Bearing Gaza in Exile
I have been working on a memoir on the meaning of Palestine for several years. A developmental editor, who knew nothing about Palestine, got back to me in September, 2023, with minor suggestions. I was excited to tackle the revisions suggested as soon as I completed an academic paper on imagining economic liberation in Palestine for a conference in Doha. I had set October 10th, 2023 as the day to work on finishing my memoir. That day never came.
From the moment I saw the images of paragliders flying over the incarcerating walls of Gaza on October 7th, dread flooded my life and would not recede. Another war was declared, this time initiated by Palestinian military groups, not by any Arab army. In a single day, Hamas and Islamic Jihad commandos shattered Israel’s posture of invincibility, killing 1,139 Israelis, most of them civilians—the highest death toll in a single day since the state’s creation in 1948. The Palestinian fighters attempted to defy the laws of gravity and of settler colonialism. Their act was as audacious as it was petrifying; the freedom it aspired to was already shrouded with death. It hurled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into an abyss whose depths we could not yet fathom.
The tranquility of the lake in front of me that Saturday did not calm my racing heart. I had come up to Maine with my family for our annual Indigenous People’s weekend getaway. Instead of heading out for the hike we had planned, we spent the morning transfixed by images broadcasted on Al Jazeera: brown people—my people—rushing through gaping holes blasted into the eight-foot wall, while others—young, Western looking—ran for their lives at a rave festival. I turned away from the iPad to catch my breath. The red and yellow leaves drifting onto the grass outside could not soothe the fear swallowing in my chest. Their slow descent only deepened the dread. Time trembled, stretching with the foreboding weight of the calamity to come.
I was incredulous, scared. My partner wrapped his arm around me, but his embrace couldn’t loosen the tendrils of panic coiling through my taut muscles. I knew that Israel’s response was going to be ferocious, even if I could not have imagined the scale, duration and brutality of the genocide it was going to launch. I have studied and taught the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict long enough to know how a settler-colonial state responds when the people it subjugates dare to rise up against their oppression.
My first instinct was to call my daughter, now in college. Her roommates had heard her crying, but none of them came to check on her. I tried to soothe her and assure her that all would be well. I did not believe it, but had no other words to say by the time I put down the phone. I then looked at her fifteen-year-old sister. She didn’t want to talk—confused, like the rest of us. It struck me then: she was the same age I had been when Israel launched its war on Lebanon in 1982. Tears welled in my eyes. Why must I endure another war, be tested all over again? How do I protect my girls without burdening them with a history so heavy, so merciless?
I called my aunt and my cousins back in Birzeit. They were euphoric about the siege break, about the resistance, about the freedom—if only for a day. They had not yet seen the excruciating images that flooded the internet. I exchanged WhatsApp messages with friends in Palestine: everyone was incredulous and many were scared. The military and policy experts interviewed on CNN and MSNBC I listened to on our way back to Boston opined that this unprecedented breach of the walls of Gaza reflected not only a major Israeli intelligence failure, but also a policy failure; trapping two million Palestinians within 358 square km for seventeen years couldn’t provide Israelis with security. Some even said Palestinians have been oppressed for too long and that they have rights.
Those voices went silent by Monday, October 9th, once the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared that Israel was “fighting against human animals.” No western leader called him out on his racism, or found a problem with his president’s verdict, a week later on October 13th, that Israel’s war against Gaza was “to save western civilization” and “western values.”
I knew better not to expect much from the West. It had long negated the existence of the Palestinian people and denied the colonial foundation of Zionism.
Like most, I had never imagined an attack on this scale by Hamas, one meant to remind the world of Palestinian existence– just as Leila Khaled did when she hijacked a plane flying from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1969. It shattered the myth that peace could be achieved in the region by acquiescing to Israeli apartheid and ignoring Palestinian rights. It brought a halt to Arab countries’ normalization with Israel, which the USA was trying to expand to include Saudi Arabia. The repercussions of October 7th were bound to be unprecedented, for Israel’s raison d’etre had been hit at its core: the Jewish state, and the Zionist ideology that upholds it, proved incapable of protecting Israelis citizens, let alone the Jewish people, as it claimed.
