This is how these young people want to be represented and remembered. Not as mere numbers. Not as mangled corpses lying in concrete rubble. But as children that see shapes and figures and pictures even in the most horrific and brutal of circumstances. They are reminding the rest of the world that they too are people who value life and want to live as the rest of the world does: quietly. These altered photos are one of the most vital examples we have of how Palestinians in Gaza are coping with the consistent presence of death surrounding them.
Waging Nonviolence, July 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/1IMzH5v.
Three Poems for Gaza
Nathalie Handal
Gaza
Once in a tiny strip
dark holes swallowed hearts
and one child told another
withdraw your breath
whenever the night wind
is no longer a land of dreams
The Gazans
I died before I lived
I lived once in a grave
now I’m told it’s not big enough
to hold all of my deaths
Tiny Feet
A mother looks at another—
a sea of small bodies
burnt or decapitated
around them—
and asks,
How do we mourn this?
World Literature Today, July 29, 2014, http://bit.ly/1xvs1U6
Palestine, Summer 2014
Kim Jensen
There are things that allow you
to take leave of the earth:
the sea quarantined
behind cement and wire
chains of signifiers
that men have been here—
gun mounts and barbed towers
a crested wave in the shape
of a warped neck.
There are things
that allow you to take leave:
four small children with frozen faces
grey from the dust of rubble
the color red blossoming
beneath motionless heads
in Shuja‘iya Rafah little Salma
swaddled in blood. The Bakr boys fleeing on the beach
hovering above the sand Don’t ask me
to wait to see what happens
when they land.
This is how you take leave
of ancient cities
that rose in the gilded mist of imagination.
You take leave as a monk does
singing in chants and madrigals.
You take leave in a spiral motion, a lyric wish
in formal passage—so that perhaps
your absence
may be noted.
The UN Counted the Number of Our Dead
Samah Sabawi
The UN counted the number of our dead
Thank you for that
But we know how to count
The UN published reports and factsheets
Detailing 51 days of “hostilities”
Provided footage and documentaries
The massacres were televised
2131 killed...1.8 million terrorized
110,000 displaced...
495 children slaughtered...dead
And the UN said
“There is nothing more shameful
Than killing sleeping children”
Grave concerns were expressed
Rivers of tears were shed
The UN counted the number of our dead
Thank you for that
But we know how to count
The UN issued denunciations
Using words like “indiscriminate”
“disproportionate”
And even “abomination”
The UN huffed and puffed
And called for an investigation
And they counted...and counted...and counted...
...the number of our dead
Thank you for that
But we know how to count
We have counted our dead and displaced
Since 1948
And uprooted trees
Detentions
Fatalities
Injuries
Revoked permits
Exiled refugees
We have counted settlements
That spread like a disease
We have been counting for years
Towers and walls
Checkpoints and wars
And we know how to count
Resolutions and declarations
Statements and denunciations
Press releases and condemnations
War crimes and violations
So thank you for counting United Nations
But we know how to count
Ferguson and Gaza
Zeina Azzam
They tried to make us invisible:
the silencing bullets invaded,
disappeared without fear
into our flesh.
The killer and the instrument
have no words,
just tear gas and F16s
and unknowable means.
Our bodies, like our maps,
filled with holes.
Our eyes sting, burn.
Injustice everywhere smarting
like smoke
in the air we breathe.
In Ferguson,
officers in gear
imitating soldiers
conjuring a killing field.
In Gaza
drones watch and thrum
there is nowhere to run.
People explode, houses collapse,
soldiers imitate themselves.
I am not invisible.
I’ve been the eyelash in your eye
the stone in your shoe
the heartburn in your heart
burning, fashioning words that
you chew and chew
—a bitter, strange fruit
you cannot swallow.
Ferguson is our new word—
it’s been on our tongues
with Intifada, Soweto, Tiananmen,
Tahrir, Occupy, Occupy...
In Gaza, we’re occupied,
we speak Ferguson like we’ve been there.
We have brothers and sisters in Missouri.
We tell them how to resist
because it’s in our blood to resist.
Yes, let’s make the police uncomfortable,
the soldiers squirm,
the reporters struggle to censor or understand.
Ferguson is our word to speak, shout, sew on our flags
as we hoist them high in the sky.
