Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire

Summary

An anthology of essays and poems by Palestinian writers inside and outside the Gaza Strip, edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing and Michael Merryman-Lotze for the American Friends Service Committee and published by Haymarket Books in 2022, aiming “to break the intellectual blockade on Gaza” (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.17). Part 1, read here, comprises the praise pages and imprint, the editors’ Foreword, Jehad Abusalim’s Introduction situating Gaza in the Nakba as a continuing process and in AFSC’s work there since 1949, Refaat Alareer’s memoir chapter “Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?”, Asmaa Abu Mezied on recording with phones as resistance to erasure, Shahd Abusalama’s chapter on Permanent temporality spanning prison exile, Western humanitarianism in 1948-50 Gaza, revolutionary culture and present movements, Basman Aldirawi’s poem “Don’t Step on My Feet Again”, and the opening of Abu Mezied’s second chapter on peasantry, land and Place attachment. Part 2 completes Abu Mezied’s chapter — peasant resistance from the 1936–39 Revolt through the Environmental Nakba to the blockade-era collapse of Gaza agriculture — adds Aldirawi’s poem “Why Are You Still Here?”, Salem Al Qudwa’s chapter on the Architecture of the everyday and the ethics of experimental housing design, Suhail Taha’s chapter on Gaza’s fifteen-year electricity crisis, and the opening of Nour Naim’s chapter on artificial intelligence and Digital occupation. Part 3 completes Naim’s chapter — Israel’s five strategies of AI repression and her program for AI as a catalyst for liberation — gives Mosab Abu Toha’s chapter on cultural struggle in Gaza (the Edward Said Public Library, Gaza’s libraries, press, music and cinema under Israeli siege and Islamist censorship, and the bombing of the Samir Mansour Bookstore), and opens Dorgham Abusalim’s memoir of returning to Gaza on the eve of the 2014 fifty-one-day war. Part 4 completes Abusalim’s memoir (the roof-knock on his brother’s house, his illness, his twelve-hour Rafah exit), gives Yousef M. Aljamal on travel restrictions as a manifestation of the ongoing Nakba, Israa Mohammed Jamal’s memoir “Let Me Dream”, Basman Aldirawi’s “Gaza 2050: Three Scenarios”, three imagined futures for 2050 endorsing the One-state solution, Abu Toha’s poem “A Rose Shoulders Up”, and the opening of the Notes (Introduction through the start of Abu Mezied’s “Lost Identity” notes). Part 5 completes the Notes (the remaining chapters’ bibliographies, including the substantive notes on cash-for-work aid and on the INSS), gives the Index, the “About AFSC” institutional history, the Contributors’ biographies, and the publisher’s back pages and back cover.

What the file is

The ebook edition (ISBN 978-1-64259-725-7; © 2022 American Friends Service Committee), licensed to its purchaser on 10/20/2023 (PDF p.9, and licence lines throughout). Cover artwork by Malak Mattar, cover design by Rachel Cohen; published with support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund (PDF p.9). The text copy is clean and paginated with PDF-page markers; PDF p.1-4 are blank in it because it is image-only there, and those pages were read in the original: they contain no book text, only cover and publisher matter (the front cover with the title, subtitle and editors’ names, the cover repeated reduced on a white page, a blank leaf, and the publisher’s logo page with an ebook licence line). Several chapters run in two-column layout whose fragments interleave in the text copy (notably PDF p.47, p.51, p.53, p.65) and were reassembled in the order of the printed pages, and one quotation from Said is cut short in the text copy at PDF p.50. Photographs by Sameh Rahmi appear throughout, with captions. PDF p.320-324 are the back cover (image-only in the text copy, read in the original), a blank leaf, a page bearing only the word “Disclaimer” with no text following it, and the ebook licence and distribution notice, which states that the ebook has no technical DRM restrictions and carries visible and invisible marks by which illegal distribution can be traced (PDF p.320-324).

Section by section

Praise and imprint (PDF p.5-9). Endorsements from the Palestine Chronicle, Nadia Hijab, Ali Abunimah, Laila Elhaddad, Barbara Ransby, Sarah Schulman, Ahdaf Soueif, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Jean-Pierre Filiu and Nathan Thrall frame the book as Gaza speaking for itself; Filiu quotes Darwish (1973): “we do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth” (PDF p.6).

Contents (PDF p.10-11). A map of the Gaza Strip and Gaza District before 1948, the Foreword, the Introduction, thirteen chapters by Alareer, Abu Mezied (two), Abusalama, Aldirawi (two poems and an analysis), Salem Al Qudwa, Suhail Taha, Nour Naim, Abu Toha (two), Dorgham Abusalim, Yousef M. Aljamal, Israa Mohammed Jamal, then Notes, Index, About AFSC and Contributors.

Foreword (PDF p.13-14), by the editors. Palestinians in Gaza are “seldom given voice or asked to speak”; the anthology gives personal narratives, poetry, and economic and cultural analysis. Divisions and movement restrictions imposed by Israel, particularly since the 1993 Oslo Accords, fragmented Palestinians and isolated Gaza; “For change to occur, Gaza must be understood as an integral part of historic Palestine” and “There can be no meaningful or sustainable resolution in Palestine and Israel without Gaza” (PDF p.13). The editorial committee was Tareq Baconi, Ann Lesch, Sara Roy and Steve Tamari (PDF p.14).

Introduction (PDF p.16-28), by Jehad Abusalim. Gaza’s experience stays abstract to outsiders despite the stock phrases (open-air prison, besieged enclave, highest population densities); oppressive regimes erase historical context so the oppressed look irrational, and “when it comes to understanding the Palestinian cause in general, and the contemporary reality in Gaza in particular, historical context matters” (PDF p.16). The central context is the 1948 Nakba: over 750,000 Palestinians uprooted, a “spatial and territorial rupture”; Gaza City had been capital of a Gaza District of more than fifty-three cities, towns and villages, and the new Strip’s roughly 100,000 inhabitants were joined by 200,000 refugees (PDF p.17). The book was interrupted by May 2021: Israel’s assault across historic Palestine, the Unity Intifada, expulsions attempted in Sheikh Jarrah and police violations at Al-Aqsa; work stopped for advocacy and for checking authors’ safety, and “this book was written under and during the most Gazan circumstances” (PDF p.18). Discourse on Gaza is trapped in Israel’s security framing, a humanitarian victim lens, or a heroes-and-martyrs lens; what is missing is a Palestinian-led conversation about two million people with “an unresolved plight for justice, return, and the reclamation of their rights” (PDF p.19). Abusalim joined AFSC in spring 2018, his first day coinciding with the start of the Great March of Return; AFSC had assisted refugees in Gaza from 1949, at UN request, and launched the Gaza Unlocked campaign in 2015, the essay booklet Life Under Blockade in 2018, and Ahmed Abu Artema’s thirteen-city US tour in 2019 (PDF p.19-20). Sanctions after the 2006 Legislative Council elections, the Hamas takeover of 2007, and almost fifteen years of blockade and collective punishment “have failed to topple Hamas’s rule; instead, they caused deep social, economic, health, and psychological disasters” (PDF p.21). The Nakba is “not just an event that occurred in the past; it is a process that continues to shape life in Palestine”, whose equation is that “Israel’s existence as a Zionist and Jewish-majority state must be at the expense of Palestinian existence” (PDF p.22-23). The two-state option persists as a “two-state delusion” though experts call it dead; Gaza is 1 percent of historic Palestine, with two million people, 70 percent of them 1948 refugees and descendants, density 13,069 per square mile, projected by a UN Population Fund report to reach 4.8 million by 2050 (PDF p.23-24). AFSC’s September 2020 call for abstracts, “Gaza: Reimagining the Boundaries of Possibility”, asked whether a better future could be imagined “as a part of a broad vision of ending the Nakba through return, restoration of rights, and achieving justice”; the book is no manual, but an exercise in imagination going beyond demanding “‘permission to narrate’”, organised by the question “How do we understand Gaza in the shadow of the Nakba and its continuation, and how can we imagine a better future?” (PDF p.25-27). The Introduction closes with summaries of every chapter (PDF p.27-28).

“Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?” (PDF p.30-42), by Refaat Alareer (memoir). A life told through the refrain “It shall pass”. In 1985 his father was shot at the Nahal Oz crossing, with no investigation and no accountability, and lived with shrapnel and phantom pain; a soldier’s rock split the schoolboy Alareer’s head, another’s rubber-coated bullets hit his chest and arm, soldiers beat boys aged eight to eleven in a home raid, and his father, a labourer in Israel, feared losing his work permit if his son were caught stone-throwing (PDF p.30-32). He survived the First Intifada (1987-93), in which Israel killed over 1,600 Palestinians, and Rabin’s “‘broken bones’ policy”; his friend Lewa Bakroun, thirteen, who did not throw stones, was shot dead at point-blank range by a settler before his classmates, and Lewa’s mother Haniya was later unable to travel for cancer treatment because of the siege (PDF p.32). In 2001 his cousin Tayseer, a farmer, was killed by troops at Nahal Oz, the same post where his father was shot (PDF p.33). After Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), “which claimed the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-three days”, Israel “literally counted the calories entering Gaza” and banned mail, books, timber, chocolate and most raw materials (PDF p.34). Teaching at the Islamic University of Gaza, he told his children stories through the bombardment and resolved to nurture young voices, telling students “Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world”; the result was Gaza Writes Back (2014), twenty-three stories for the twenty-three days (PDF p.34-35). Months later the July 2014 war killed over 2,400 Palestinians and destroyed over twenty thousand homes in fifty-one days, and bombed IUG’s administration building and his office (PDF p.36). His teaching of Amichai, Shylock and Fagin led students to see Shylock as “just like us Palestinians” and to rewrite his speech beginning “Hath not a Palestinian eyes?” (PDF p.37-38). Israel gave two inconsistent pretexts for bombing IUG — a “‘weapons development center’”, then “developing chemicals, to be used against us” — and students joked about PMDs, “Poems of Mass Destruction” (PDF p.38-39). His argument: “Knowledge is Israel’s worst enemy. Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe” (PDF p.39). The 2014 Shuja’iyya massacre, ten hours of bombardment of a neighbourhood of over one hundred thousand people, killed his brother Mohammed, four extended family members, and — in a strike on his wife Nusayba’s sister’s home — her sister, three of her children and her husband; he and Nusayba have over thirty relatives killed by Israel in two decades (PDF p.39-40). BDS, armed struggle, peace talks, protests, tweets and poetry are “All are terror in Israel’s books”, and Tutu and Emma Watson were attacked for solidarity (PDF p.40). He asks “When will this pass? When will it be enough? How many dead Palestinians are enough? How many massacres are enough?” and turns to the reader: “Reader, will you make this matter?” (PDF p.41). The chapter ends with a poem on humanity dead on the Mediterranean shore, where “Only the pebbles wept” (PDF p.42, poetry).

“On Why We Still Hold Onto Our Phones and Keep Recording” (PDF p.44-45), by Asmaa Abu Mezied. Written “for us, not for them”: recording resists erasure — Hagar Shezaf’s reporting that Israeli Defense Ministry teams systematically removed historic documents from Israeli archives describing killings, demolitions and expulsions — and resists Western media that portray Palestinians as terrorists or numbers and demand proof of humanity (PDF p.44). Gazans record tears, flights, “death delivered by F-35 missiles sent with love from the US government”, children finding toys and pets alive, disappointment in leadership and rage at world silence: “We record for future generations”, not to humanize themselves for others (PDF p.44-45).

“Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Permanent Temporality” (PDF p.47-70), by Shahd Abusalama. Before 1948 Palestinians could meet in Jerusalem, Jaffa or Gaza; the 1947-49 Nakba destroyed and depopulated 531 villages and towns, and “Permanent temporality” is a concept used to describe the experience of exile for refugees in general, and it applies to Palestinian refugees in particular — camps locked in limbo awaiting a denied return, in a perpetual cycle of settler-colonial violence (PDF p.47). Her friend Louay Odeh, born in Jerusalem in September 1978, was released on October 18, 2011 in the exchange of Gilad Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, but exiled to Gaza among 164 so destined, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention (PDF p.48). Their fathers had met as prisoners — Ismail, detained from Jabalia Refugee Camp in 1972, and Yacoub Odeh, detained from Jerusalem in 1969, meeting in Beersheba prison in 1974 and moving together to Nafha prison in 1980, freed in the 1985 swap of 1,150 detainees for three soldiers — and the 2011 reunion in Gaza required a two-day journey via Eilat, Taba and Rafah for a one-hour drive (PDF p.49). Born in the First Intifada, Abusalama came of age under the Oslo Accords, which Edward Said condemned as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” (PDF p.50); prisoners and Gazans alike live by stocking against uncertainty (PDF p.50-51). Gaza was “already encircled with an electric fence in 1994 as part of the preparation for peace with the Palestinians”, and the 2020 “Deal of the Century” brought US recognition of annexed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, an attempted redefinition of refugee status, and UNRWA defunding (PDF p.51-52). Her questions: “How can we break free from the vicious circle that traps us and our families in a state of permanent temporality? How can we protect future generations from undergoing the same experiences?” (PDF p.52). A section on Western imperialism and humanitarianism traces Said’s “Orientalism”, the Christian-Zionist culture of “the restoration of Jews” to “redeem” the “Holy Land”, Herzl’s 1895 diary note that “the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor [the natives of Palestine] must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly”, and the Balfour Declaration (PDF p.53-54). About 200,000 refugees, a quarter of the total, were expelled into Gaza alongside its pre-1948 population of 80,000; returnees crossing the fence were framed as “hostile infiltrators”, and Benny Morris is cited for “as many as 5000” civilian Palestinian returnees were killed “by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], police, and civilians along Israel’s borders between 1949 and 1956” (PDF p.54). The UNCCP, its Clapp Mission and UNRWA assumed return unrealistic; AFSC, invited by the UN in December 1948 to manage Gaza’s relief, split between Clarence Pickett’s March 20, 1949 argument that refugees must accept “‘home’ is now the Jewish State of Israel” and that farmers faced an industrial revolution, and the refugees’ own rejection of resettlement, voiced in the AFSC Gaza Unit’s October 12, 1949 letter: the UN bears “the total responsibility to feed, house, clothe, and repatriate them”, and “resettlement is not even considered” (PDF p.55-58). AFSC withdrew on May 1, 1950 as UNRWA took over, having warned that “prolonged direct relief contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees” (PDF p.58). A section on the Palestinian revolution reads Jabra I. Jabra on the deliberate labelling of the dislodged as “‘refugees’”, and the cultural production of Azzam, Kanafani, Shammout, Ghannam, al-Ali, the Touqans, Darwish and el-Qasem feeding the PLO-led revolution of 1968-82 (PDF p.59-60). Kanafani’s Letter From Gaza (1955, fiction) and Darwish’s “Silence for Gaza” (1973) are read closely: Darwish’s “We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth” and “Gaza does not liberate us. Gaza has no horses, airplanes, magic wands, or offices in capital cities. Gaza liberates itself from our attributes, language, and invaders at the same time” (PDF p.61-63, discussed as literary works). Li and Filiu are cited for Gaza as ghetto and “‘laboratory’”; the 2005 disengagement is read as “blaming the victim”; bombardment is “mowing the lawn” (PDF p.63). The Great March of Return, begun by refugees — over 73 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants — on March 30, 2018, is set against Lieberman’s “no civilians in Gaza” and Gantz’s 2019 campaign boast of sending parts of Gaza “back to the Stone Age” (PDF p.64). Kanafani’s 1972 assassination in Beirut with his niece Lamis Najem, the revolutionary cinema movement (1968-82), and the one-state vision originating with the Palestinian Communist Party in the 1930s follow (PDF p.65-66). A final section, “Setbacks and Breakthrough”, argues Western “realism” and “neutrality” became colonial tools, presents Salman Abu Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine and his claim that “the central component of peace that is yet to come is reversing ethnic cleansing and implementing the right of every human being to return to his home”, names Tal3at, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Druze draft resisters and BDS, indicts PA security coordination and the international system, and ends in hope for a revived unifying structure like the PLO of the 1970s (PDF p.67-70).

