Selma Dabbagh

On 9 February, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops in East Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem.

On the first day of his second term as US president, Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘phenomenal location on the sea’. Living in a tent close to the beach in southern Gaza, my friend Marwa has had her request for permission to travel to the north, to visit her elderly mother, denied three times for ‘security’ reasons. There has been no news of her cousin, who used to look after her mother, since he was taken by the Israeli army over a month ago.

‘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.