One day, I get a call from a friend in Gaza, Maram. “Hey, how are you?” I ask automatically, instantly regretting the question. “You know I’m just praying we all die in an airstrike,” she replies, “So I don’t have to watch my family die of hunger. At least bombs are quick.”
I’m speechless, but it doesn’t matter: The stories absolutely pour out of her, expressed in the way of a 27-year-old who learned English from watching endless American movies: “You feel me?” punctuates her speech. (Her mother forced her to stay in for a whole summer to learn English after getting an F at school. The punishment proved transformative.)
She tells me, eloquently, of her anger, which isn’t solely aimed at Israel. Her own leaders are leaving the majority of the population to suffer, and other Arabs throughout the region are showing no support at all, no willingness to intervene. Many Palestinians I speak to express their condemnation of Hamas but ask me not to attribute these opinions. “They can kill us,” one living in Rafah said, starkly. Imagine the number of enemies, the need to watch one’s words while watching the sky for bombs, the rooftops for snipers and the ground for scraps of food or fuel. They are hemmed in from all directions, including psychologically. A poem by Ezzedine Shehab, a doctor in Gaza, published on X, expresses this powerfully: “They speak of resistance. / We speak of graveyards. / They claim to represent us. / We look at the sky and wonder who, if anyone, still hears us.”
It’s often hard to find the words for such conversations. Even “How are you?” seems inappropriate and insensitive, not to mention unanswerable; people in Gaza are not OK, which I should — I do — know. But how else do you open conversations? “Hey,” I write to another friend, Leila, living in a refugee camp near Khan Younis, “just checking in,” before deleting, feeling that another question hangs over it: “I’m wondering if you’re alive or dead.” In the end I send a simple “Hey” and stare at its starkness, knowing I have to follow it up, eventually managing: “It feels wrong to ask you how you are.”
Leila’s reply comes instantly. “No no, we want to be asked, it means someone is listening,” she writes. Hassan, a university student in Mawasi refugee camp, also near Khan Younis, has a slightly different take on this. “Really, it depends who’s asking,” he tells me, “and how they ask.” He explains that the question from someone in Gaza really means “Are you still alive?”; from the friends who melted away while the violence increased it means an implied apology; from me and others, a desire to know what is going on. “The true answer to this question,” he finishes with, “is that I’m just surviving … I could say I’m still breathing, but I feel that I’m an empty shell.”
Then comes a question back to me from Leila that also leaves me wordless. “How’s life in the U.K.?” I stare at my phone, repeatedly attempting and deleting replies. What do I say to someone living through a genocide? My life is perfect. When I feel like it, I walk to my fridge, get out food, eat it. If what I want isn’t there, I walk to a shop, buy it, eat it. My house is safe, quiet. I have a job — a job writing and commissioning articles. And at this point, I’m writing about — and trying to commission from — Gaza.
I don’t want to be writing this article. As an editor at New Lines, I want to publish stories from Gaza by Palestinians. But as they are starved, bombed and burned, fleeing from one insecure home to another, attempting to avoid the snipers, scavenging from dirt to feed their children and themselves, even those who want to write cannot find the time or the strength. But they keep in touch, replying to messages when they can, and the details they tell me about their lives deserve recording.
These insights also humanize the incomprehensible numbers and the shocking photos that mainstream media outlets are now increasingly sharing. I am glad these photos are making it into the wider world because they are, finally (though far too late to save lives), forcing action by governments. But showing human skeletons also serves to evoke pictures of famines or the Holocaust, removing the humanity of the individuals, rendering them as timeless victims. I want instead to share what I know of their individuality and show their strength, not only in their ability to survive such conditions but also in their attitudes and expressions and resolve for the future — their futures and that of Palestine.