“Don’t Step on My Feet Again” (PDF p.72), poem by Basman Aldirawi (poetry). Under drones and F-16s, blackouts and a border crossing “Between the earth and sky”, the speaker dances with hope and whispers “Don’t step on my / Feet again” and “You’re a full human even if / You feel like half”.

“Lost Identity: The Tale of Peasantry and Nature” (PDF p.74-99), by Asmaa Abu Mezied. She explores agrarian practice and Place attachment — a bond with place beyond home, where identity is shaped by interaction with the land — and how Palestinians’ harmony with nature evolved over the past century in Gaza, noting the lack of Gaza scholarship on agriculture and heritage preservation, and her own position as a descendant of villagers who did not personally experience the Nakba, not speaking for Gaza’s refugees (PDF p.74). Her Bedouin grandmother’s saying — a lap of soil better than a lap of gold (Arabic, PDF p.75) — opens a history reaching to Canaanite olive cultivation and oil export to pharaonic Egypt, and to proverbs and songs carrying planting calendars, rainfall prediction, fig-drying and the memory of the Iraqi army in 1948 (PDF p.75-76). The peasant as national mobilizer and freedom fighter expanded farmer identity beyond attachment; Palestine’s documented pre-colonial agriculture (Jaffa orange exports rising from 290,000 cases in 1897 to 1,608,570 in 1913 on Palestinian grafting expertise) counters the myth of a neglected “desert” made to bloom by Zionist pioneers, a myth still used to legitimize confiscation (PDF p.77-80). Her grandmother’s rule — “You give to al-ard (the land), she will give back to you.” (PDF p.80) — frames a history in which peasants, about 30 percent of villagers landless by the early 1930s as Zionist settlement rose from 300,000 to 1,250,000 dunum, made the 1936–39 Revolt a peasant revolution (some 90 percent of rebels) betrayed, in her account, by notables who ended the strike to protect merchants’ and citrus profits, while absentee landlords such as the Sursocks sold the land — Marj Ibn Amer, evicting 8,730 peasants — that peasants sold under 10 percent of (PDF p.80-83). The 1948 Nakba was also, in Qumsiyeh’s term she adopts, an “Environmental Nakba”: Qada Gaza lost forty-five villages and Al-Majdal, its citrus falling from 22,000 to 4,000 dunum and cereals from one million to 17,000 dunum, its native trees replaced by European pine, a destruction continued in 2015’s designation of some 576,491 West Bank dunum as natural reserves, half inside settlements and closed military areas (PDF p.83-84). Refugees kept the lost villages alive as ritual and memory — Sayigh: “There is no detail of village life, from crops to quarrels, that people cannot remember in microscopic detail” (PDF p.85) — and rebuilt agriculture in the Strip (170,255 cultivated dunum by 1966, on refugee labor and diaspora remittances), but the remembered 1960s “golden times” enriched traders, not laborers, and citrus monoculture served Western markets, not food security (PDF p.85-89). Under occupation, Swedenburg’s “Preservation-Dissolution” policy, product dumping, “colonial agriculture” such as the water-hungry 1990s “Red Gold” strawberries exported only through Israeli firms, the eastern buffer zone closing off half the cultivated land (Gisha: 1,300 live-fire incidents, 2010-17), the uprooting of over one million trees since 2000 (PalTrade), the damming and sewage-filling of Wadi Gaza, and a population grown 59 percent in 2007-2020 to over 2.2 million at 6,175 per square kilometer cut agriculture’s labor share from 32 percent in 1970 to 4.7 percent in 2019 (PDF p.91-96). She closes against a romanticized heritage detached from the struggling farmer: place attachment first needs the land’s economic benefit, the May 2021 aggression made her cousin Ahmed’s relation to his land “transactional”, and “the only solution lies in ending the blockade and the occupation”; her hope is preservation of heritage and a tiny nature museum on her grandfather’s land, under the Egyptian proverb “Those who lose their past, are lost” (PDF p.97-99).

“Why Are You Still Here?” (PDF p.101-102), poem by Basman Aldirawi (poetry). Despite the killed olive tree, the “veto”, F-16s, machine guns, apartheid wall and checkpoints, the speaker still stands, answered in the question by his grandfather napping under his olive tree before the colonizer came and ended his life.

“Ethical Implications of Experimental Design on Affected Communities in the Gaza Strip” (PDF p.104-131), by Salem Al Qudwa. After the 2014 war, vulnerable families accepted transitional wooden houses that broke extended-family ties; against donor prototypes and the “cash for work” approach, he argues for the “Architecture of the everyday” — self-build with common materials, engaging families over time — and for “permanence as resistance” in concrete, the local “new vernacular” (PDF p.104-105, p.113). Gaza is 365 square kilometers with over two million people, some 70 percent refugees, at 5,204 people per square kilometer; the 2014 offensive damaged or destroyed over one hundred thousand homes and May 2021 displaced some seventy-four thousand people and destroyed or damaged nearly seventeen thousand units, while the blockade bans cement, gravel and steel as “dual use” (PDF p.106-107, p.112-113). Experimental alternatives failed culturally and structurally: UNRWA’s roughly fifty mud houses after 2008–9 could serve only as filler and were received as shacks of “the past”, and Catholic Relief Services’ wooden shelters split families — its 2017 competition rejected his reinforced-concrete “hard half” proposal (PDF p.113-115). His case study, the Rehabilitation of Damaged Houses Project with Islamic Relief Palestine (begun from his 2006 work as an emergency architect; frozen in summer 2007, renewed 2009), rehabilitated 167 houses for over 1,200 people in Beit Lahia and Al Shouka by December 2011 at about $4,400 per unit, 55 percent below normal cost, using three adjustable unit-cube options that doubled living area on the same footprint, local labor and on-site apprenticeships (PDF p.116-124). Its lessons: women’s design contributions on privacy, ventilation and light must be structurally included (they were excluded from construction and IRPAL’s sessions were men-only), time with households builds trust and agency beyond questionnaires, and no complaint mechanism was established (PDF p.127-131). A counterpoint opens the chapter’s middle: Oxford’s award-winning “sustainable” Abercrombie Building kills birds on its glass, while birds nest in the shrapnel holes of Gaza’s destroyed homes (PDF p.110-111).

