe because of the living conditions, maybe because sometimes, we forget that before this horrible war, Gaza was not Switzerland, right? Every child in Gaza under the age of 18 has known nothing but war because Gaza has been under a blockade for almost 18 years. So, I guess people have developed this way to cope and to continue living, always forward-looking and with a smile. I mean, the Gaza Circus as an example, right? It’s basically like Clowns Without Borders, but the Gazan version of it. And they go from one shelter to one shelter, from one tent to one tent, and they entertain children. And to be displaced yourself, and 90% of the cases, people in Gaza are grieving day in, day out, and don’t even have the closure of burying indignity or spending the days of condolences as people do in this region. But to be able to continue, to want to make people laugh.
MT: It’s a great question. We’ve not been asked about humor in the book before other than the Lulu the cat story, which is funny, which makes me crack up every time. There are a couple of examples which I’m going to give, and I’m just going to read out little bits from the book because, as I said, it’s not about us; it’s about them. There’s one little piece by a guy called Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, who is a doctor. He works with medical aid for Palestinians inside Gaza, and he contributed some beautiful pieces in a diary. But he has a little anecdote. He says (this is on the 8th of April this year):
“My five-year-old nephew, darling Omar, made us laugh today. He regards this as a war against children. We overheard him telling his mother: ‘At least grown-ups can find coffee in the market. Children like me can’t find any snacks or lollipops. Now do you understand why this war is against us, not you?”
MT: And there’s also a piece by Naim Al Khatib as well. It’s an extraordinarily funny piece, actually written in one of the previous conflicts, I think. In 2014, he wrote this, and he describes a very surreal situation where he’s sheltering with other people in his apartment block and trying to stay out of the line of fire of the Israeli snipers, who can fire through the kitchen window, but the bathroom that they need to get to in order to answer calls of nature is across the kitchen on the other side, and they have to run the gauntlet of going in front of the window. So, he devises a particular solution to this issue. It’s very funny how he does it, and it’s very funny what they do, and it’s very funny how he describes it as well. But I’ll leave the story for you. There’s a short piece in the beginning of this essay that he writes, where he says, (this is the 2014 war):
“The night, or the day, as my young daughter would say, that the [2014] war tightened its grip around the neck of our neighbourhood, Dina asked me, ‘Baba, why did they make it all daytime?’ The truth is that my intelligence got in the way of understanding her question, and when I asked for an explanation, she clarified: ‘Because they don’t let us sleep.”
MT: So this is how kids see conflict, which is also very touching and moving in its own way as well.
JD: Gaza is about kids. Wherever we’ve been, even on deserted streets, you have kids popping up. The thing about children, including those impacted by war, is that they have their own way to make do and to get by. The children of Gaza have not been to school for the second year in a row. We’re talking about 650,000 kids who have not been to school. And unlike in other conflicts I’ve worked on, where we could introduce a learning program to make do or to catch up, in Gaza, it is impossible. Of course, the first thing that pops to mind is internet learning, like we’ve had with children during the pandemic and that. But in Gaza, that’s absolutely impossible because the internet connectivity is so, so bad that people can barely do a WhatsApp call or sometimes sending messages. I mean, I remember being there at the peak of the telecoms cut, trying to send a WhatsApp message and looking at my phone with this thing that goes round and round and round and nothing goes through. So the loss of education is huge. And we know that the longer children spend out of school, the more difficult it is for them to compensate and to catch up, the bigger the loss. So, imagine the second year, which translates into five years of loss already each year of loss, right? And the question is: What can you do for children not to become a lost generation? And what can you do for children so that they don’t fall prey into exploitation, including by armed groups, but also other sources of exploitation, including gender-based violence, early marriage, child labor, and such? So, the longer this war goes on, the bigger the impact on what is in the backyard of Israel, which is Gaza.
PB: This is a question I always, frankly, struggle with figuring out how to ask or easing to ask at all. Because obviously, in the United States and in the West, a conversation about Gaza is almost synonymous with the conversation about Hamas, in that essentially, it’s even described as the war between Israel and Hamas. And so Hamas—so often just the humanity of Palestinians is completely lost by this conversation, constantly about Hamas. And yet, Hamas is the most important political force in Gaza, has been for many years now, arguably the most important political force in Palestinian politics in general. So I’m just curious: Was there anything that any of the writers said in their conversations or in their writing about Hamas or, more generally, about the idea of armed resistance, that you think was significant, and that might give people some greater insight into these political dynamics in Gaza?
JD: For someone who was frequenting Gaza before the war, Hamas was not popular with the people of Gaza. Even before the war and during the war, Hamas was not at all and is not at all popular among, at least, the people that I’ve met in Gaza. People focused on their survival. I think people like all of us had their apartments, had their lives, had their cars, had their jobs, and then, almost overnight, they lost everything. And that was really the focus. But this whole reductionist way is something that has been very, very particular to the war in Gaza.