Yet while making the argument for writing, I simultaneously feel that this work of recording is pointless. Words have been shown as inadequate against the military might of Israel, buttressed by the most powerful countries in the world. We are all impotent witnesses, unable to prevent the atrocities we have been watching for almost 22 long and cruel months. What use are more words? And is it really my place to be the amanuensis of Palestinians? I go round and round with these feelings of guilt, shame, powerlessness and rage. But in the end, we all need to keep speaking out using any platform we have. As a writer and editor, I have to believe it is better to write than not to write.
Eventually, I send a reply to Leila’s question: “Life is perfect here. I wish you could come and visit.” She sends me a picture of her cup of tea, in the tent she’s currently living in. We agree that one day we will drink tea together, when the war is done. But the reality is that none of us ever knows if people in Gaza will survive until the next text exchange, a reality also never lost on the people in Gaza. And we don’t know when the war will finish or what the situation will be when the bombs stop. Tea together might have to wait a long time. Or it may never happen.
Another woman asks for my help in finding funding to ensure education continues. “All the kids are missing their schooling and we can’t let that happen,” she writes. “We will lose a whole generation.” The expression hangs in the air; we both know it’s not just one generation lost in this totalizing destruction. I text a friend with UNICEF, asking whether they might be able to implement a scheme similar to one I worked alongside in Jordan, providing spaces for children to go to after school, designed with the Syrian refugee population in mind. I forward her proposal, but of course nothing can be done at such a time. I have no news for her, ever. Each time her name pops up, I try and chase the UNICEF connection. I try to encourage her with words, but they’re empty, and she’s frustrated — understandably so.
I explore the possibility that she could write about the challenge of educating children who are traumatized and hungry, and why it’s so important to so many Palestinians that their education should continue, but her writing, even in Arabic, is fragmentary and impressionistic; a paragraph here and there. I don’t know what to do; New Lines essays have a certain form, and I cannot fashion one out of the sentences she is sending. Our communication tails off, leaving immense guilt behind. If any of you want to write to New Lines and complain about how I’ve let down someone who is starving, be my guest; you can’t be saying worse things than I say to myself.
Maram, on the other hand, wants to be a writer, and with an English degree from Al-Azhar University in Gaza and a voracious appetite for reading has the skills to pull it off. Her messages are eager, at first happy to help with the article I’m writing, and then overjoyed when I tentatively suggest she might write for us herself. It’s her dream, she tells me.
The first few paragraphs she sends through are visceral; evocative portrayals of her day-to-day life. I reply encouragingly, with suggestions for expanding the piece as a sort of diary entry, exploring life in Gaza under bombardment and siege, and how that is changing how she thinks of her future. But the following day comes the message that her best friend has been killed, and she’s bereft. She wonders if she could write about this friend — of course, I say, knowing that whatever she writes will have power, and I can do any necessary work to craft it into a publishable form.
But her time is taken up with looking for fuel for the fire, cooking the little they have, washing with the little water they have, grieving. She messages me heartbreaking apologies for not delivering, saying she knows she’s let me down. I reply each time: Please never apologize, I’m here whenever you want to write, I wish I could do more. It’s certainly not meant to be pressure, I tell her. Write only if you want to.
She is grateful in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable: Why should anyone be grateful to me, living my easy life, observing the horrors from afar, taking a few minutes to respond to messages? A Palestinian friend living in the West tells me I should accept the thanks and just stay around for Maram, because she will be glad she has someone to talk to about her friend, her grief, her rage. I see this, but it feels such a minuscule gesture; a WhatsApp message here and there in the face of so much grief.
At some point during my conversation with Maram, the internet starts to glitch. Bad connections are always irritating, but during this conversation it feels appalling to ask someone to repeat such raw emotion. When it cuts out it’s even worse; I can’t help wondering, but a few minutes later a text arrives. “Internet cut.” At least it wasn’t the airstrike she had been praying for, and we reconnect many times over the following days. One night she calls, late, and I talk to her from bed, before realizing it’s even later for her. “You should get some sleep,” I say, and I can hear the surprise in her response. “Oh, you know, the drones and the bombs, it’s pretty noisy at night. And it’s so hot at the moment, I’m so sticky, and there are so many mosquitoes.”