“People’s Light in Gaza’s Darkness” (PDF p.133-146), by Suhail Taha. Gaza is in the fifteenth year of an electricity “crisis”: two-thirds of its power is controlled by Israel, its sole plant was destroyed in 2006 and 2014, and availability averaged seven hours a day in 2017–18, twelve to thirteen in 2019-2021, and four during assaults such as May 2021 (PDF p.133). World Bank and UN sustainable-energy pledges are read as addressed to the powerful — the same UN called Gaza unlivable by 2020 — because electricity in Gaza is purely political, as his Shuja’iyya handyman Abu Tariq’s nursery-rhyme chain (Abu Mazin, Haniyya, the Americans, the occupation, the EU, the World Bank, the aid agencies) lays out; lighting Gaza at the price of Trump’s Deal of the Century would be shame, not relief (PDF p.133-136). The chapter follows Abu Tariq’s family through set lessons — “the night is always longer than the day”; “You do not have to wait for electricity to get your things done” — Salma’s eleventh birthday on November 14, 2011, ruined as celebration by outage and then by a strike’s light she mistook for a meteor, the candle fires that killed three children each in Deir al-Balah (2012), Shati camp (2016) and Nuseirat camp (2020), a darkened family room in the 2014 war where Khaled counts his school’s losses by raid, and Gazan invention under siege, from Iyad Khalaf’s cooking-oil car to Muhammad al-Dabbah’s 2020 racing car and Abdallah al-Radi’s airless tires for scooters and wheelchairs (PDF p.137-146). Its closing hope is an outage that is “not a moment of mortal danger but a pleasant ritual of getting together in a cozy room to tell stories by candlelight” (PDF p.146).

“Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Restoring Palestinian Rights and Improving the Quality of Life” (PDF p.148-172), by Nour Naim, translated by Anas Abu Samhan. AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution could reshape life and reinforce the Palestinian narrative within a vision of ending the Nakba through return and restored rights, but Israel’s advanced AI is denied to Palestinians, and its control of crossings, “dual use” import bans, underground lines and cellular infrastructure imposes a “Digital occupation” — Paltel agreements turning Palestinian high-tech firms into proxies — depriving Gaza of the revolution’s benefits as the world enters the post-digital era (PDF p.148-149). Israel has turned Gaza, 365 square kilometers inhabited by two million people, into a laboratory for AI military technology without international monitoring: Unit 8200’s deep-learning programs Alchemist, Gospel and Depth Wisdom, the Gaza Smart Space division, and SIGINT/VISINT/HUMINT/GEOINT collection serve a twofold goal of profit and domination, even as Gaza’s missile capabilities and the end of short wars have defeated Israel’s blitzkrieg doctrine (PDF p.150-153). Five strategies maintain control: preventing Palestinian technical development (infrastructure dependence, Gaza held to 2G against Israel’s 5G, unimplemented ITU resolutions, May 2021 attacks on internet infrastructure); facial-recognition surveillance (AnyVision’s “Better Tomorrow”, violating the “presumption of innocence”); drone suppression (the zannana; HRW’s twenty-nine civilians killed by drones in Cast Lead, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ 825 killed 2006-2011); a robot-and-sensor digital siege (ANDROS, Haroni, SandCat, the EU-funded iDetecT4ALL project); and combating Palestinian cyberspace — her “Cyber Dome” — with platforms fulfilling 95 percent of Israeli Cyber Unit deletion requests and Google and Amazon’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract entrenching the occupation (PDF p.153-159). AI algorithms are built on data “riddled with lies and racism” against Palestinians, but the digital space “is no longer a secondary space in the Palestinian struggle—rather, it is a real space for struggle no less effective than the one on the ground” (PDF p.160). Her program for AI to restore rights: high-resolution satellite imagery (freed by the December 2020 lifting of the 1997 Kyl-Benjamin Amendment limits) and Forensic Architecture-style investigation to bring war criminals to justice; live maps, Palestine Open Maps and Palestine VR reconnecting refugees and the fourth-generation diaspora to their villages; colorized historical photographs; locally designed AI tools; 3D printing of equipment and prosthetics (over a thousand Palestinians became amputees when snipers targeted Great Return March protesters); AI assistance for physicians; and nanotechnology sensors against unexploded ordnance (PDF p.161-169). She closes with AI as a catalyst for liberation — “It is not enough to let the world know the truth—the world already knows the truth. We need to make the world take action” — calling for a national strategy, specialized research centers, trained AI teams, and use of the US Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2019 and the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act (PDF p.170-172).

“Exporting Oranges and Short Stories: Cultural Struggle in the Gaza Strip” (PDF p.174-205), by Mosab Abu Toha. On August 2, 2014 Israeli aircraft bombed the Islamic University of Gaza administration building (Israel called it a “weapons development” center); Abu Toha rescued The Norton Anthology of American Literature from the English Department’s rubble, and the photos he posted brought worldwide book donations from which he founded the Edward Said Public Library — Gaza’s first public English-language library, opened in Beit Lahia in summer 2017, sponsored through Mariam Said by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, with a Gaza City branch opened September 25, 2019 (PDF p.174-179). Books themselves face checkpoints: Noam Chomsky’s donated books were held from July 2016 to January 2017 under Israel’s mail ban, normal deliveries take seven to nine weeks, and a Canadian donor’s fifty FedEx novels were destroyed after a $700 West Bank pickup demand (PDF p.180-181). Gaza’s library history runs from Arif al-Arif’s 1943 record of four Arabic libraries to the Palestine Museum’s 2015 survey (forty-one libraries in Gaza, seven destroyed, eight closed or inactive, the largest — Bani Suheila’s forty thousand books — closed since 2008); the PA Ministry of Culture in Ramallah held no information on Gaza’s libraries for nearly fifteen years (PDF p.182-184). Reading is collapsing under siege economics: Diana Tamari Library membership fell from over twenty thousand before 2007 to a quarter of that, and Dar Al-Shorouk asked its branches to stop sending books because “almost no one buys new books anymore” (PDF p.185-186). Both Israel and the PA ban books: Arafat banned Edward Said’s works after his 1991 PNC resignation, and Israel banned and confiscated 6,420 books in 1967-95, its prohibited lists once including Orwell’s 1984 among more than 1,600 titles (PDF p.187-188). After 1967 Gaza became “the exporter of oranges and short stories”; its press flourished under Egyptian rule (nineteen newspapers, 1948-67) (PDF p.188-190, appendix table PDF p.205). Music and cinema face Islamist as well as Israeli repression: Sol Band’s unveiled sixteen-year-old singer Rahaf drew a fatwa and police shutdowns, and Gaza’s ten cinemas of the 1970s were burned or closed in the Islamist campaigns of the 1980s-90s, a suppression continued under Hamas through festival permits, film pre-screening and the bans on al-Muzaien’s Masho Matook (2010) and 36 mm (2013) (PDF p.191-196). Against this stand the Al-Forsan and Palestine Theater groups, the Basma Society’s youth theatre, schoolgirls’ libraries, TEDx Shuja’iyya, ASHTAR Theatre performing in the ruins of the Said al-Mishal Foundation destroyed on August 9, 2018, and Ali al-Jabali’s gallery in the bombed Italian Complex (PDF p.196-200). Abu Toha’s Harvard Scholars at Risk Fellowship was cut by permit and visa delays; his students, in a Strip with 96.4 percent literacy (2014), dream of being captains, pilots and fishermen in a Gaza with an airport, theater and seaport (PDF p.200-203). The chapter closes with the May 18, 2021 bombing of the Samir Mansour Bookstore: “But we are not. / We are still here.” (PDF p.203-204).

