Selma Dabbagh

‘How has this year been for you?’ a musician friend from the West Bank asked me when we met for the first time in several years. ‘For us, we have been through a lot before, but we were never scared,’ he said. ‘Now, we do not know. I could have a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier who does not like the look of my face, or my instrument, and just shoots me. It is like the country is in its death throes.’ I didn’t know how to respond. Attempts to reassure or reframe are an insult to the intelligence.  

Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.

On 28 August, Israel launched a ground and air attack on the northern West Bank, ‘the biggest of its kind since 2002’. With the military onslaught came images of medical staff rounded up, hospitals besieged, ambulances and paramedics stopped, cities and refugee camps sealed off, roads destroyed, water, fuel and electricity supplies cut. Israeli occupation forces were reported to have killed twenty Palestinians in Jenin in two days. They took over people’s homes and positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings. Mass arrests and abuse of detainees were filmed by residents. The human rights organisation al-Haq has shown footage of the destruction of the eastern part of the city by Israeli bulldozers.

If, in 1948, firing had not been coming in the direction from masnaa al-bira (the beer factory) my family would have headed south to Gaza, where they would, according to my father, have stayed. By the time they tried to leave Jaffa later, by boat, my father was badly wounded, following a grenade attack. If the sea had not been too rough on one attempt to lift him onto a boat on his stretcher, we could have ended up in Lebanon. If a man called Sir James Craig had not walked into the British Council in Damascus in 1952 and discovered my uncle Hussein’s gift for languages, we might not have come to England. My brother-in-law has lost at least 23 members of his family in Gaza, mainly children. A cousin of his, Sumaya, worked as a teacher. She was sheltering in a school when she and her three children Leen (aged six), Mariam (three) and Malik (two) were killed in an airstrike.

One of the pieces in the recent retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s work at the Serpentine Gallery is an image of a woman’s divided face, with the slogan ‘your body is a battleground’ taped across it in red. Since October, women’s bodies have been blasted across the killing fields of Gaza and trapped under its rubble.

‘I can start with saying it is an unbearable situation in terms of dignity,’ my friend Marwa says in one of the voice notes she leaves me from her tent in Deir al-Balah. ‘Today you caught me on a good day. Today I want to talk. It is not usually easy for me to express this’ – the sound of a drone cuts in – ‘pain.’

When a building under construction collapsed in George, South Africa, last week, dozens of workers were buried beneath the rubble. Delvin Safers, an electrician, was trapped next to a colleague who was ‘already deceased’. His girlfriend sent him photographs of their two-year-old son to keep his spirits up. Without the light from his phone, everything was dark. That was the hardest part of it, Safers said. ‘When you close your eyes, it is dark, then you open them, it is the same thing.’ He was freed after a couple of days, with the use of his legs. ‘That was the main thing,’ his father said, ‘when I saw my son walk.’ His life was saved thanks to the large teams of rescue workers with hard hats, sniffer dogs, cranes, bulldozers and trucks who came to his rescue.

In Gaza more than ten thousand people are trapped under the rubble, according to the United Nations.

Last November, I wrote of waiting for the grey ticks to double up and go blue when sending WhatsApp messages to my friend Ghassan Abu Sittah, who in October had narrowly missed being killed in the bombing of al-Ahli Arab and al-Shifa Hospitals in Gaza, where he had travelled from London to work as a surgeon. He survived and was inaugurated as the rector of Glasgow University, with 80 per cent of the student vote, on 11 April. He has set up a fund for Palestinian children, planning ‘for the day after’, and is speaking tirelessly to the media and audiences across the world. 

Gaza’s economy has been stifled since the time of the British Mandate, a process exacerbated by first Egypt’s and then Israel’s occupation. The nail in the coffin was the land, sea and air blockade that Israel imposed in 2007, placing Gaza under siege, severing its economic links with Israel and strong ties to the West Bank, turning it into an isolated enclave where the free movement of labour, material or expertise was impossible.

The support for Palestinians among ordinary people in Pakistan is genuine, palpable and widespread. Audience members asked what they could do with the outrage they feel when they watch images of slaughter and starvation. They described their sense of isolation and distress when watching these clips on social media on their phones. M.A. Jinnah Road (formerly Bandar Road), lined with crumbling colonial-era architecture and packed with lawyers’ offices, was festooned with Palestinian flags, especially near the mosques, strung up between the banners of the parties that had run in the recent elections. In Pakistan, two things get stolen, a man joked at the Sind Club: lighters and elections.