As Michael Brown fell to the ground:
My hands are up, don’t shoot me
My food has run out, don’t evict me
My face is brown, don’t choke me
My baby is crying, don’t tear gas me
My family is homeless, don’t jail me
My flag is flying, don’t arrest me
My job is gone, don’t erase me
My son is dead, don’t torture me
My door is broken, don’t rape me
My school was bombed, don’t dismiss me
I have nowhere to go, don’t starve me
My hands are up, don’t shoot me
My hands are up, don’t forget me.
From Dawn to Dusk
Lina H. Al-Sharif
Caught between a rock
and Gaza.
Gaza is a hard place.
Boxed into the trenches of abyss.
Jawed between the teeth of darkness.
Sea left to salt.
Remembered when the night gnaws the dusk.
Forgotten when the dawn makes the almonds husk.
Dusted, trumped, rusted, crushed.
Like a piece of rusk.
The dim din.
The ticking bomb.
The sand clock.
The Pandora box.
Gaza is a rock.
coarse, hoarse.
Gaza is a hard place.
Rose and fought.
Filters in light.
Remembered with pride.
Forgot to recline.
From dawn to dusk...
when crushed like a rusk
When the almonds husk
Gaza never succumbs.
An Unjust World
Nour ElBorno
I was asked to talk to the world
In the language they know
About the truth.
They say I must try to wake them up.
Make them see and listen.
I say “No.”
A world that needs someone to tell them,
“It’s wrong to kill children and women.”
Must rest and discuss global worming, with an “o.”
I’d rather save my voice
To comfort the child,
And the mother that mourns,
The man who saw his house turn
From shelter to ash,
And the bodies of his family burn along.
I refuse to waste what is left of me
On defending my right to exist.
The world was told so many times;
It decided to keep the dark,
And blow out the candles instead:
Who needs light when darkness takes over;
It is an unjust world
I refuse to take part in.
I’d rather stay under the wreck
With the memories I have built
Than stand on a stage,
And show my rage.
My people are dying,
And you are trying
To be convinced:
You give reasons why murder is okay;
You give speeches when a child being an orphan is fine;
When bombing a hospital is the only choice left.
You ask me to tell the world what?
Wake up?
Dude they are a hopeless case.
Why?
Because they need reasons to be convinced
Why a human must be allowed to exist.
I no longer seek refuge in the world
I hereby announce myself an outworld.
And my people and I, hell yeah, will never cease to exist.
Seafaring Nocturne
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Across the sea floor
limbs curl through ink clouds,
settle near an old trunk
spilling its treasures.
Sodden maps surrender
their borders and silver frames
tarnish. Currents swallow
dark clots and over Gaza the rain
sorties over new monuments
of ash, open wounds of rubble.
Waves buckle under
the weight of swollen
vessels, flayed carcasses, hauling
hundreds of lives
to shorelines where no one
looks forward to their arrival,
relentless survivors, white-knuckle
grasping at stars, reaching
for the buckle of Orion’s
belt, cleft of his boot.
Even on nights when
there is no anchor, the brine
of a dream consumed
by the sea, salt like shards
on parched lips is gentler
than the sulfur of prayer,
the dry scorch of waiting for mercy.
This Miraculous Terrorism
Omar J. Sakr For Shayma
My tears are ineffective bombs,
Hamas-hurled, Israel-born. If only
I had more funding, state-of-the-art
GPS navigation, I could guide them
to bless the right soldiers, the ones
without guns, untrained and still young,
the little snakes-to-be, the ones dying.
How is it that I can hear their screams
and feel their mourning, their subtle ghosts,
even though I sit deaf, hands folded,
eyes closed, an ocean away? The flashes
of cameras, and the twitching of fingers
(accompanied by the sterile antiseptic drawl
of reporter-speak, desert dry), can only account
for so much. Why am I crying so fucking hard?
When my tears dry up, when I am emptied of loss
will the US kindly resupply my stock? Sorry,
this isn’t—I’m not trying to be—I’m just tugging
on this invisible line tying my chest to Palestine;
I don’t know when it got there, or which fisherman
sunk his hook so deep. But it isn’t just one line
is it? No, it’s a multitude, a madman’s cat-cradle
criss-crossing the world, set to twang
every time someone says the word ‘Muslim’,
the label on the net I was caught in from birth.