From the moment Israel declared war on Gaza and ordered that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” enter the Strip, my days were swallowed by an unrelenting tide of rage, grief, and defiance. I became addicted to the news I watched every morning on Al-Jazeera and did not succumb to the temptation to smash the TV after hearing CNN commentators refer to Israeli babies being burned in ovens that didn’t exist. I refused to collapse under the weight of the daily report of children killed in Gaza each day, the 2000 ton bombs delivered by the US that erased whole neighborhoods, the overcrowded UNRWA schools—their fences filled with the laundry of hundreds of families seeking shelter there—often futilely, as schoolyards became repeated targets. My eyes remained hollow staring at a scene of a parent clutching two plastic bags filled with the remains of his loved ones, Ashlaa’ (body parts). “These are my children, you hear me? My children!” a man shouted in despair beside the rubble of a destroyed building, his voice echoing in my mind to this day.
With each passing week, each passing month, the body of Palestine—its people, its nation, its land—was further mutilated. Every Palestinian in the diaspora became obsessed with documenting what Palestinian journalists reported before they were killed, what UN agencies condemned before they were banned, and what Gazans posted, in perfect English and with stupefying dignity and poise, on social media before being slaughtered. This worse nakba would not be negated like the first one. It is the first genocide broadcasted in real time.
But I didn’t want to just bear witness. I did not want to be pulled down by the heft of helpless witnessing or to relive an iota of what Gazans were going through. More is expected of me and the ghosts of the dead haunted me: those who were buried under the rubble, those passed who endured the Nakba, and those who survived the Naksa only to see the dream of independence shattered, as my parents did. I wanted and needed to do more. I wanted to explain, to see a way out, to be part of strategizing and mobilizing for the end of this war. Like many Palestinian academics in the US, I joined teach-ins and webinars, spoke to the press, presented at conferences, wrote articles and recorded podcasts.
To do so, I had to put on my armor and sever my head from my body. I needed to be calm, rational, equanimous. I had to prove, yet again, that Palestinian women are rational not hysterical, competent not incapable. I needed to defend, yet again, my and our legitimate right to exist and be free despite an ongoing genocide determined to eliminate us.
For the first nine months of the war, my brain worked in overdrive to explain, again and again, our right to exist. I deciphered the structure of Israeli apartheid that had brought about the brutality of October 7th and the war that followed. I dissected the juncture this most recent Israel-Hamas confrontation had brought us into to understand the fissures and possibilities. I compared the seismic shock it created to the 1973 war, which also surprised Israel, but was led by two Arab armies, not by Palestinian guerrilla fighters based in their homeland. I went back to history to find some answers for how such wars end. I re-examined the Nakba of 1948 and the 1967 Six-Day war to explain how its descendent led the October 7th attacks. I clarified how the Oslo peace process kept the Gaza Strip under siege for seventeen years and destroyed the two-state solution. I compared the ongoing war to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that led to the expulsion of the PLO. I consumed the news, studied the offences and counter offences, unpacked the ebbs and flows in the media coverage. I analyzed what international and regional actors were doing—and what they were not doing. My mind had to remain cogent, principled, analytical, even-handed. My words had to be unflinching, measured, stripped of the tremor ringing in my heart.
But the horror continued and worsened, especially after the first ceasefire ended in December 2023. I could no longer bear the scenes of devastation and tormenting displacements—the endless streams of people carrying whatever mattresses and household goods they could heap onto donkey carts, their eyes fixed on the heads in front of them to avoid the sight of mutilated bodies rotting on the ground, clasping the hand of an elderly relative or a young girl clutching a pink backpack adorned with a smiling Dora, the one she had meant for the school Israeli missiles had already pulverized.
“If I were in Gaza right now,” I said to my husband one morning, “I would not leave my house.” Tears were rolling down my cheeks, my body rebelling against my mind. “Let the roof fall over my head, the bombs shred me to pieces, but I won’t be displaced again.”
“How can you say such a cruel thing?” Franz turned his eyes away from the images of people searching through the rubble for a loved one. “What right do you have to condemn our children to such a destiny?”
I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. I knew damn well that the privilege of free choice is not available to those living under constant bombardment. My reflexes beat in time with the drums of survivor’s guilt—and perhaps also with what had been etched into me since childhood: never leave your land. But who am I to say that when I am safe living in the West for over twenty years? Still, I wished for my own death rather than to live through a second Nakba—one that Israel’s agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, openly vowed would be worse than the catastrophe of 1948. Exile remained for me the greatest sin of all wars; death was mercy, mutilation or exile was an eternal punishment.