“In the Haze of Fifty-One Days” (PDF p.207-225), by Dorgham Abusalim (memoir). Returning from graduate studies abroad through Egypt and the Sinai to spend Ramadan with his family in Gaza — despite his siblings’ warnings that a massive war was coming — he comes home to his blind mother, his wheelchair-using father, and his sisters, records the first Israeli strikes on his neighborhood on his phone, and reflects that Israel’s technological prowess “reduced me and my family to possible testing targets for its advanced weapons” (PDF p.207-212). Ill through the war with a rash along his veins, climbing fever, mouth lesions and a swollen throat, unable to see a doctor because it was too dangerous, he counts the seconds between missiles at night and spends evenings on the balcony playing Tarneeb, Hand and Trix under the zannaneh drone (PDF p.213-214). In the third week a “roof-knock” hits his brother’s empty house next door; the family flees to the garage with bags and land deeds packed, waits hours at his aunt’s for a bigger missile that never comes, and he defines the roof-knock against Israel’s “fair warning” claim: it is “in fact, deadly”, and some families did not make it out in time (PDF p.214-216). School memories (bullied as a “mama’s boy” for refusing to forget his family on the Day of Judgment), a confrontation with Baba — who shouts khawal and manyak, glossed “They mean ‘faggot.’”, and fires three shots into the sky from the balcony — and his exit during a humanitarian cease-fire follow: Khan Younis flattened like Shuja’iyya after the Khuza’a massacre, the bombed Rafah arrivals hall, a twelve-hour wait on the Egyptian side, a young man’s seizure he turns away from, and a military convoy to Cairo airport, closing with OneRepublic’s “I Lived”, “the one song that got me through the haze of those fifty-one days” (PDF p.217-225). A photo of Palestinians waiting at Rafah follows (PDF p.226).

“Travel Restrictions as a Manifestation of Nakba: Gaza, the Path Backward Is the Path Forward” (PDF p.227-240), by Yousef M. Aljamal. His father, ordered by soldiers at Al-Nuseirat in 1987 to dance for entertainment, asked them to clap and ran, hiding in an orange grove and signalling his family by making the Maghreb call to prayer (PDF p.227-228). His grandparents fled Aqer in 1948, his great-grandfather Ahmad Aljamal killed by Zionist militias, his grandmother carrying her baby to Gaza; the family split between Gaza and the West Bank could reunite only under the 1967 occupation, until Oslo’s permit system (1993) and the Second Intifada (2000) cut Palestinians off again (PDF p.228-229). His mother missed both her parents’ funerals in Jericho, an hour away as the crow flies; he was stranded in Kuala Lumpur in 2013 returning through Cairo (PDF p.229-230). His sister Zainab, twenty-six, died in Cairo in 2007 after a permit to a Jerusalem hospital seventy-nine kilometers away was denied and her Rafah surgery came too late; her body waited two days at the closed crossing, and a soldier told his crying father, “All of us will die” (PDF p.231-232). Gisha’s court case won his mother a four-day permit in 2012, her first visit in twelve years; she “overstayed” thirty-two days, “a day for each year she had spent in Gaza, prohibited from leaving” (PDF p.232). Cousins are met for the first time in Jordan (2014), Germany (2017) and Sweden (2018); Samer was abducted in Somalia for a $1 million ransom as a supposed son of Bin Laden and held two months (PDF p.233-236). Against Israel’s security claim — “baseless”, meant to divide — the family has tripled since 1948 and remains one family; travel restrictions are the ongoing Nakba, Gaza being 1.3 percent of Mandate Palestine, the post-Oslo checkpoint system collective punishment, and his demands include ending the eastern buffer zone (over one-third of fertile land) and the three-to-six-nautical-mile sea buffer, free family movement, and student travel, closing with Ibrahim Nasrallah’s words, acting as if “we live above occupation and not under it” (PDF p.236-240). A photo of a Rafah anti-annexation mural follows (PDF p.241).

“Let Me Dream” (PDF p.242-257), by Israa Mohammed Jamal (memoir). Her third-grader Rawa’s textbook shows Jericho, Haifa and Nablus she cannot visit; the author, a refugee from Breer whose grandparents fled to a Rafah camp in 1948, studied the Egyptian curriculum as a child before the Palestinian curriculum of 1995 (PDF p.242-243). Childhood memories: the Arabic-speaking soldier Ramee’s candy for informers’ names, her father ordered to clean streets, soldiers killing all the men remaining in the neighbourhood mosque, her father negotiating to say al-athan in its doorway, and al-motaradeen (the chasers) denying soldiers comfort (PDF p.244-246). Land Day and other celebrations reliably ended in catastrophe; at her brother Iyad’s wedding the mother of his dead friend Jad danced with him in tears; at eighteen, studying for the tawjihi under attack in 2004, she wished to die and scored 87 percent (PDF p.246-248). Married in 2006, she had Rawa in 2008; the family then scattered to Egypt (Iyad, Abdullah, her father, her mother after extreme border difficulty, Doaa, Alaa, Fakher) and her closest brother Hasan later to Germany, his first visa expiring while the border was closed (PDF p.248-251). Rawa’s first birthday, January 6, 2009, was fled under bombardment; a 2012 Egypt trip — her first exit from Gaza — reunited her daughters with their grandfather at Cairo zoo (PDF p.251-253). After the 2014 war her children played drones destroying blocks and soldiers versus Palestinians; her son Mahmoud’s kind COVID-lockdown officer contrasts with her soldier memories (PDF p.253-255). She dreams of liberation, erasing “refugee” from her children’s vocabulary, praying at Al-Aqsa, an end to the blockade for family reunion and travel, better schools (forty-plus per class, no purified water), Rawa studying medicine in Turkey, Rahaf engineering in Germany, and her own women’s-empowerment NGO (PDF p.255-257). A Gaza Sea Port photo follows (PDF p.258).