I’m silenced at the onslaught of insights; I should have known the violence increases at night (as in many war zones); I know what summer in that part of the world feels like, but hadn’t thought to overlay that experience with the knowledge of what’s happening. What does the heat feel like in a tent? How do you keep mosquitoes out of such flimsy structures? The horror of the Israel-engineered famine is visual, with mainstream media finally picking up the images from social media many of us have been seeing for months, the emaciated bodies making the front pages. But when do they sleep? Sleep is just as fundamental to bodily function as food, but its lack leaves fewer visible marks. Is there also a sleep deprivation epidemic, and what is this doing to health?
At the same time as I am trying to commission stories from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora, books on the topic are constantly coming through the door, many from publishers wanting help with publicity. Fady Joudah’s “[…]”; “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” by Atef Abu Saif; “Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide” by Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana and Ala’a Obaid; “The Book of Ramallah,” edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat — all contain powerful and beautiful writing that takes me into the heart of the culture as well as the violence and struggle. I send pitches for reviews to a variety of publications, but as journalists, how do we get through to readers who have Gaza fatigue? How does one keep covering a genocide? And so not all pitches are successful; editors ask me for reviews of other books, on other topics. Instead, I buy the books for friends and lend out my copies, boosting them in my own circles at least, knowing the effect good writing can have — at least on individuals, not so much on politics; the bombs go on.
More frequent than books are the requests for money. Since Oct. 7, many Palestinians in Gaza have had GoFundMe campaigns with heartbreaking, personal stories. I choose one a week, again feeling — as with my writing, emailing, texting — that the gesture is so small as to be symbolic, useless even, just a token of support telling the individual there are people in the wider world aware of their need. Nothing, it seems, can take away the cause of that need, despite the abundant evidence of Israel’s crimes.
Along with the rest of the world, I am watching the proof on my social media feeds. There was the 18-month-old shot in the head, cleanly, by an expert sniper, followed by reports that this was a pattern: children shot in the head. There are the reports from doctors that different body parts are targeted on different days; one day they might see multiple bodies with shots to the testicles; another day it will be legs; another day the stomach. I can’t help wondering about the society that forms soldiers who use living children for target practice, and what will happen to the society when they return to civilian life. There are the grieving parents clutching tiny body bags, swaddled bodies of babies lined up ready for burial, others rotting in the incubators that have no electricity to run. These stories come daily.
The problem, then, isn’t that people don’t know. Many of us are receiving the messages constantly, but the problem is that there is nothing to be done with all the information. I write increasingly angry emails to my parliamentarian; when I see her in town, I apologize for how angry they are, explaining I work on Gaza and begin, embarrassingly enough, to cry. She hugs me, says she’s doing all she can. And the thing is, she is. She speaks out regularly, attends marches, opposes the government’s policies — all with no change of political direction. Even an elected official is powerless; what chance do I have?
Friends in the West often ask me what they can do. Write to your government representatives, I say; give to Medical Aid for Palestine; go on the marches; sign the petitions; follow and boost Palestinian voices on social media. And none of it will do anything at all. I wonder how many people around the world will start to show signs of secondary trauma given the sheer quantity of photos, videos and testimonies coming out of Gaza — the particularly bleak way of experiencing conflict in the 21st century — unmatched by an ability to act. That is, it’s not just the horror, but the horror combined with the helplessness.
My own feelings go round in circles. I feel I have no right to such emotions, nor the right to write others’ stories; yet silence is not an option, either. My words feel ineffectual, but the platform is all I have. As Hassan says to me, “It is a duty for me to speak, to write, to document what we are living through.” “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” writes Omar El Akkad; we need the documentation to be incessant, so that moment comes as soon as possible.
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