Israel’s relentless war scratched open old scars previous wars had inscribed onto my psyche. It threw me back to the primordial fear sowed at a preverbal age in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It reignited my first memories of Amman in 1970, during Black September, when my younger brother told the three-year-old me not to worry about gunshots. It brought me back to Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982. It resurrected all my anger at, and disappointmet in, men; men who make wars and leave it to women to deal with the consequences; men who pontificate and mansplain to me at conferences, who file motions against me; men who promise to protect but can’t because they are either too self-absorbed or too damaged; men who rape Palestinian men and strip them naked before cramming them into sand pits or onto open trucks to be be brutalized in Israeli interrogation camps.
How can we ever stop this brutality? How do we grieve when the loss never ends—when the wound is ripped open again and again with an endless cruelty? I thought Arab countries would intervene at one point and threaten to cut diplomatic and commercial links with the Jewish State. They didn’t. I hoped Muslim governments would impose stronger sanctions and European countries would practice their professed civilization by forcing Israel to adhere to international law. They didn’t. We were not white like the Ukranians; we were children of a lesser God.
I still refused to despair. I went to demonstrations, worked with activists, supported students who put up encampments and demanded that their universities divest from Israeli military companies. I was uplifted by the massive demonstrations in support of the rights of Palestinians in all major cities worldwide. I was moved by the ingenuity of Jewish acts of solidarity and growing dissenting Jewish voices. Palestinians were finally winning the narrative war, the mind and hearts of people, even if the mainstream media remained silent about Israeli atrocities, even if the ADL and the Zionist lobby continued to demonize every Palestinian supporter.
But the more the war dragged on, the harder it became to find solace in the narrative win or to keep faith in the power of rational analysis or international law. It became difficult to dissociate body from mind, hope from anguish. The International Court of Justice ruling in January calling on Israel to prevent possible acts of genocide was historic, but did not bring about a ceasefire. Israel was becoming a pariah state, but the US did not stop sending weapons. As Ramadan approached in 2024, I thought the carnage might stop. Another Ramadan came in 2025, but the war did not end. I fasted and prayed for the salvation of the people of Gaza and for my tortured soul, but couldn’t find the solace. I kept calling my siblings, trying to keep the family together despite the distance. I failed. My sister was badly depressed in Amman and my youngest brother was alone in DC. My other brother remained in Paris, miles away.
“The war should have brought us together, but it is fragmenting us even more,” I complained to my brother one day. The work of the Palestinian diaspora, which had grown vocal and assertive, did not assuage my sense of fear and displacement. I wanted to be with my siblings under the same roof, but exile does not make that possible.
“Count your blessings, Leila,” was his impassive answer. “We are still alive while many in Gaza have lost all their brothers or sisters.”
He was right, but I was tired of finding solace in lesser pains, in being grateful my parents died before living this second Nakba, in counting my blessings for living in the land of the free and home of the brave, the country that is financing this war.
By June 2023, the war had lasted longer than the war of 1948, in which four Arab armies fought a nascent Israeli army. This war became a clear ongoing genocide. As it became clear that no ceasefire would be signed before the US elections in November 2024, my rage metamorphosed into despair. I no longer had the force to explain, demonstrate, or shout. Words deserted me. A recurrent nightmare began to besiege me every night: over and over, I would pull myself out of derelict trenches, surrounded by dead bodies and walk alone amid the debris of carnage and lost hopes.
I needed a warrior’s rest. I wanted to be back home and feel grounded albeit in a war zone. Without knowing how, I made it through Ben-Gurion in late June with Franz and the girls. A big smile spread along Frida’s face and mine as the taxi rolled onto the West Bank. My anxiety subsided as soon as I saw the embracing hills at the bend of Deir Abu Mishaal village. The scent of jasmine wafting through the windows when the car rolled up to the house was soothing. The trees my father had planted were tall and standing, some even bearing fruit. Diana was waiting for us inside the house, which she had already made spotless after eleven months of abandonment. Amtou Inshirah’s maklubeh was ready for us and my cousin’s girls jumped in excitement seeing Frida again.