“Gaza 2050: Three Scenarios” (PDF p.259-266), by Basman Aldirawi (analysis). Gaza, occupied since 1967 and still regarded as occupied after the 2005 withdrawal, is controlled by Israel in air and sea space, six of seven crossings, the buffer zone and the population registry; over two million people in 365 square kilometers live with undrinkable water and, per UNCTAD’s 2015 warning, a Strip that could become “uninhabitable” by 2020 — “Gaza was uninhabitable even before that” (PDF p.259-260). The three scenarios that follow are imagined futures written in the first person, not events. In Aldirawi’s imagined no-solution scenario for 2050, Gaza’s population has reached ten million people, the blockade has lasted more than forty years, and Gaza still has the thirteen government hospitals with fewer than two thousand beds that Aldirawi gives as the figure for 2021 (PDF p.260-261). In his imagined two-state scenario for 2050, Palestinians have accepted a state on 22 percent of their original land with no right of return, and Israel still restricts movement, imports, the airport and the seaport, so that “the reality favors Israel” (PDF p.262-263). In his imagined one-state scenario for 2050 — the only scenario he presents as giving Palestinians their full rights — he imagines himself living in Beersheba, his family’s original city, travelling to Gaza in one hour with no checkpoint or apartheid wall, refugees returned to their original cities, and joint democratic elections in “normal diversity” (PDF p.263-265). Humanitarian aid is “a proven failure”; finding a solution is the occupier’s responsibility, not the occupied’s, with real international pressure and no equating occupied with occupier: “Gaza needs the ongoing Nakba to end. Gaza needs life.” (PDF p.265-266). A beach photo follows (PDF p.267).

“A Rose Shoulders Up” (PDF p.268), poem by Mosab Abu Toha (poetry), reprinted from Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (City Lights, 2022), with an Arabic version: “Don’t ever be surprised / to see a rose shoulder up / among the ruins of the house: / This is how we survived.”

Notes (PDF p.269-290). Notes for the Introduction (including the substantive note that the two-state framework is both cause and symptom of fragmentation and that the PLO leadership entered the peace process without the consent of those it claims to represent, PDF p.269), for Abu Mezied’s recording chapter, for Abusalama’s chapter (notes 1-56, including the Evans/Hailey definition of permanent temporality and a note on the sniping of filmmakers Yasser Murtaja and Ahmad Abu Hussein at the Great March of Return, PDF p.270-273), for Abu Mezied’s “Lost Identity” (notes 1-73, ending PDF p.277), for Al Qudwa’s chapter (notes 1-45, including the substantive note 1 on cash-for-work aid — vetted recipients, menial labour, no challenge to the situation that leaves people in need — and note 45 on his co-directed project film, PDF p.277-280), for Taha’s chapter (notes 1-14, PDF p.281-282), for Naim’s chapter (notes 1-28, including note 7’s description of the INSS as a Tel Aviv University-affiliated institute for national security and cyber warfare and note 21’s caveat that little is known about the PA’s and resistance factions’ own AI uses, PDF p.282-284), for Abu Toha’s chapter (notes 1-49, including the Gaza Municipality Library, established in 1996, as the second largest library with twenty-five thousand books, PDF p.284-288), a single note recording that a condensed version of Dorgham Abusalim’s chapter appeared in A Land with a People (2021) (PDF p.288), for Aljamal’s chapter (notes 1-16, PDF p.288-289), and a single note for Aldirawi’s “Gaza 2050” citing the UN’s September 1, 2015 report that Gaza could become uninhabitable in less than five years (PDF p.289-290).

Index (PDF p.291-309). An alphabetical index whose locators are printed book pages, not PDF pages. Its largest entries are for the Gaza Strip (characterizations, conditions, demographics, population growth, Israel’s strategies to control it, possible futures), freedom of movement and the permit regime, the Nakba (including the ongoing Nakba), artificial intelligence, libraries and books, Operation Protective Edge, and the right of return (including technology and the right of return).

About AFSC (PDF p.310-311). Founded in 1917, the American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization including people of all faiths, based on the belief in the divine light within each person; since 1948 it has worked in the United States, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory for nonviolence and an end to the occupation. In April 1948 its staffers’ Middle East trip led it to accept the UN’s urgent request to support displaced Palestinians in Gaza, where it ran food, shelter and sanitation in ten camps and opened schools for all the Strip’s children; the structures it set up formed the basis of UNRWA’s operations. Its voice was “one of the first and most forceful” for Palestinians to return to their homes, warning of intractable problems if hundreds of thousands were abandoned with no recourse to either return or voluntary resettlement with compensation (PDF p.310). It ended refugee relief in 1950 but stayed engaged — preschool centers with UNRWA, the first legal aid clinic for Palestinians under occupation in the 1970s, youth work from the 1990s, offices in Jerusalem and Gaza, and US advocacy and domestic programs. The writings in the anthology do not necessarily reflect AFSC’s opinions; they are authentic voices of Palestinians from Gaza who “call on the world to act as if their lives matter” (PDF p.311).

Contributors (PDF p.312-315). Biographies of the three editors and of the editorial committee (Tareq Baconi, Ann Lesch, Sara Roy and Steve Tamari), then, under “Authors”, of the eleven chapter authors: Jehad Abusalim is completing a PhD in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and contributed to Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (2020); Jennifer Bing has worked at AFSC since 1989 and Michael Merryman-Lotze since 2010; Basman Aldirawi (also published as Basman Derawi) is a physiotherapist and 2010 Al-Azhar University graduate who contributes to We Are Not Numbers, as does Israa Mohammed Jamal (listed here as Israa Jamal), an English literature graduate and mother of five; Nour Naim holds a PhD from Istanbul Aydin University; Suhail Taha is a Ramallah-based researcher and anthropology PhD student at Sciences Po; the other biographies are as recorded in the reading notes (PDF p.312-315).

About Haymarket Books; Also Available; back pages (PDF p.316-324). Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit Chicago publisher founded in 2001, named for the Haymarket martyrs of 1886, with more than five hundred titles (PDF p.316). “Also Available” lists, among others, Palestine: A Socialist Introduction and Mohammed El-Kurd’s Rifqa (PDF p.318-319). The back cover (PDF p.320, read in the original) calls the book a seminal, moving and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists and a collective effort to center Palestinian voices; a blank leaf (PDF p.321), the “Disclaimer” page (PDF p.322) and the ebook licence and distribution notice (PDF p.323-324) close the file.

Key passages

• “when it comes to understanding the Palestinian cause in general, and the contemporary reality in Gaza in particular, historical context matters” (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.16).
• “For change to occur, Gaza must be understood as an integral part of historic Palestine” (PDF p.13).
• “Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world” (PDF p.35).
• “Knowledge is Israel’s worst enemy. Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe” (PDF p.39).
• “How can we break free from the vicious circle that traps us and our families in a state of permanent temporality?” (PDF p.52).
• “You give to al-ard (the land), she will give back to you.” (PDF p.80).
• “There is no detail of village life, from crops to quarrels, that people cannot remember in microscopic detail” (PDF p.85).
• “permanence as resistance” (PDF p.113).
• “The electricity is coming” (PDF p.144).
• “I call this the “Cyber Dome,” which operates similarly to the Iron Dome” (PDF p.159).
• “It is not enough to let the world know the truth—the world already knows the truth. We need to make the world take action” (PDF p.170).
• “I had never imagined that books could be harmed so ruthlessly.” (PDF p.174).
• “almost no one buys new books anymore” (PDF p.186).
• “We love our country. We resist by singing, by art.” (PDF p.191).
• “The store was all I had in my life. My wife and I sold her gold to keep it going and develop it. Now all is gone.” (PDF p.204).
• “Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world” (PDF p.224, quoted from The West Wing as Dorgham Abusalim presents it).
• “All of us will die” (PDF p.232, an Israeli soldier to Aljamal’s father, as Aljamal presents it).
• “we live above occupation and not under it” (PDF p.240, Ibrahim Nasrallah, as quoted by Aljamal).
• “It’s not the responsibility of the occupied to find a solution to their occupation; rather, this is the responsibility of the occupier” (PDF p.265).
• “Gaza needs life.” (PDF p.266).
• “call on the world to act as if their lives matter” (PDF p.311, About AFSC on the anthology’s authors).

