Dreaming Of Gaza: Nakba, War And The Next Palestinian Generation

-Essay-

CAIRO — Since the Israel-Hamas war began, I have experienced two things. First, a mental image of my grandmother has appeared to me every day against my will. Second, I have had recurring dreams of three basic symbols in different forms: a young girl, always wearing pink pajamas, and an army; the Israeli occupation (sometimes settlers); and a discussion with Israelis who invade my dreams. I confront them to either to confess their guilt or accept the truth, but I wake up before that happens.

In a dream during the weeklong truce, six weeks after the war began, I saw the word truth written in a notebook. I was going to tell the truth to an Israeli teenager — with dyed red hair and a gold nose ring — who sat across from me: she is part of the occupation. And while that occupation gave her land, a house and a bottle of water, it took away part of her ability to enjoy full human feelings in return.

Everything in the dream was speeding because the Israeli army was on its way. I had to tell her the truth so she would allow me to cross with the child I was protecting. But it was clear from the conversation that I would fail; the teenager said she did not to understand. My panic grew each time I tried to tell her, until I lost the child and woke up.

I do not need a dream interpreter or a psychoanalyst to decode the symbols that I believe all Palestinians in Gaza are sharing since the outbreak of the war. It tests our ability to comprehend the present genocide, what we are sharing here and now — not a past event of our collective history that we learn from, nor an idea from which we derive a logical warning that it might happen in reality.

A Genocide live

We are seeing the genocide live with a high degree of detail and clarity. We monitor its numbers daily. We are now witnessing what will become a detailed history.

This is unlike the past, when we experienced remorse, sadness and anger over massacres and genocide revealed later with reports and investigation committees uncovering the shocking numbers — violence that was understood in a scientific and bureaucratic manner through its consequences and after it had gone.

Today, on a daily basis, hundreds are killed in Gaza. That is a reality, not a possibility. Every day, people in Gaza experience a terrible loss with unimaginable impact.

Since the war began, I have been trying to think about imagery to describe what is happening before my eyes.

My dreams are repeated, often spoiling the course of my day, driving guilt into my mind. I spend my days watching the news or joining a political movement. Yet I am burdened with guilt that I am still searching my dreams for some reassurance that I can protect others, and that I can talk with imagined Israelis and offer them a chance to escape the violence of the occupation.

These recurring dreams expose my inability to avoid thinking about the logical follow-up to this moment. They expose my failure to accept the innocence I assumed about the world. Yet I cling to it — perhaps out of fear.

If the images coming from Gaza do not make the world realize the atrocities, I do not think reading a text about it will.

The world, represented in my dream by the girl with red hair, does not understand because it does not want to understand. My dreams reveal that what I believe in my consciousness contradicts what is in my subconscious mind, which I resort to for whatever my consciousness can’t comprehend: A vicious circle of responsibility.

I had not been able to write anything since the war began. I lost the ability to use language and create words or sentences with meaning. Nothing is more more eloquent, profound or true than the remains of children. If the images coming from Gaza do not make the world realize the atrocities, I do not think reading a text about it will.

Maybe the world is aware and concerned. I don’t know how to write about genocide, even though I know what it looks like. I’m really embarrassed by everything that is happening. And by embarrassed, I mean I’m ashamed. When shame disappears, sadness remains.

During the truce I visited the Christmas market to look for gloves. I passed by a stand held by the indigenous people of Montreal, who were the guests of this year’s market. When I saw the large map of Montreal on display, empty except for an “X” marking each indigenous group who still existed on the map’s edge, I cried. The map had put salt in the open wound of Gaza.

A dad joke

In a dream before the truce, someone said “Khiryat Shmona” instead of “Kiryat Shmona,” the name of a city near the Lebanese border. Dad often told this joke, replacing the Hebrew word “Kiryat” with “Khariyat,” which is derived from the Arabic word meaning “pee.” When I woke up, I laughed at father’s old joke.

