SÍONA O’CONNELL

In the narrow alleys of Palestinian refugee camps, amid the concrete and corrugated metal of temporary shelters that have housed families for seventy-five years, keys once hung on kitchen walls like religious icons. Heavy, ornate, the kind that once opened front doors of stone houses in Al Majdala, Salama, Jaffa. The houses are gone, demolished in 1948. The neighbourhoods have been rebuilt with different names, different stories. But the keys endured, carrying the entire geography of loss.

Until now. Until Gaza. Until there were no walls left to hang keys upon.

The Palestinian key is perhaps the world’s most recognised symbol of forced displacement, carried by families who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Nakba and in the decades of conflict that followed. Unlike keys lost to natural disaster or economic migration, these keys were taken by design, part of a systematic effort to sever people not just from place but from the possibility of return. The destruction was meant to be absolute: not just homes but entire villages, not just buildings but the memory of communities, not just displacement but erasure.

In Gaza today, the systematic destruction has been so complete, so methodical, that the very concept of keys becomes absurd. What locks remain to turn? What doors survive to open? As Palestinian neighbourhoods disappear under relentless bombardment, as entire communities are erased from the earth, we witness something beyond displacement – we witness annihilation.

No amount of semantics or twisting and turning – like a key desperately seeking a lock that no longer exists – can call this anything but genocide.

The word sits heavy as the ancestral keys once did, undeniable in its precision. Yet we lack a word for those who witness this erasure and choose to call it something else. Those who see the systematic destruction of a people and reach for euphemisms. Those who watch starving children, traumatised families, entire communities extinguished, and speak of ‘complex situations’ and ‘both sides.’ Those who abandon their humanity in the face of such clear moral imperative.

And what will we be called when history judges this moment? When future generations ask what we did whilst watching genocide unfold in real time, broadcast, documented in unflinching detail – what word will they use for our response? They will wonder at those who possessed all the tools of knowledge, all the means of action, yet chose the comfort of wilful blindness. They will question those who forgot what it means to be human.

The children amongst the displaced carry a different weight now. Starving, traumatised, they embody a truth we cannot look away from: that when displacement becomes total, when there are no keys left to inherit because there are no homes left to remember, we witness the mechanics of genocide in real time.

This dual displacement – historical and ongoing – mirrors patterns that stretch across the globe and through history. In South Africa under apartheid, the forced removal of over millions of people followed a similar logic of erasure. Families torn from District Six, Cato Manor, Sophiatown, and hundreds of other communities were meant to disappear not just from their neighbourhoods but from memory itself. Children were supposed to grow up forgetting where they came from, accepting their exile as natural. Yet like the Palestinian keys, these communities’ sense of belonging somewhere persisted, carried in stories, in songs, in the stubborn refusal to forget.

The profound power of these keys lies not in what they once opened, but in what they demand we see. It ought to be utterly uncomplicated for anyone who claims to be human: to see injustice, to mirror the same essential human values of dignity, community, the right to belong.

The key became the central focus of an exhibition that Jade Nair and I created, ‘The Love Letter’, at the University of Cape Town  earlier this year on forced removals. We collected thousands of keys to symbolise the destroyed homes of the dispossessed, each one a testament to a family displaced, a community erased, a life interrupted. The weight of these keys was overwhelming; together they formed a constellation of loss that stretched across decades and continents.

These same keys then moved to become part of the Nakba commemoration held at the Castle of Good Hope on May 18^th, 2025, a colonial structure that outlasts District Six. The irony was not lost on us, that this fortress of colonial power, built to subjugate and control, should house the keys of those it helped displace, whilst the communities it destroyed existed now in memory and in the metal we carried.

These keys pose an uncomfortable question about human complicity. Keys teach us not just about what was taken, but about what we allowed to be taken. They remind us that belonging is something that lives in people rather than just in places, but they also force us to confront what it means when we stand by whilst that belonging is systematically destroyed.

The keys ask us what remains of our humanity when we witness such suffering and choose silence.

When young Palestinians paint them on murals, when they carry them in protests for justice, they transform objects of displacement into declarations of possibility. The key becomes a promise: the values that made those homes sacred – hospitality, community, resistance to injustice – must find soil in which to grow and flourish.

In Gaza today, as children learn what it means when there are no more keys to inherit, when homes become memory, when neighbourhoods become names in history books, when the familiar weight of metal in the palm is replaced by the desperate search for survival itself, they inherit our choices too. They inherit a world that watched, that knew, that had the power to act differently.

What will history call us? Those who possessed unprecedented access to information, unprecedented means of communication, unprecedented tools for global action, yet chose to debate semantics whilst children starved and their mothers died? Those who had every opportunity to act with basic human decency and chose otherwise? The keys to destroyed Palestinian homes have become keys to a question we cannot avoid: when the final reckoning comes, what will we be called by those who survive to remember this moment?