Who Will Tell the Stories of the Children of Jabalya, Khan Yunis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah? - Opinion - Haaretz.com
In a conversation I had with Palestinian author Muhammad Ali Taha, he shared his memories of the child he was before the Nakba. On June 19, 1948, residents of the Palestinian village of Mi'ar in the Galilee feared for their fate during Israel's War of Independence. Taha's family was one of those that chose to flee to Lebanon.
"I was 7," he said of the moments that changed his life. "I left home quickly, and my parents didn't take their personal documents, not even my birth certificate."
Taha's family arrived at the Lebanon border, but his father refused to keep going with the other refugees. Instead, he decided to risk returning to Israel with his family. "He didn't want us to live as refugees all our lives," Taha said. "He preferred to return, even though we had nowhere to return to – certainly not our own village."
The family walked through the Galilee villages of Suhmata, Buqei'a (known as Peki'in in Hebrew) and Rameh until they reached Sakhnin. In the end, they settled in the village of Kabul. The loss of Taha's home in June 1948, the flight and the return to the Galilee forged part of the painful memories of his childhood.
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"Those were difficult days," he said. "The sight of entire families that fled is etched in my memory – women, men, elderly people and children walking to the Lebanese border. I remember the expressions of sorrow on their faces, their helplessness. It was terrible, inconceivable."
One can imagine Taha as a child when he witnessed the Palestinian tragedy with his own eyes. He grew up and studied, and only later in life did he document the destruction and his life in the village, of which not a trace remains. But not all Palestinians had the opportunity to record their stories from 1948.
The writer Muhammad Ali Taha at his home in Kabul, Israel.Credit: Rami Shllush
Until a few years ago, Israelis even cast doubt on the credibility of stories of the Nakba, like the massacre in Tantura and the one in Kafr Qasem in 1956. Historical knowledge of the Palestinian tragedy was well hidden in the state archives. Historians are still fighting to learn what happened back then to Palestinian families. But what has been revealed is still less than what remains concealed. Only when the archives are opened do the atrocities get discovered.
A straight line connects the veil shrouding the events of 1948 and what is happening in the Gaza Strip in 2024. The scale of the destruction in the current war is inconceivable – schools, museums, hospitals, community centers and hotels. Entire families in Gaza have fallen apart due to their displacement, and some have even been wiped out by bombs. Children in Gaza are witnesses to what is happening, just like the young Taha, who was there and witnessed the Nakba.
It's hard to find words for the physical and emotional devastation this war has wrought among Gazans. But it's important to ask how the destruction in Gaza is being recorded. How are Gazans coping with and documenting the suffering and destruction that surround them?
Those are just some of the questions I ask my friends from Gaza to try to gain a deeper understanding of the issue of documentation. And in most cases, the answer is a long silence that expresses the depth of their pain.
"I'm ashamed that they talk about us in numbers," one friend said when I asked him how he was documenting the deaths of children in Gaza. "We're human beings, but this war has reduced us to a single line, or a number."
A Palestinian walks among the rubble of damaged buildings, which were destroyed during Israel's military offensive, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, June 12, 2024.Credit: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Documentation, he said, is almost impossible given the destruction of the systems responsible for this at hospitals and local aid centers, and given the lack of professionals, some of whom have been killed or displaced. "We've been deprived of the basic right to document, to remember, even to bury our loved ones and give them a fitting goodbye," he said.
With the last of their strength, despite their meager resources and a lack of basic conditions for writing, Palestinian authors have tried to capture these tragic moments in Gaza. Among them are Atef Abu Saif, who has published a diary, and Mosab Abu Toha, who has written opinion pieces in English for the foreign media and recently published a book of poems.
In their stories, both chart the tragedy of the Palestinians during the war, moving between their daily lives and the collective pain that deepens their feelings of powerlessness.
The world is aware of them and hears their voices. And maybe it's aware of and hears the voices of the Gazan journalists who try to convey the situation despite the dangers posed by the bombing.
But who will tell the stories of the invisible people? Of the women fighting every day to feed their children and coping on their own with infectious or chronic diseases? Who will tell the stories of the children lost under the ruins? Every child has a story, just like Taha. But these children in Gaza have been killed, so their stories will never be heard.
As long as the power, knowledge and information remain in Israel's hands, we'll never understand what happened, and there will be people in the West who continue to doubt the Palestinians' stories. It's just like what happened with the massacre in Kafr Qasem. Only after the state released the military transcripts and the documents written by Israeli leaders at that moment in history did Israelis believe that it really happened.
Israel's practice of obscuring the truth and refusing to release information isn't new. It existed in the past regarding the events of 1948, and it exists today regarding the war in Gaza.
Who will be responsible for telling the stories of the children of Jabalya, Khan Yunis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah? Who will document the books and libraries destroyed in the bombings? Who will remember the names of entire families that were wiped out completely?
"The tragedy isn't just the war but the way it's gradually killing us," a friend from Gaza said. "It's a slow death. Even if we remain alive, we have very little information to tell about and document the destruction in its entirety. It's like a necklace that has been broken, and the beads it once contained will be missing forever."