MM: It is sad that the conversation on Gaza has to be parallel to the conversation about Hamas. We can speak about the UK without speaking about the Labour Party, right? It’s only in the Middle East where the West has created these constructions where you only speak about the people, only on their political affiliations. Outside the Middle East, we give the liberty and the privilege to speak about people’s stories, and beliefs, and ideas without necessarily bringing anything about their political affiliations. And I don’t know why we’re not being given the same privilege that other people around the world have. We have many contributors who have aired their views, so to speak, critical of Hamas. They’ve said it, it’s recorded, it’s there, it’s in the book, it’s published. We did not feel in any way that we had to censor. But I have to say that most of our conversations were not about the geopolitics or about the Hamas social or political program. It was about their life, about their human lives. I think people are more concerned about their stopping the war, about them having more chance to live, about their ability to restore some of their dignity in their life. And I think the discussion about what happened—what Hamas did, what others did, what other political party didn’t do, that political evaluation, if you like—I think it will come. They will have this conversation. It has started in some circles, but I don’t think it’s in Gaza, and I don’t think it is right for it to be in the public domain now.
PB: Mahmoud, I wanted to just pick up on that. And also a question we had in the chat, which is: When people in these essays that you talked to, or have you read, think about rebuilding, how do they think about it? I mean, given the circumstance that Gaza was, as you said, classified as an open-air prison by Human Rights Watch and others, and called unlivable before October 7, and also given the fact that most people in Gaza are from families that are refugee families, so they’re not originally from Gaza anyway: When people imagine a future and rebuilding, we know what the Western American discourse tends to be about, which is very, very circumscribed in certain kinds of ways. But how do people in Gaza think about what that means?
MM: I would just object to the open prison because that’s implied that they are criminals of some sort. I think it’s more like a concentration camp, actually, than anything else. Bombed from the sky, where they have a very almost nonexistent way of escaping. Look, everyone we talked to really spoke about hope and spoke about after the war, going back to their city, to their neighborhood, rebuilding their house, even the falafel shop that got destroyed three times; he was wanting to go back and rebuild his falafel stand. Everyone had a drive for the future, driven by hope. I don’t know if it is a survival mentality or not, but everyone really spoke about that. Every two, three sentences, someone was speaking about hope along the conversation. I really appreciated that element of hope, which also struck me as a sign of unlost humanity as well. Everyone we talked to knew that we were producing this book in English for the global audience, that it’s going to be non-Palestinians or non-Arabs going to be reading this, and encouraged us to do so. Which means that the people have not lost hope—but not only that, they have not lost hope in humanity, in the other people. Almost everyone we talk to has spoken about the notion that if reasonable people, human people around the world read these stories, then they will see how unfairly we have been treated. So these two things combined, this belief in humanity with some sort of hope, is still there. I find it very difficult to see how practically that is possible. But it’s inhumane, of course, for us to go back to them and tell them it’s not possible. You’re not going to go back. Your house has been completely destroyed. It’s not possible to say that. So you have to play on with their hopes a little bit and keep the hope alive. Our brain is telling us it’s impossible. Our heart is telling us it has to be possible, because of our belief in humanity, that’s basically where I am now.
MT: There’s a quote from Edward Said that I want to throw in about hope. I’m slightly paraphrasing. He said: In a situation of cruelty and injustice, hopelessness is submission, and to submit is immoral. People can’t afford to be hopeless. So we, us, we in Britain or in America or in Europe, in the West, we can say it’s bleak, and it’s awful, and there’s no future, and it’s terrible. People there cannot.
PB: Right. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, we’re just about out of time, but I’m going to just give Mahmoud, if he wants, and Matthew, a chance to read the last snippets from the book and then we will close.
MM: I will read from Issam Younis, who’s the head of Al Mezan [Center for] Human Rights organization in Gaza. He said, at the end of a very long interview, he said:
“I wholeheartedly believe that justice will prevail. Victims, sadly, sometimes don’t see justice in their lifetimes, but collectively we, the Palestinian people, will see justice. However, justice cannot undo what’s been done. The pain will stay. And we should be firm in resisting populist narratives around justice as revenge. Justice is the most honourable of human values. Our national vision should be based on a concept of justice as a high moral principle. We, as Palestinians, need to unpack these terms and establish what justice means to us. Whatever the practical details of a future state might be, it must be founded on principles of fairness and equality for all under the law. We need to take back the initiative.”
PB: Beautiful. Matthew?
MT: This is from a guy called Nabil Tarazi. The Tarazi family are one of the original Indigenous families of Gaza who’ve been there for centuries upon centuries. And he said, also at the end of an interview, he said this:
“For us, Gaza is a symbol, a place that has stood for so many years against aggression, occupation and genocide. Today, at last, the world is seeing who the Palestinians are – we are human, ordinary human beings – symbolised in what is going on in Gaza every day. Gaza matters because it is the place where the rebirth of the Palestinian nation will probably begin.”
PB: Very beautiful. Mahmoud, Matthew, Juliette, thank you so much for spending this hour. Very grateful to all of you.
JD: Thanks a million, Peter. Thanks everyone.
MT: Thank you for so much.
PB: Thank you.
NG: That’s our show today. Thanks to our producer Jesse Brenneman, and to the Beinart Notebook’s Daniel Kaufman for additional editing. Please rate, review, and subscribe to On the Nose. And don’t forget that if you become a sustaining member of Jewish Currents, you’ll get real-time access to conversations like the one you just heard. Sign up now at JewishCurrents.org/membership. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
*Spelling adjusted from original text
