By Tareq S. Hajjaj / Mondoweiss
In different times that bear little resemblance to these days, we would begin the new year with high spirits and celebrations, visiting relatives and spending time with family. Any occasion that made us feel alive and helped us forget the daily reality of living under a merciless blockade was welcome. People had differing traditions depending on their social and economic backgrounds. Young men would spend time with their friends, either at each others’ homes or sometimes they would rent a “chalet” or cabin on Gaza’s beach. Extended families would visit one another and gather in each others’ homes, and some would put up lights and decorations. Others would set up Christmas trees placed in a corner in their warm homes.
Abu al-Wafa used to hold large celebrations for his family in his home in the Tuwam region in northern Gaza. They would gather near the white-and-yellow-colored jasmine bushes, and the dozens of cactus pots his wife, Um al-Wafa, had planted. Their little dog would join them as family members gathered in the garden with a breathtaking view of the sea. Food was always on hand, as trays upon trays came out of Abu al-Wafa’s oven, and people took comfort in the knowledge that they would enter the new year with a full belly and good company.
Nothing like that will even happen in Gaza this year. Not because Abu al-Wafa left for France, where he holds residency, and not because his house has been destroyed and flattened, but because the war has displaced all of us. This time, the only wish anyone in Gaza has for the new year is the end of the war.
It’s a war that no one in Gaza or Palestine has ever seen — not this generation, not the older generation, not even the Nakba generation. All of them say the same thing: they have never experienced anything on this scale.
Zaki Salamah, 82, was only 7 years old when he witnessed the 1948 Nakba. He was displaced from the village of Yibna outside of Yafa, and resettled in a refugee camp that was named after his home village, in the middle of the city of Rafah in Gaza. He says he still remembers the Nakba, and it was nowhere near as destructive, deadly, and horrific as Israel’s barbaric campaign in Gaza today.
It is as if Palestinians are forever fated to live their lives attempting to escape their own death and erasure, that they are forever fated to be born under the rubble or in a refugee camp, perpetually stateless and searching for their homeland. This is the conclusion Salamah reaches after a lifetime bookended by displacement and grief.
“My father arrived from Yibna in 1948, and we lived in a tent for over three years,” Salamah told Mondoweiss. “Until UNRWA transferred us to more humane places of refuge, first in Khan Younis and later in Rafah. We bought houses there over the years and made new families. We married off our children, and they had children of their own.”
“And now we and their children have been displaced all over again,” Salamah continued.
Before the war, Salamah lived in the Katibah neighborhood of Khan Younis, from which he was displaced to Rafah once the Israeli army invaded the area, even though it had been designated a “safe zone” by the military earlier in the war.
“We’re no longer pleading to return to Yibna in Yaffa. We’ve been reduced to asking to return to Khan Younis,” he said.
Starting the new year in what remains of Gaza
In a small tent erected over the sidewalk outside a nearby school that can no longer house any additional families sits Muhammad Oweis, 56, in the Sultan neighborhood, west of Rafah. His wife spreads a blanket on the ground inside the tent, placing thin foam mattresses on top of it. Beside her sits plastic bags filled with clothes, a small amount of flour, some official documents for six displaced family members, and a small tin in which they place spare bits of paper and plastic to light a fire that they can use to prepare food they receive from the shelter — primarily canned beans, tuna, luncheon meats, cooking oil, and flour.
The family believes that the worst is yet to come, settling into a comfortable realism untainted by hope, the result of the world’s indifference to their extermination. Oweis left his home in al-Shuja’iyya in northern Gaza and was displaced several times until he finally reached Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost point before Egypt. Throughout the war, he witnessed one tragedy after the other, living through death and coming out alive each time with less of himself remaining.
At the start of the war, he was displaced to the home of one of his married daughters in Gaza City and was then forced to leave with his wife and younger children further south. He has been unable to reach or speak to any of his daughters who remained behind in Gaza City, one of whom had given birth to a baby boy in the middle of the war.
“I have six daughters, all of them married,” Oweis’s wife says. “I was beside them every time they gave birth. I helped my girls raise 13 children.”
For the first time, she was unable to see her latest grandchild or to be there for her daughter.
In the short reprieve between displacements, when people are able to sit in the UN shelters and school courtyards and discuss their predicament, the prevailing sentiment is the same: Gaza will be completely wiped off the map, and most people will be expelled to the Sinai.
It’s no longer acceptable to simply talk about the difficulties of life, of people’s inability to secure basic necessities for their families. That experience is now universal. When over two-thirds of Gaza’s people have been displaced and deprived of food, water, electricity, fuel, medicine, and shelter, when they continue to be bombarded and massacred in the tens of thousands even after they’ve fled from one temporary refuge to the other, there’s nothing much left to say. And to even contemplate the question of hopes for the future becomes devoid of meaning.
The one thing that occupies the mind of most when thinking of the future is where they will go next — not somewhere else in Gaza, but in exile. The only future laid out before us is a repeat of the cycle of displacement and ethnic cleansing that never ended since the Nakba.
“From the moment of our birth, we’ve been suffering this injustice,” says Oweis. “We are a cursed people born under occupation and perpetual displacement whose only fitting end is death.”
Rafah is now the focal point of Gaza’s Nakba, housing over a million and a half souls from every part of Gaza. Despite the crushing poverty that most of them have experienced for most of their lives, at least they had homes to go back to at the end of the day. Now even those have been taken from them.
“Sometimes, we hear over the radio that we might be allowed to return to our homes in northern Gaza, even if they are little more than piles of rubble,” Oweis says. “We can set up tents near them and wait for them to be rebuilt if the war ends. If we are given the chance at a dignified life, our home in Gaza is more precious than all the world’s palaces.”
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