Evidence the work relies on

Personal testimony and memoir (Alareer’s life narrative; Abu Mezied’s family and village memory; Abusalama’s family and friendship history), family and AFSC archival material (the Gaza Unit letter of October 12, 1949; Clarence Pickett’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed of March 20, 1949; AFSC’s March 1949 report to the UN, as presented by Abusalama), cited scholarship and journalism in each chapter’s notes (among them Benny Morris on returnees killed 1949-56, Hagar Shezaf on archive removals, Darryl Li and Jean-Pierre Filiu on Gaza as laboratory, Rosemary Sayigh on Lebanon), official and institutional figures (the UN Population Fund’s Palestine 2030 projection; the Fourth Geneva Convention text on forcible transfer), and Palestinian literary works (Kanafani’s Letter From Gaza, Darwish’s “Silence for Gaza”, Jabra’s memoirs), each credited to its author inside the chapters. Part 2 adds Abu Mezied’s cited agricultural history and statistics (British consular export reports, Qada Gaza citrus and cereal areas, PalTrade tree-uprooting figures, Gisha live-fire and permit reporting, Kurzom on cut flowers, Braverman on pine and olive cultivation, Swedenburg on peasant resistance and Preservation-Dissolution), Al Qudwa’s practitioner case-study record of the IRPAL Rehabilitation of Damaged Houses Project (household visits, sketches, bills of quantities and costs), Taha’s named family narrative and press-documented inventions and candle-fire deaths, and Naim’s cited account of Israeli AI and Paltel agreements. Part 3 adds Naim’s cited reporting and institutional sources (the Jerusalem Post on Unit 8200’s AI programs, Hanan Greenwood on Gaza Smart Space, ITU resolutions, Frost & Sullivan on drone exports, Human Rights Watch and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights on drone killings, Forbes on AI diagnosis, MIT spinach-sensor research), Abu Toha’s documentary survey material (Arif al-Arif’s The History of Gaza, PNIA’s library list, the Palestine Museum’s 2015 libraries survey, his interviews and correspondence with Chomsky, Samir Abu Lebdah, Abdallah Tayeh, Atef Abu Saif, Khalil al-Muzaien and Sheikh Abdullah al-Masri, and the WAFA periodicals table in his appendix), and Dorgham Abusalim’s family memoir narrative. Part 4 adds Dorgham Abusalim’s completed family memoir, Aljamal’s family history and cited Gisha case record, Israa Mohammed Jamal’s family memoir (first told in part to a Yale Reporting and Writing on War student in 2020), Aldirawi’s cited UNCTAD 2015 uninhabitability warning, and the Notes’ bibliographies for the Introduction, the recording chapter, Abusalama’s chapter and the opening of Abu Mezied’s agricultural chapter. Part 5 adds the remaining Notes’ bibliographies for every other chapter (agricultural, architectural, electricity, AI, cultural, memoir, travel and scenarios chapters), the Index’s printed-page locators, the Contributors’ biographies, and the About AFSC institutional history as the book itself presents them.

Analysis

The anthology’s method is collective authorship under a single editorial frame. The editors’ Foreword and Jehad Abusalim’s Introduction set the thesis — Gaza is unintelligible outside the Nakba as a continuing process, and discourse on Gaza must escape the security, humanitarian-victim and heroes-and-martyrs frames — and the eleven contributors then work that thesis from inside Gaza (or from a Gaza family’s exile) in the genres they command: memoir (Alareer, Dorgham Abusalim, Aljamal, Israa Mohammed Jamal), poetry (Aldirawi, Abu Toha), family and archival history (Abusalama, Abu Mezied), practitioner case study (Al Qudwa), ethnographic narrative (Taha), technical survey (Naim) and documentary cultural history (Abu Toha). A call for abstracts, “Gaza: Reimagining the Boundaries of Possibility”, is the book’s organising device, so testimony repeatedly turns into a program: recording as anti-erasure, permanence as resistance in housing, AI as a catalyst for liberation, and Aldirawi’s three imagined 2050 scenarios, of which only the one-state scenario is endorsed.

Its evidence is correspondingly mixed, and the page above credits each kind to its author: personal and family testimony that no outside source could supply; AFSC archival material from 1949-50, quoted against AFSC’s own then-leadership; institutional figures (UN, UNCTAD, PCBS, Gisha, PalTrade) carried in the chapters and their Notes; and close readings of Palestinian literature, labelled as literature wherever they are used. The Notes are full bibliographies, not decoration, and several are substantive arguments in themselves (the Introduction’s note on the two-state framework, Al Qudwa’s note on cash-for-work aid, Naim’s note on the INSS).

Its limits are the limits of its method. Figures are each author’s, as of that author’s writing (2020-21 for most chapters, with May 2021 epilogues), and they conflict inside the book — Gaza’s pre-1948 population, its density and area, and the 2008-9 and 2014 tolls are all given differently by different contributors, and every such conflict is recorded under Open questions rather than reconciled. The future-oriented chapters are explicitly exercises in imagination: Aldirawi’s 2050 scenarios are imagined futures, not forecasts with evidence behind them, and Naim’s AI program is a proposal whose Israeli-side premises rest on the journalism she cites. About AFSC states that the writings do not necessarily reflect AFSC’s opinions (PDF p.311); the anthology is a platform for Gazan voices, not an institutional position, and its claims stand with their individual authors.

People, organizations, places and events

Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Michael Merryman-Lotze, Refaat Alareer, Asmaa Abu Mezied, Shahd Abusalama, Basman Aldirawi, Salem Al Qudwa, Suhail Taha, Nour Naim, Mosab Abu Toha, Dorgham Abusalim, Yousef M. Aljamal, Israa Mohammed Jamal, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, American Friends Service Committee, Islamic University of Gaza, Gaza Writes Back, Edward Said Public Library, Samir Mansour Bookstore, ASHTAR Theatre, Forensic Architecture, Palestine Open Maps, Louay Odeh, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Gaza, Nahal Oz, Nafha prison, Great March of Return, Unity Intifada, Salman Abu Sitta, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Day of the Land, Beit Lahia, Jabalia

Concepts

Nakba, Two-state solution, Permanent temporality, Place attachment, Right of Return, Orientalism, One-state solution, Environmental Nakba, Architecture of the everyday, Digital occupation, Sumoud