It’s been getting tighter and tighter every year,
and now our skin is fetish-marked fishstocking
and we are all marred as one. Maybe this is why
as these children die, and men and women burn
beneath this name, this dog-tag embedded in our eyes,
I feel their grief, their death, as if it were my own. It is
my name too, it is my grief too, it is my heart too, it is
my children too, and my death toll forever. That accounts
for some of it, but not all. I hear the air sirens in Tel Aviv,
I hear the death-chants on the streets, I taste their fear,
as a distant echo, as the other side to this bitter coin.
Right now though, as I sit here shaking and weeping,
I cannot escape the call of my name shouted so often,
ringing in the shrill music of missiles singing. I cannot
stop thinking about Shayma Sheikh Khalil, 5 days old,
prematurely born via caesarean section
on July 26, 2014, 10 minutes after her mother died
in an Israeli airstrike. They called her a “miracle baby”
for surviving, for being pulled out of familial death
and into life. However, she died
July 30, 2014, after the power plants in Gaza
were attacked and her incubator shut off.
I could not write those words—
thank god for copy + paste, thank god for reporter-speak
otherwise you’d have only my trembling, my aching
grief, my tears to translate into meaning. Shayma
is merely a pebble in a blood-strewn avalanche:
over 1300 dead. 433 a week. 61 a day. Two an hour.
Such efficiency of horror. Such methodical death
tearing gaping holes in this fishing net, letting the bodies
rise to the surface to line the streets like grisly buoys.
I cannot think anymore. I cannot speak anymore.
I cannot feel anymore, or see through the shame.
When even miracles are killed in their infancy
in their first blue blush of life,
can you imagine what comes next? Dare you even try?
Scratched That [blog], http://bit.ly/1bMOAKn
6
51 Days Later, and Counting: The Untenable Status Quo
Another assault ends with a cease-fire, and suddenly there is a slow and steady stillness, a numbing status quo. We have counted the dead and recounted the massacres and surveyed the damage and tallied the cost of reconstruction. We have heard the rebuttals of the carefully crafted spin. We have the figures to assist us in making sense where there is no sense to be found, as though an explanation would provide closure. But after the smoke clears, who will remember the dead? And what happens when the lenses of the cameras turn elsewhere, and gaze of the global community is no longer absorbed by Gaza’s burning images on their screen? And how will those left behin
d live, rather than merely survive? Who will be there to pick up the pieces, to cradle the children, and to heal an entire society violently ruptured by an onslaught that deliberately aimed to fracture livelihoods, destroy productivity, and deprive a new generation of any chance of prosperity? This chapter takes stock of where things stand in the immediate aftermath of the assault and explores the long-term impact of repeated assaults on Gaza.
How Israel Is Turning Gaza into a Super-Max Prison
Jonathan Cook
It is astonishing that the reconstruction of Gaza, bombed into the Stone Age according to the explicit goals of an Israeli military doctrine known as “Dahiya,” has tentatively only just begun two months after the end of the fighting.
According to the United Nations, 100,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, leaving 600,000 Palestinians—nearly one in three of Gaza’s population—homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian help.
Roads, schools and the electricity plant to power water and sewerage systems are in ruins. The cold and wet of winter are approaching. Aid agency Oxfam warns that at the current rate of progress it may take 50 years to rebuild Gaza.
Where else in the world apart from the Palestinian territories would the international community stand by idly as so many people suffer—and not from a random act of God but willed by fellow humans?
The reason for the hold-up is, as ever, Israel’s “security needs.” Gaza can be rebuilt but only to the precise specifications laid down by Israeli officials.
We have been here before. Twelve years ago, Israeli bulldozers rolled into Jenin camp in the West Bank in the midst of the second intifada. Israel had just lost its largest number of soldiers in a single battle as the army struggled through a warren of narrow alleys. In scenes that shocked the world, Israel turned hundreds of homes to rubble.
With residents living in tents, Israel insisted on the terms of Jenin camp’s rehabilitation. The alleys that assisted the Palestinian resistance in its ambushes had to go. In their place, streets were built wide enough for Israeli tanks to patrol.
In short, both the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs and their right in international law to resist their oppressor were sacrificed to satisfy Israel’s desire to make the enforcement of its occupation more efficient.
It is hard not to view the agreement reached in Cairo this month for Gaza’s reconstruction in similar terms.