Something Shahd Abusalama said to me in the spring of last year has played over and over in my head, to the point where I forgot where it had come from even though the words kept repeating themselves.
Unable to sleep last night, trying to break the grim habit of demanding media updates from Palestine on my phone screen, I went back to the transcript of my interview with her, looking for the details she’d shared of her family and their journeying, but instead stopped dead at the oddly familiar words, screaming now like a warning, “We are trying to say ‘this violence is unsustainable’.”
I’d sat down to interview Shahd on a May day in Sheffield about her fight against suspension from the city’s Hallam university as a result of her political activism. Shahd, an academic with a PhD in media studies, is from the Gaza Strip, born the daughter of refugees of Palestine’s 1948 Nakba. Growing up, she told me, her “centre of gravity” was the Jabalia refugee camp. That’s where she attended a United Nations school and learnt to dance the Dabke.
On Monday, Israeli missiles smashed into Jabalia’s market place, killing dozens of blameless ones stood by stalls and on street corners. According to Al Jazeera, so far this week, five neighbourhoods have been completely levelled in the central Gaza Strip.
“I’m living in the middle of contradictions and I’m always struggling in between those structures of power,” Shahd had added last year, “I feel trapped in violence that extends from Palestine to here and I don’t know how to get free from it.”
On Wednesday of this week, Shahd, now living in London, was writing of her loved ones not far from Jabalia, “My family is hosting more relatives who escaped heavy bombardment, knowing that our home may not be any safer. ‘The ground is shaking beneath us, and the walls feel like they're falling inwards’ is how my mum put it. Drinkable water is running out, and we can hardly reach them.”
“We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant told the world on Monday. And the world looked on largely unmoved.
“A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power? Cutting off water, Sir Keir?” is what a reporter asked Britain’s Labour leader at his party conference of Gallant’s declaration.
“I think Israel does have that right,” said Starmer the hard man, the man of consequence and consequences, his earlier career as a human rights lawyer now locked up safely in the past.
Words keep rebounding from the past though, finding themselves recommissioned to better suit their next target. Animals. Beasts. Dogs. Low life.
“Evil gunmen who have crawled out of the ghettoes of West Belfast, evil human pus…” was how one city councillor depicted my home place back in 1988. But the intent behind Gallant’s words is on another level altogether.
Gaza’s last power plant is now out of action, hospitals are running on generators, the end of their fuel terrifyingly in sight, the fate of children in incubators and patients on dialysis machines hangs in the balance, drinking water and food are running out.
“Attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said, but alas that was last year’s October not this one, and the people she was sticking up for then were Europeans, not Arabs.
“Cockroaches” and “snakes” is what the radio station RTLM labelled Rwanda’s Tutsi minority ahead of the genocide of the mid-1990s. Human animals, in effect. Academic careers have been built on exposing the conditioning that must take place before a genocide can be put into effect, Hollywood has put it in lights for us, and yet here we are. Gaza 2023, and the world looks on, unwilling to risk anything for a couple of million poor Palestinians.
Maybe Mr Gallant has a point, some people think. The paroxysm of rage that escaped from Gaza on Saturday morning engulfed hundreds, leaving the bodies of young and old strewn across kibbutzim and the Supernova music festival site three miles from the wall most of their killers would never previously have been able to cross. This was a war crime many seem to think came out of nowhere, driven by inexplicable, pathological intent.
“This violence is unsustainable,” said Shahd 18 months ago, and the words came from a place of anguish. Shahd is no more responsible for the slaughter of civilians on Saturday than are her trapped family or the hundreds of thousands of others now cowering under Israeli air strikes, so what was she talking about?
“You have to remember that Gaza, more than 70 per cent of its population are refugees who descend from those lands, so it’s basically a refugee concentration camp,” she said of the strip of land 25 miles long, never more than five miles wide, home to 2.3 million people, more than half of them children, that has been under blockade for 16 long years.
“Violence is always there, it’s always part of the underlying elements of our reality, it’s always present, it’s an occupation, it’s a siege and it’s one of the most frequently bombarded areas and it’s just incredible, honestly very horrific.
“Basic access to electricity, water, 95 per cent of water is contaminated in Gaza, the issue of malnutrition is just widespread among refugee children especially, and these are reports that have been issued by the UN.
“The UN made this famous call in 2012 saying that Gaza may be uninhabitable by 2020 and we have already now passed that threshold and they have come out with another report, another update, saying that Gaza is uninhabitable. But for us, for the Palestinians inside who have to live with that harsh reality day in and day out, we cannot even begin to grasp how these humanitarian organisations thought that it was ever inhabitable.”
That was in May 2022. Today – October 12 2023 – Ghassan Abu Sitta, a reconstructive surgeon at the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital Shifa, says he has 50 patients waiting to go to the operating room: “We’re already beyond the capacity of the system to cope.” This morning, the Red Cross said the fuel to operate hospital generators could run out in a few hours.
“I’m trying my best, but even when I call out what is obvious, when we call out the oppression, we are silenced and so I always feel alienated, I always feel like I’m the exception to the rule and how can I feel at peace with my surroundings when I know of all these multi-layered violent structures that are basically there and they’re legitimating the continuing violence against us and fuelling it more? So how can I ever feel at peace?” Shahd Abusalama
As of this afternoon, there are 1,417 Palestinians lying dead in Gaza, including 447 children, 10 medics, at least six journalists and 11 UN employees. More than 300,000 people have fled their homes, made refugees, two, three, four, five times over. It’s said that people get tired of the statistics, even the imagery, of massacre, but we’re not weary of them, not really, we don’t know what to do with them is the thing. We’re scared of them.
We’re in the grip of a collective cowardice that dictates no real risks should be taken when rich men prepare the ground for genocide and the wretched of the earth suffer what they must. Meanwhile, “the feeling of dehumanisation is eating us alive,” says Shahd.
These, then, are the human animals of Gaza: Shahd’s mother Halima and her father Ismail, her brother Mohammed and her young niece Eliya; the four families sheltering in the Abusalama home – her aunts and uncles and cousins – not safe even there, rationing the scant fuel for the generator so they can attempt to let their children scattered around the world know that they have survived another night under bombardment.
And still the nights come.
Excellent Pádraig
Brilliant piece -