But the five weeks I spent in Palestine didn’t provide me with the respite I was hoping for. They threw me into an emotional whirlwind living the war, and its dissonance, enfolding in the West Bank. I went to give condolences to a relative who lost her twenty one year old son to an Israeli bullet. I visited one of the prisoners released who told us about the torture he and his mates had experienced. I went to Nablus, which was raided several times, but could not make it to Nur Shams and Jenin refugee camps, reduced to mini Gaza by early July 2024. I didn’t find a campaign of civil disobedience as had arisen during the first Intifada. The Palestinian Authority had forbidden any demonstrations in support of Gaza and refused to defend the unity of the Palestinian people. It has lost its legitimacy for continuing to carry out its security coordination with Israel, chasing rebellious Palestinians in Jenin and Nablus while preventing demonstrations of solidarity with our brethren in Gaza.
The hardest to bear was witnessing the surreal life in the Bantustan of Ramallah. Jameel’s sister came over to invite me to her youngest son’s wedding, which promised to be big. Frida and her cousins continued to go to al Tira for their bi-weekly boba. The coffee shops were full, and the roads to and from Ramallah jammed with fancy cars. Franz’s colleague at Birzeit University took us to a new restaurant to discuss how we can support Gaza’s educational infrastructure. The remodeled old house was filled with youngsters drinking alcohol and smoking argileh; it had the feel of an American or Lebanese hipster club rather than a subdued venue for how to help our people in Gaza. The dissonance between the ongoing brutal reality of death and the ferocious desire to live was suffocating.
“We have a right to live, auntie,” said my eighteen-year-old niece when I told her about my experience in Ramallah. “People outside idealize us and demand too much of us. We resist by holding onto life, not just to the land.” Her cousin in the Jalazone camp had just been murdered by an Israeli sniper. She still decided to go to his university in Birzeit instead of accepting any of the offers she received from the States.
“The Israelis are extremely brutal this time and the Palestinian Authority has suffocated the Palestinian national movement,” explained my dearest friend back home when I asked why people in Ramallah were not in the streets. We were sitting in my father’s back garden, beside the stone wall next to the fig trees, a gentle breeze softening the humidity of July, waiting for the sun to sink into twilight. “All we can do is stay on the land,” she added, “and not leave.”
Here to stay. That is what I wanted. To stay home, to be with the earth again, to feel the steady pulse of the soil beneath my feet. I thought of Gramsci’s famous words. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.” I never thought the monsters of the Israeli state would last for two full years, break a ceasefire of sixty days in 2025, weaponize aid and starve people to death, bringing the toll of those killed to over 60,000 people, sixty per cent of whom were children. But I also knew that we have been here before, in 1948, even if the scale of death then is dwarfed by what we are bearing today. It will take a new generation to rise from the ashes of this genocide, but they will. The conflict is not over, but has entered a new phase, one in which the two-state solution is dead and Israel’s settler colonial foundations no longer denied. A new solution will need to emerge, one that addresses the reality that there are seven million Palestinians, equivalent to the number of Jewish Israelis living in the land between the river and the sea and which is under Israeli control. These Palestinians are here to stay, however hard Israel tries to expel them. Another seven million Palestinians are living in the diaspora and refuse to forget. And while I won’t know what dent my writing made or will make, I was well aware that our work as Palestinians is cut out for us. We are each doing our part and will continue.
My only refuge that summer of 2024 was my father’s garden in Birzeit. I needed to lose myself beneath the loquat and fig trees, my fingers burrowing into the rich, dry earth to pry weeds from its grasp. The brittle scent of thyme, bursting from the smooth limestone rocks, calmed my restless mind. Fresh lemons, their sharp, sweet tang still clinging to my fingertips after I plucked them for our salads, sparked a flicker of life within me. I tended the apricot, pomegranate, and orange trees too—pruning neglected limbs, whispering care into branches left untouched since spring. Though it was not the pruning season, I wanted to take care of them and tend to their scars. I then rested my back against the broad trunk of an olive tree, nestling between its thick, twisting arteries that gripped the earth. I watched sunlight filter through the jasmine shrubs as the sky deepened into a richer blue. In that walled haven, I drew on the well of love and strength this place always gave me. It recharged me for the next battle awaiting us.
Leila Farsakh is a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labor, Land and Occupation (2005) and editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (2021). She is presently working on a memoir entitled Hon Casa? In Search of Palestine, in Search of Home.