ASHRAF KAGEE

I want to tell you about three friends. I have known them for about eight years so they are relatively new friends considering my age. Until late 2023 they lived in Gaza but as the society was being annihilated, they realized that they and their families would die either of a military attack or of starvation unless they left. They were among the lucky ones who were able to leave.

Let me start with Samih, a psychologist, researcher and scholar. Earlier in his life Samih met a Canadian academic who was visiting Gaza and who offered him an opportunity to pursue a masters degree in social services in Canada. At that time it was relatively easy to leave Gaza and he accepted the scholarship, which allowed him to live in Canada for some years. He was eventually naturalized as a Canadian citizen but was very clear that Palestine was where he was needed and so he returned. He worked for several organisations, conducting research into the mental health consequences of living in Gaza where a siege had been imposed since 2005 and the society was constantly under attack by the Israeli military.

Whenever he needed to leave Gaza he could not do so at the Erez checkpoint at the north of the strip, which was out of bounds to most Palestinians. And he certainly could not fly out of Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv as all Palestinians were banned from doing so. Instead, he always left through the Rafah checkpoint on the border of Egypt. He told me many stories of how Palestinians were treated by the Egyptian authorities. They were required to wait for several days before they were allowed entry into Egypt. Sometimes their passports would be contemptuously tossed on the floor by officials for them to pick up, even elderly persons. Sometimes they were forced to sleep on the pavement for a few nights because no transport was available to take them to Cairo.

When the Israeli military started its annihilation of the Gaza Strip from October 2023 onwards, Samih and his teenage son moved from their apartment in Gaza City to a family member’s home in the north. When this became unsafe they moved to a refugee camp. He sent me pictures of his family cooking on outdoor fires, charging their cell phones with a car battery, and huddling together for warmth against the Mediterranean winter. They slept with the windows open so that shattering glass from an aerial attack would not injure them. But this meant that they would endure the cold Gaza nights with not much to keep them warm.

I was in contact with Samih constantly, but I tried to avoid calling as I knew that it would cost him airtime and battery power. Instead, we texted. When I didn’t hear from him for a day or two, I feared the worst but eventually he would respond, and I would relax. I asked about our mutual friends and colleagues whom I had come to know on my several academic visits to Gaza over the years. He told me that two students whom I had taught had been killed in the bombings. He sent me a picture of his car that had been damaged by a bomb, its windshield shattered, but miraculously it still worked. It was a small hatchback in which we had driven around Gaza City many times when we visited friends or went to find something to eat.

Samih’s apartment, for which he has spent many years saving, was reduced to rubble. After two and a half months, when it was clear that the Israeli attacks were not going to cease, he decided to leave. He made the decision with a heavy heart as he had siblings in Gaza whom he would leave behind. But he reasoned that he was out of options and that he needed to act in the interests of his children, some of whom were in Canada. The challenge was getting out through Rafah where he and his son joined the desperate crowds all trying to exit. His and his son’s official documents, especially their Canadian passports, became of crucial importance, and they waited several days until they were allowed to pass into Egypt. Understandably Samih was ridden with guilt at leaving his sister, cousins, nieces and nephews behind to endure the wrath of the Israeli military.

Now in Cairo, he felt he needed to stay, just to be close to Gaza which was his home and where the rest of his family were now living in camps. Food inside Gaza was scarce and expensive and he worried about their health and of course their physical safety as the numbers of dead were ratcheting up. Eventually with a heavy heart he and his son decided to depart for Canada to join the rest of the family there. The guilt and sadness were evident in his voice whenever I spoke to him. He had lost his home, his community, his society, and he would soon lose his income because the NGO he worked for in Gaza was to close. With five children to support he would need to find a job and he would need to find a way to manage his trauma, guilt, and grief.