The “Khariyat Shmona” joke started on the day in 1992 when my father deleted the word “return” from his vocabulary. At the time, we were following the events of the Marj al-Zuhur sit-in by the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel deported them to southern Lebanon after a major attack against its army.

Every day, we watched the faces of the protesters in simple tents on the border, and we would watch the return of the deportees on television almost a year after their protest camp. In my childish mind, it was the return that my father had been promising me. But when I packed my belongings and told my father that I was ready to return to Haifa, he turned pale.

He told me for the first time that we would not return, stood up and disappeared from the house for hours. After that, only the bitterness of the “Khariyat Shmona” joke remained, and the terrible weight on me and him whenever Palestine mentioned in our home.

Why we love Gaza?

Perhaps my love for Gaza comes from my imagination about the success and guarantee of returning to it. Perhaps it comes from the people of Gaza’s love of their cities, sea, land, livestock and fruit, and their steadfastness for 16 years despite the siege and wars with visible and invisible losses and gains.

Perhaps my love for Gaza comes from the freedom of its people to love and insult it at the same time. But I only know, by proxy, how to understand the uniqueness of such love. Only by proxy, I know the partial survival; in which the body remains alive while the soul perishes.

Before Oslo, the phrase “Land for Peace” was everywhere — in news bulletins and newspaper articles, and in conversations I overheard among my parents and their friends. In my dream, I tell the teenager that her acquisition of land certainly comes with some loss. I may tell myself that losing land comes with some gain: an added human value, for example.

The world is not ours, and it is a world trying to get rid of us.

Following the attack on Al-Shifa Hospital, I dreamed of my father before he got sick. He was healthy, and we were in the living room of our house, whereverses of the Quran were on a billboard on the wall. He was opening bags of Eid clothes for me. And in another bag, there were body parts.

My fear of the body parts and my father’s absolute neglect of them made me wake up. My heart was overwhelmed with sadness that there are martyrs who will not be revived in the dreams of their friends and loved ones, that there is an innocence that can no longer protect us. The world is not ours, and it is a world trying to get rid of us.

The truce allowed people in Gaza to bury whoever they could and to search for the remains of their loved ones. While people in Gaza were busy grasping the scale of the disaster, my world redefined itself in a few days. During the truce, Gaza was returned to its pure Palestinian self, which asks about fate and sovereignty, and which rises above our image as traitors, saboteurs, and civil war specialists.

Coming from my grandmother’s future

This Palestinian self knows that it has not been the same since the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948. It returns us to our correct positions: if we are not in diaspora, then we are under occupation. On top of us are those remaining in the territories of 1948, whom we falsely believes since the Intifada that they enjoy more freedom.

Coming from my grandmother’s future, I understand that the continuation of the Nakba also changes those who had suffered from it.

Not once did I see a recurring image of my grandmother in my mind, intruding into my thoughts and disturbing me. The image floated around to tell me something about myself, my grandmother and about my family at this time.

I fear the end that is the opposite of that; that it is end that my grandmother told me about.

After the truce, I found myself praying, especially when my feelings fail me. I find myself dreaming of the end of the war, the return of people to their homes, the reconstruction, the delivery of aid, the burden of mourning and loss in the coming years, and the possibility that the United Nations may publish an apology five years later. We may find ourselves celebrating the end of Netanyahu’s trial and imprisonment.

I find myself thinking that Gaza will go back to what it was. I count on its steadfastness, although I was the one who could not hold on for half an hour in Beirut after one explosion. I pray for the Prophet as my mother does when words betray her and me.

I know that all these are dreams and illusions. I fear the end that is the opposite of that; that is the end that my grandmother told me about, sitting at sunset on a balcony overlooking the land of Jaloul and the Shatila camp. She holds a thin white embroidered cloth folded three in layers, which she uses to wipe her mouth every time she takes a sip of tea.

Under her white headscarf, her hair appears to be partly grey and partly dyed brown with henna. She always looks forward. She whispers to me, as she has ever since I was born, because, I have been told that she lost her voice in the Nakba.