I am horrified by the proposed new asylum policies of our heartless government. I’d like that to go on record.
But today I am thinking about Gaza.
We have floods. They have floods.
Try to imagine.
But I wanted to tell you something else as well.Dr Ezzideen Shehab is a physician in Gaza who founded the Alrahma Medical Centre, a free clinic, committed to providing accessible healthcare in north Gaza. His book about his experiences in Gaza, “Diary of a Young Doctor,” has recently been published by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide.
I came across his writing on Instagram. I hate Instagram. I joined it to see art and to post my own art, but it’s noisy and annoying. However, sometimes something pops up that I was not expecting and am pleased to see, such as film footage of a benefit concert for Gaza. It was there I came across the actor Denise Gough reading a moving excerpt from Shehab’s book.
I have transcribed it from the footage. Any errors are mine.
“During the last ceasefire when the guns fell silent as if exhausted by their own cruelty, the people of Gaza began to walk home. Tens of thousands filled the roads, a river of torn humanity flowing beneath a bruised and merciless sky. I saw them with my own eyes. Old men leaning on canes, mothers clutching the hands of frightened children, youths carrying the ghosts of their dead on their backs. They walked for hours, for days, not toward comfort, but towards the ruins that once bore their names.
And I understood then that returning for them was not a journey. It was a resurrection. Each step was a prayer. Each tear a hymn. To walk toward their shattered home was to walk toward life itself though life no longer wanted them. But now even resurrection has lost its meaning.
When the army once again announced that people could return north, the news fell upon us like a stone in a dead sea. No echo, no stir, only silence. Those who ran now hesitate. Many like us no longer have homes. The walls that once held our laughter are dust. The air itself has forgotten our voices. Some went back for a day. Only to touch a wall that survived the inferno. Or to stand where their father once prayed. And then they returned quietly to their tents, carrying nothing but ashes in their hearts.
Do you understand my friend? When a man prefers a tent to his own home it means the covenant between man and earth has been broken. It means exile has entered the soul. We have not only been driven out from our land, we have been expelled from the very idea of belonging. And now among Gaza’s youth there is but one word on every tongue. Rafah. It is no longer a crossing it is a dream. The last metaphor for hope and not the hope of life but the hope of escape. They wait for its gates to open as the damned wait for judgement. When it opens, you will see them thousands rushing forward faces wild with a desperate light as if salvation itself were fleeting and they must chase it or die. Many will have run toward the sea ready to throw themselves into its vast indifference chasing the trembling horizon of Europe. Some will drown but they will die moving forward. For them the sea is gentler than the land that devoured everything they loved.
And the world will watch again in silence. That same hypocritical silence that covers the Earth like Ash. They will count bodies instead of saving them. They will hold conferences instead of hands. And they will speak of peace as if peace were not the cruellest word of all. The Israeli government knows this despair well. It delays the opening of the crossing not from ignorance but from knowledge. It knows that the deepest victory is not military. The deepest victory is when a people forget they wish to live. This is Gaza now. A place where even hope has grown tired. Where home has become a wound. And where survival itself feels obscene. The tents flap in the wind like dying lungs and inside them people no longer dream. They wait. They wait for the next door to open. Whether it leads to safety, the sea or the end. And sometimes I think that perhaps this is not Gaza alone. Perhaps this is the world itself. A world that has forgotten how to love. Yet dares still to call itself human. Free Palestine.”
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