Let me tell you about Fayez, a psychiatrist and intellectual who had devoted his career to mental health of the people of Gaza. Until a few weeks ago Fayez, his wife and six children lived in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. I had visited their home many times for lunch and dinner. One of the dishes I was served on a few occasions was mandi, a dish of chicken and rice with a blend of spices cooked in a pit about a metre deep in the ground. The family had such a pit in their backyard. They would start a fire in the morning and wait until the coals became embers, after which they would lower a metal container with the raw chicken in it. They would cover the pit with a lid and a blanket and then wait a few hours for the meal to be cooked. During this time we’d chat, go for a walk and attend the mosque for Friday prayers and on our return the food would be cooked. Bringing the metal container out of the pit was a ritual and then of course a feast would ensue.

This life has evaporated for Fayez and his family. With the relentless bombing, they were forced to leave their home and for several months moved around from one camp to another, from Khan Younis to Rafah in the south to Deir al Balah in the middle of the Strip and then again back to Rafah. I stayed in contact with Fayez, again offering support, solidarity, my outrage at the barbarity of the attacks, usually by text and once or twice by phone, although I was mindful about his battery. He tried to show that he was in good spirits by texting “still alive” with a smiley face emoji. But we both knew that the situation was grim and that people were being killed literally in their thousands. On various occasions they stayed in a school that had been converted into a place of refuge, then a tent, then a friend’s apartment that had not yet been destroyed.  

Understandably, Fayez was concerned for his children as the Israelis did not discriminate whom they killed. Infants, children, pregnant mothers, disabled persons were fair game. He wanted to leave but he said he did not have a foreign passport as some did. Nor did he have the money to pay the exorbitant costs of an exit permit so that he and his family could pass through into Egypt. Besides, amidst the chaos it was not even safe to travel to Rafah where they would be able to petition for an exit permit. With thousands of people desperate to exit, brokers have been charging up to $10,000 per person to help them leave. Getting their names on the list of eligible people would require them to pay these exorbitant coordination fees, bribes really, to brokers and couriers who had contacts in Egypt.

Eventually, with the help of family in Saudi Arabia, Fayez was able to obtain a loan so that he could obtain the necessary paperwork for his family to leave. Except there was a snag. All his family members’ names were on the departure list except his. He was forced to make the painful decision to send his wife and six children to safety in Egypt while he remained behind in Gaza. I imagined my friend waving goodbye to his family, the looks in his children’s eyes not knowing if they would see their father again, the worry and concern that Fayez must have had about their well-being, the frustration that he would not be there to take care of them. He returned to his camp, waiting for his turn to come to leave. Eventually after some weeks he was able to leave and is now in Cairo. By then his family had managed to obtain visas to enter a European country where they live temporarily but he has been unable to join them. He and his family are now separated by fate, circumstance, war, and genocide.

Then there is Haytham, a psychologist, intellectual, father and husband. His text in November 2023 speaks for itself.

Last Sunday night We lost our sister in law, 19 years old niece, 18 month old nephew, and two were seriously injured Suad 8 yrs in clinical death and Jabr 16 yrs who is doing better after surgery. We are fine so far, hope this will end soon.

But of course it has not ended, and I was not sure what to text in reply. What can one say besides platitudes and condolences? In the 2014 attacks Haytham lost several family members, brothers, his mother, and other family members. And now there were these losses in 2023. There is no way to imagine this loss and grief, each piled on top of the other. Imagine having to come to terms with this horror, an experience that lies way beyond the capacity of most people to imagine, certainly myself. Besides the emotional toll, Haytham also needed to make pragmatic decisions to save his children from being killed in the current attacks which have shown no sign of relenting.

Haytham and his family managed to leave Gaza in January by paying a considerable sum to Egyptian agents to be able to cross the Rafah check point. They now live a precarious existence in Cairo where his wife was able to find a job. I spoke to my friend a couple of weeks ago on a Whatsapp call. He sounded despondent, heavy, sad. His voice was low. He is over the age of 60 and so unable to find a job easily.

