Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture edited by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia (Saqi Books), and From the River to the Sea and Other Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash (Banipal Books) are a testament to the resistance and courage of Palestinian people in the face of extraordinary brutality. Both books challenge the dehumanising narrative of the Western Media, as Gaza speaks for itself, resisting erasure.
“To walk through Gaza is to penetrate the heart of the Palestinian uprising, to realise why it happened and why, sporadically, it endures [. . .] You come up against the vast, omnipresent system of control Israel has created — in and through the Oslo accords — over every facet of Palestinian life from work to walking,” Graham Usher, Middle East Report, 2001 [page 155]
Generational Trauma
Palestinian families carry the trauma of the Nakba (displacement) of 1948 as a living memory amongst those born decades later. Jewish communities in Israel carry the trauma of the Holocaust, pogroms and centuries of diaspora persecution. Arab Christians, Yazidis, Armenians and Kurds also carry their own particular archive of collective terror. Trauma doesn’t care what flag you fly or what god you pray to. Israelis and Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, Iraqis and Iranians: all hold parallel, albeit not identical, traumas. The destruction of Gaza is not just geopolitics, for all the communities involved it is a deeply personal, existential issue tied to history, memory, trauma and identity.
Trauma is passed on through generations. It is what happens inside us in response to traumatic events, and doesn’t end when the violence stops, but embeds itself in the nervous system, distorts perception, impairs attachment and can eventually become part of the emotional DNA of not only a family, but of a nation. Children may not experience the original horrors of war, displacement, or persecution, but they absorb the emotional residues — hypervigilance, fear, rage, emotional repression — from their parents and grandparents.
Because trauma overwhelms empathy, with survival instincts taking precedence, it becomes harder and harder to see the other side’s pain — only yours matters, and you’re gradually blindsided. The Middle East is a mosaic of ancient civilizations, faiths, colonisation, partitioning, foreign interference, mass displacement and constant conflict. The region is a cauldron of historical, generational trauma. Ultimately, intellectual and ideological justifications rationalise destructive systems, overriding basic human empathy, dignity, understanding and tolerance. Moral absolutism, dehumanisation through abstraction and the normalisation of the unacceptable — under the guise of ‘the ends justify the means’ — are standardised.
‘There, on a land we were told was not our land,
beneath a sky we were told was not our sky,
my people live their death,’
From the River to the Sea and Other Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash [page 14]
Daybreak in Gaza
The 336 pages of Daybreak in Gaza combine essays, interviews, poems, diary entries and photographs telling the stories of Gazans who still live there and those displaced — from translators, schoolteachers, journalists, doctors, economists, chefs and volunteers with UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) . . . to Christians, Armenian photographers, acrobats, musicians, film makers, artists, poets, anthropologists, architects and graduates, among many others.
We journey through Gaza’s living culture, vividly animated by countless memories of daily life and its ancient heritage of the first two millenia — now under siege and reduced to rubble, but not erased. Living under layers of military, bureaucratic and psychological control weaves a tapestry of tension, resistance, routine and resilience fraying at the edges, stitched together with defiance and patched with grief. Kinship, hospitality and shared struggle consolidate an already strong community. Weddings, funerals and holidays happen. Markets are plentiful. Cafés fill at night. Kids play on the beach.
We learn about ‘Tatreez’, the traditional Palestinian art of embroidery which is a richly symbolic and deeply political way of telling stories, stitch by stitch. We learn about a love of chillis, and everyday dishes such as Maqlubeh, an ‘upside-down’ rice dish with chicken or lamb, eggplant and cauliflower. We visit ancient churches, mosques, historic archives and heritage sites.
For depth, humanity and context beyond the headlines, Daybreak in Gaza is essential reading.
From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Historically, poetry is Palestine’s most loved art form, with Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan leading the way. From the River to the Sea and Other Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash, skilfully translated by Robin Moger, is a powerful and timely collection of twenty-four visceral poems that confront the ongoing tragedy of Gaza and amplifies the deep-rooted trauma of Palestinian existence. Palestinian poet, novelist and prolific translator, Samer Abu Hawwash is based in the UAE. In his poem Sitting in front of a TV screen, I Watch the Genocide, he is rendered speechless by what he sees on the screen; numbed and dazed by the horror of it all.
‘I wanted to say failure, the lie of lineage and that
language whose mere utterance, merely to write it,
has become a torment, just one language among
many, something impossibly distant, one stain
among many on the face of a day that never arrives,
a torn sky over no-heads, a torn grave beneath no-
feet, and I wanted to say . . .’ [page 5]
The poems are excruciatingly beautiful, a documentary in verse that bears witness and preserves collective memory. While grounded in the specifics of Palestinian daily life, the poems resonate beyond the current monstrosity.
‘After everything was over and there was only the
great stillness, a scream came in the form of a vast
block of dust, and it spoke in a voice that roared, “I
am the scream!” and we all believed it; and in its
heart, millions of screams of all sizes and weights
began to scream, “I am the scream!” and we stood
there stunned, unable to summon a word or a breath.
Then the scream blew, little puffs of breath, till we
were stripped of everything – of our clothes, our
skins, our bones, our words, our memories – all
sloughed away like a window torn free in a storm,
and once the scream had accomplished its sacred
task, it stood in the last wilderness and opened its
mouth, and we arranged ourselves into a line and
began to advance in silence, hopping one by one
into its mouth, and each time it swallowed one of us
it would shrink until it was no bigger than a speck of dust.’ [page 78]
According The Guardian, Gaza’s Health Ministry reports over 59,000 dead and over 142,000 wounded since 7 October, 2023. Basic services are gone with 90% of the population displaced, hospitals ruined, electricity and water supply devastated, sewage spilling into the streets. Disease outbreaks are rampant due to unclean water and overcrowded shelters. Twenty-eight countries and the Pope are demanding an immediate ceasefire, decrying civilian casualties and starvation, according to AP News.
‘Those who claimed
they saw the light did not
see our children’s eyes
gazing from afar:
sad, dead, scornful, children’s eyes,
as they stared at us, at
them,
and at us,
and at them,
from behind the centuries,’
From the River to the Sea and Other Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash [page 2]
The Siege of Gaza
What is so unusual about the destruction of Gaza and its people is that it is being documented in real-time by Gazans, journalists, civilians and NGOs on the ground, via platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X. It’s one of the most visually documented sieges in history which makes ignoring it nearly impossible.
The moral dissonance of Western governments, underpinned by a whiff of McCarthyism, and the powerlessness of post-World War Two international order to put an end to the horror, is fueling fury about colonialism, racism and imperial hypocrisy amongst myriad populations across the World. This is a moment of reckoning. If World leaders continue to walk away from what is happening in Gaza, without facing accountability, it sets a terrifying precedent.
Use of the ‘G-word’ has weighty implications as it goes far beyond ‘war crimes’ or ‘disproportionate force’ hence its use being so deeply divisive. Genocide stands at the pinnacle of human cruelty because it is not only about killing people, but about killing the idea that those people should exist at all. Which is why it is known as the ‘crime above all crimes’.
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