Gaza: A year of pain and the search for belonging
Gaza: A year of pain and the search for belonging
The last 14 months of the genocide in Gaza have not only alienated, but also a new feeling of belonging.
"Now you have a big family that is always at your side," wrote my Palestinian friend Natmi Abushedeq in September after helping him with a personal matter.
But on October 26, almost half of my new “Great Palestinian Family” in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gazas, became victims of Israeli bombing. 28 people were recovered dead, many were still under the ruins.
The suffering, removed Gaza suddenly feels very close. I met the Abushedeqs for the first time in March after I cried for months about the dystopian news and pictures from Gaza. In order to relieve my fainting, I decided to collect medical relief supplies for Nathmi in Berlin, which he would later bring to Gaza.
I met Nathmi's brother Ashraf and his cousin Weam, who have been living in Berlin for eight months. Her serenity made my despair seem almost ridiculous. They come from the north of Gazas, as Weam told me.
A look at life in Gaza
The pictures from social media and international news flooded my head: a sea of white corpse bags, mutilated body, blocked aid deliveries, hunger - people who drink salt water, eat animal feed and grass. Dogs that eat human corpses. Around children who are emaciated to the bones.
weam told me that his family, including his wife and three small children, was looking for protection in a school in Beit Lahiya. I felt helpless and looked for comforting words. Weam smiled gently and said: "Alhamdulillah for everything" - praise God for everything.
"Alhamdulillah" - this sentence accompanied most of our conversations on this day. As Muslims, we believe that everything comes from God and has a sense, even if we don't understand it at the moment. God plans in the long term and always to our best.
We worked and joked in between. My heart felt a little easier. I felt the resistance that is often attributed to the Palestinians, and let it be cheered up.
The Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah wrote:
"We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls after the last heaven ... We Palestinians get up every morning to teach the rest of the world, sir!"
We transported donations through the city until late in the evening and talked. Our mood was like a roller coaster - with loopings. Weam spoke about life in Gaza and here in Germany, and we joked again and again, supported each other. He and Ashraf showed me photos of their women and children, bombarded houses and exhausted relatives.
Ashraf had a phone call with his wife and the small children who had sought refuge in Rafah. It sounded painfully normal - as if Papa were only on a business trip. Life under bombs had become normal in Gaza. The men had already experienced six wars in their lives.
Ashraf told me that his children had eaten chicken that day - for the first time since the beginning of this aggression. My heart sank again. Was that her only meal of the day? Did you only live from 200 calories a day like so many people in Gaza? Do you eat at night? How many dead and mutilated people had you already seen?
"Alhamdulillah. You always like to eat enough," I said.
WEAM spoke a lot about his father, a man who had built a business in Gaza. When he said goodbye, he saw him cry for the first time. But his father, sad and determined at the same time, sent him to Germany via Greece. Life in Gaza had become too difficult - they agreed. Neither father nor son suspected at this time how much hostility and oppression the Palestinians would experience in Germany after October 7th.
police force against Palestinians
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 was traumatic for Israeli society. Innocent life was lost and they are rightly mourned here in Germany. The Israeli war against Gaza has been on for 14 months, kills and mutilated arbitrarily and repaid Gaza in front of our eyes. But German society looked away with a few exceptions. During my life I mostly had ethnic German friends. Today there are very few left.
The disregard of the Palestinian suffering - displacement, displacement, racism, apartheid - hurt myself before October 7, 2023. With the beginning of the war against Gaza, I distanced myself from all those who wanted to teach me from the traditional one -sided German perspective. I didn't have the strength to fight this position in my personal environment.
I became a witness how the police stormed into the crowd in demonstrations. Sometimes this happened because some people called forbidden slogans, such as "from the river to the sea, Palestine is free". Another time there was no reason. The police pulled people out of the crowd and let them go again without being able to prove that they had committed a crime.
In none of the protests I participated, I have experienced violence from the demonstrators. It particularly hurts me to see the police officers brutally attacking the Palestinians, while they peacefully express their despair over the horrors in Gaza. How many of them also mourned about family members killed in the protests?
Amnesty Germany has repeatedly pointed out the disproportionate and racist police force against peaceful Palestine-solidarity demonstrators and demanded independent investigations. "Peaceful demonstrators of Muslim and Arabic origin and their supporters are disproportionate police measures," warns a statement.
The countless disturbing experiences that I had in the protests with the police - together with the continued general criminalization of all demonstrators - ultimately led to the fact that I was looking for other forms of solidarity, far from the streets.
Two months after our first meeting, one day I passed Nathmi, where I found him and his relatives while cooking. Weam greeted me a little reserved. "You got his father," said Natmi.
He had been killed three days earlier. I stammered a few words that seemed inadequate.
"Alhamdulillah", Weam replied with tears in his eyes. The family wanted to spend the day together.
In the car I also broke out in tears. Nathmi had told me earlier that they had lost many family members. How did you endure all of this? What had you done to earn all this apocalyptic suffering?
The last 14 months of the genocide in Gaza have not only produced alienation, but also a new feeling of belonging. I saw a video of the funeral of the Abushedeq family members. Her bodies, wrapped in ceilings, were hastily buried in a mass grave between the rubble. I cried all day. There was no compassion from the German Society for Natmi while he mourned.
Although I have never met the Abushedeqs that are in Gaza, I feel connected to them - a closeness that I can hardly imagine in Germany. It feels like I have never really known this country.
I see the deepest humanity in the devastated Gaza, where death is omnipresent. For me it has become more of a home than the country in which I have been living for over 30 years. I never thought that I would be so alienated, undesirable and persecuted in Germany.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazera.
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| Ort | Beit Lahiya, Gaza, Palästina |
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