I remember him attending my workshops in Gaza. His sharp intellect did not allow me to be complacent. He challenged me, asked tough questions, provided context, history, and political acumen in our discussions. And we became friends. He invited me to lunch at his home on several occasions. I learned that he liked tennis. Yes, there were tennis courts in Gaza, and on my next visit I took him a set of Dunlop Fort tennis balls. He had an elegant apartment in Gaza City and he drove a Hyundai Tucson. Both have been destroyed. He left Gaza mainly to keep his children alive, and how could anyone fault him for it? Haytham, who had lost so many family members, was terrified of losing his children. He happened to have the money to pay to leave, to survive, to fashion a life of sorts in Cairo. On the phone he told me that he and his family longed for their lives in Gaza, for their apartment, for their community, their friends and family. But life as they knew it went up in smoke and now exists only in the rubble that is now Gaza. Many members of their family have remained, unable to leave. They live in tents, clamouring for food when it is available. There is no relief in sight.

Haytham, urbane, refined, skeptical, always ready to challenge orthodoxy, now worries night and day about his children’s future. At the moment, the younger ones attend an online school. As Palestinians there are restrictions on their educational opportunities in Egypt. Of course, it is good that the family was able to leave and find safety from the unfolding genocide in Gaza. And of course Haytham did what any ordinary person would do, which was to find a safe place for his family.

It is also probably exactly what Israel wants. Its government wants life to be so unbearable for Palestinians that they have no option but to leave.

This is ethnic cleansing, which means that the area can be claimed as Israeli land, a land without people.

There is a concept that Palestinians talk about. Sumud, meaning “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance” in Arabic, is a reference to nonviolent resistance against Israeli aggression which has continued for several decades. Sumud speaks to narratives of Palestinian solidarity and perseverance. It emphasizes the need to retain a strong connection to the land of historic Palestine, a reluctance to leave Palestine, and it encourages the active undermining of the Israeli occupation. It is a concept rooted in struggle, wellbeing, resistance, dignity, justice, and harmony. It is also a way to analyze power relations and enhance critical consciousness.

How do the people of Gaza and the West Bank manage their lives under such indescribable adversity?

I reject the term resilience to describe how Palestinians get through the horror of genocide. Resilience suggests that people should bounce back from a stressful experience, that they should develop mental toughness to overcome adversity, and that they can succeed against all odds. Obviously, this is not possible when a society is being destroyed day by day.

But at the same time there is trauma, grief, the mental images of the horror of war, even though war is a misnomer. Calling the destruction of Gaza a war assumes a symmetry of power, of two standing armies in combat against each other. The onslaught on Gaza is not a war. Israel is a nuclear power and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, aided and abetted by a global superpower, the United States. Israel is hellbent on annihilating Gaza where the vast majority consists of unarmed children, non-combatants, civilians. Not only have many thousands of people been killed, the infrastructure has also been destroyed – homes, buildings, universities, schools, hospitals, clinics, cemeteries, government buildings. The world watches but nothing can be done.

We grieve, we mourn, we condemn, we deplore, we march, we demonstrate, we attend seminars and webinars, we wave flags, we wear keffiyas, we show off our t-shirts, but still the killing continues. Still the bombs fall. Still the children die. 

It makes you wonder how the world came to be structured the way it is, where nation states and their leaders stand by, unable and unwilling to stop the carnage. How did global society unfold in this way, where it is impossible for any nation, large or small, to find it within themselves to intervene to stop a genocide occurring before their very eyes.

Here are some thoughts. The global elite led by North America and Europe hold economic power which gives them a stranglehold on global politics. Decisions made in these western capitals hold sway. If the Americans wanted to, they could have stopped the carnage in Gaza with one phone call. After all it is their weapons being used in the massacre of the Palestinian people and some of their citizens are active in the Israeli military. But they won’t stop it, at least not yet.