How it relates to other sources

Asmaa Abu Mezied’s recording chapter is excerpted as Chapter 8 of From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine; this is the original anthology it was taken from. Its readings of Kanafani’s Letter From Gaza and of the Great March of Return overlap with The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine and Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and its account of Salman Abu Sitta’s return mapping complements The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine. The AFSC history in Abusalama’s chapter and in About AFSC is the same institution told from two angles: Abusalama documents the 1949 split between Pickett’s resettlement realism and the refugees’ refusal, while About AFSC presents its 1948-50 relief, its early forceful voice for return or resettlement with compensation, and the structures that became UNRWA’s operations (PDF p.55-58, p.310-311). Jehad Abusalim links this book to Palestine: A Socialist Introduction in person: he is an editor here and, as the Contributors list records, a contributor there (PDF p.312), and Haymarket’s “Also Available” pages list that book among its titles (PDF p.318-319). Dorgham Abusalim’s memoir also appeared, condensed, in A Land with a People (2021) (PDF p.288). Its Gaza tolls and population figures conflict with each other internally, as recorded under Open questions, and its 1948 frame — Nakba as process, return as the central demand — agrees with The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nakba and Survival and The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine while resting on testimony and present-day Gaza material those works do not use.

Open questions

• Gaza’s pre-1948 population is given as “around 100,000 inhabitants” in the Introduction (PDF p.17) and as 80,000 in Abusalama’s chapter (PDF p.54). Both figures stand as printed.

• The Introduction gives Gaza’s refugees as 200,000 joining the Strip in 1948 (PDF p.17); Abusalama gives around 200,000 refugees expelled into Gaza, a quarter of all Palestinian refugees (PDF p.54).

• At PDF p.48 the text copy prints “setter colonialism” for settler colonialism; at PDF p.56 it prints “Picket’s” once for Clarence Pickett. Kept as printed.

• At PDF p.50 the text copy cuts short a quotation from Edward Said after the PLO ‘will end up guarding the world’ (note 9); reading uncertain at that point.

• Abu Mezied’s “Lost Identity” chapter is completed in part 2 (PDF p.77-99); Naim’s AI chapter, unfinished at PDF p.149, is completed in part 3 (PDF p.150-172); Dorgham Abusalim’s “In the Haze of Fifty-One Days” is unfinished at PDF p.212 and is completed in part 4 (PDF p.213-225).

• Abu Toha’s timeline gives the December 2008-January 2009 attack’s toll as “more than 1,500 people, about 950 of whom were civilians” (PDF p.201-202), against Alareer’s “over 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-three days” for Operation Cast Lead (PDF p.34). Both stand as printed.

• Abu Toha gives the 2014 war’s toll as 2,251 killed, 80 percent civilians (PDF p.201-202), against Alareer’s “over 2,400 Palestinians” (PDF p.36). Both stand as printed.

• Abu Toha gives the 1948 displacement as “more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians” (PDF p.191), against the Introduction’s “over 750,000 Palestinians from their cities, towns, and villages” (PDF p.17). Both stand as printed.

• Text-copy slips kept as printed in part 3: “some Arab counties” for countries in the appendix table (PDF p.205, read in the original), “at one-point” in the Bergan quotation (PDF p.187), and “near continuou swar” (PDF p.201), apparently a broken “near continuous war”. The appendix table at PDF p.205 is image-only in the text copy and was read in the original.

• Gaza’s population density is given differently across chapters as printed: 13,069 per square mile (Introduction, PDF p.24), 6,175 people per square kilometer (Abu Mezied, PDF p.95) and 5,204 people per square kilometer (Al Qudwa, PDF p.106); Taha gives Gaza as a “140 square mile prison” (PDF p.143) against Al Qudwa’s 365 square kilometers (PDF p.105). All figures stand as printed.

• Qada Gaza is given in the Introduction as a district of more than fifty-three cities, towns and villages (PDF p.17) and by Abu Mezied as fifty-four villages and three cities in 1910, of which forty-five villages were lost in 1948 (PDF p.79, p.84). Both accounts stand as printed.

• Al Qudwa’s project timeline as printed: his IRPAL work began in 2006, the Rehabilitation of Damaged Houses Project was developed after the 2008–9 attacks, yet the project is also said to have been frozen during the summer of 2007 and renewed in 2009 (PDF p.115-118). The sequence stands as printed.

• Abu Mezied gives Qada Gaza’s citrus area twice, differently: citrus trees increased to 31,418 dunum in 1945, “just before the Nakba” (PDF p.79), but of “22,000 dunum of citrus farms that existed before the Nakba”, only 4,000 dunum remained (PDF p.84). Both figures stand as printed.

• Taha’s chapter spells the youngest son of Abu Tariq’s family both “Khaled” (PDF p.138, p.140) and “Khalid” (PDF p.138, p.140, p.141). Both spellings are kept as printed.

• Taha numbers two different points as the fourth lesson: “people hear better in the dark” (PDF p.142) and, for Gaza, “to look at every beautiful city scene, as it may not be there the next time you look” (PDF p.143). The duplicate numbering stands as printed.

• Text-copy slips kept as printed in part 2: “having to relying” (PDF p.105), “contactors’” for contractors (PDF p.127), and “Israeli has fostered” for Israel in Naim’s chapter (PDF p.149).

• Dorgham Abusalim’s chapter repeats the headphone paragraph at PDF p.225 (“I put on my headphones and began listening to the one song…”) twice in succession, the second time naming the song. Kept as printed.

• Aljamal gives his family’s village as “Aqer (Acre)” (PDF p.228): the text glosses Aqer as Acre in parentheses, and the identification is not explained in the source (reading uncertain).

• Aljamal’s chapter gives Gaza as 1.3 percent of British Mandate Palestine (PDF p.236-237), against the Introduction’s 1 percent of historic Palestine (PDF p.23-24). Both stand as printed.

• Text-copy slips in the Notes as printed in part 4: “dessert” for desert in Introduction note 3 (PDF p.269), “conations” and “contraining” in Abusalama note 2 (PDF p.270), “Bengel-soorf” in Abusalama note 9 (PDF p.271), and “Mazim Qumsieh” in Abu Mezied note 2 (PDF p.273) against Mazen Qumsiyeh elsewhere.

• Dorgham Abusalim’s “In the Haze of Fifty-One Days” is completed at PDF p.225 in part 4; the Notes, unfinished at PDF p.275, are completed in part 5 (PDF p.276-290).

• Text-copy slips kept as printed in part 5: the Wall Street Journal headline in Naim’s notes 22 and 24 is printed “AI Emerges as Crucial Toll for Groups Seeking Justice for Syria War Crimes” (PDF p.284); Abu Toha’s notes give the TEDx name as Shujaiya in the titles of notes 41-43 (PDF p.287) against Shuja’iyya in his chapter, and note 46’s title is printed “Dreamers among The Rubble” (PDF p.288).

• The Contributors list and the back cover name the memoir’s author “Israa Jamal” (PDF p.315, p.320), against her chapter byline Israa Mohammed Jamal (PDF p.242). Both forms stand as printed; the Index’s entry for Abu Tariq’s son uses the spelling “Khalid” (PDF p.301, printed locator).

• The “Disclaimer” page (PDF p.322) bears that heading only, in the text copy and in the original; no disclaimer text follows it anywhere in the file. Reading uncertain.

Coverage

PDF p.1-324 of 324, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5.