Part of the answer lies in the nature of domestic politics in the United States. Rather than reflecting the will of the people, the American government reflects the will of lobby groups: the gun lobby, the farm lobby, the Cuba lobby, and yes, the Israel lobby. Organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Christians United for Israel and many others make up the Israel lobby whose role is to ensure that politicians are elected who favour Israel. This means that most politicians – senators, house representatives, the president and his cabinet, are beholden to the Israel lobby which holds considerable influence among party donors. Politicians who defy the lobby lose donor funding, which is why every candidate, Democrat or Republican, expresses support for Israel as an important plank in their campaign platform. And of course, the Americans are in an election year. The president and his cabinet have signaled vague mealy-mouthed concern about Palestinian deaths. Yet, they continue to send arms and aid to Israel, ensuring that the attacks continue relentlessly. Much of this could be understood as being due to the Israel lobby.

But there is another explanation that sits alongside this one. Let’s call it neocolonialism. Remember who was in charge of the world two hundred years ago? The British, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Germans, the Spanish. They ruled the Americas, Africa, India, and many parts of Asia. They imposed white domination on the rest of the world and subjugated and enslaved people in these regions. They may have lost their empires but they have still retained economic domination. After the Second World War, American domination began in earnest as the leader of the so-called “free world”. But still the Euro-American bloc sought to ensure that they retained their global dominance through institutions that favoured the rich world. What did they want from the global south? Natural resources, markets for their manufactured goods, arms sales. Whenever countries in the majority world elected leaders who opposed American interests, these leaders would be overthrown in American inspired coups, attempted coups, or electoral interference. This meant that the world was stuck with leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Mobuto Sese Seko, Saddam Hussein, Reza Pahlavi, Anastasio Somoza, PW Botha.

Elites in the global north are on a continuous mission to dominate the majority world. Israel represents the north: white, European or American in outlook, an enclave of the western world, a representative of Western civilization. And the Palestinians? The stereotypes continue: violent, terrorist, untrustworthy, incompetent, incapable, exotic, unable to run a society.

Seen from this point of view, Israel as a bulwark against the majority world must have unconditional support from the west, primarily the United States, regardless of the genocide it perpetrates. This is neocolonialism par excellence. White lives matter. Black and brown lives, not so much. Can we call this white supremacy? Yes, but it is disguised. To criticize Israel is to be antisemitic so the story goes, even though those same Israel supporters in the northern countries dislike Jewish people. It is not as contradictory as it sounds. Israel represents the western world in the modern era and so needs to be supported, but prejudice and discrimination of the Jewish people is a centuries-old European story.

We are seeing a reproduction of the colonial narrative in the unfolding crisis in Gaza.

Right now, there is no solution, not one state, not two states, not a federation of states. There is only the reality that Israel dominates the area from the river to the sea. It governs everyone in the West Bank, Gaza, and Green Line Israel but in different ways. It is a colonial state founded by settlers from Europe whom the Europeans supported to assuage their guilt from the holocaust.

Gaza is an unsustainable situation but yet it is being sustained — by guns and bullets and F16s and smart bombs and dumb bombs, all paid for and supplied by the west. This is what things have come to, and even when the current crisis is over, there will be others in this dystopian future. This crisis has no military solution but political solutions too seem out of reach.

I wish I could comfort my friends, Samih, Fayez and Haytham. I wish I could tell them that there will be a just peace for Palestine, that they and their families will live fulfilling lives in safety and security, free of hunger and starvation, free of trauma. But I cannot tell them that in all honesty. The wisest minds in the world have tried to find ways forward but they have failed.

The world is stuck in a moral quagmire and held hostage by American domestic politics and neocolonialism. In this case might may not make right, but it makes reality, even when reality is at variance with morality and decency.

I would like to think that when the time comes, Samih, Fayez and Haytham will return to Gaza to rebuild, to reconstitute the society, and reclaim their lives. Their mission and purpose is to tend to the mental health concerns of the people of Gaza: trauma, grief, anxiety, fear. When the time comes, I will return to Gaza too and offer my services as a psychologist, a teacher, a scholar. How and when that rebuilding will occur is anyone’s guess but we have no choice. There are over two million people living in the Gaza Strip. They need our solidarity, our support, our humanity. And we must stand with them.

*NB: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the persons concerned.