Gaza is not Deir Yassin, and it never will be
My grandmother navigated life with sumud — steadfastness — as her compass. The translucent blue veins of her hands were lines on a map leading me home. Her scars were the indelible ink that told stories of grief so deep the stones wept.
Her village was renowned for its quarried stones. Today, its foundation stones are mortared with the anguished generations of blood, bones, and flesh. Surrounding the village is a forest of non-native pine trees planted in soil irrigated with layers of unremembered deaths. It remains haunted by the wind carrying the echoes of piercing screams from the severed chests and throats of its rightful inhabitants.
The village’s name has been trampled on and changed to Kfar Shaul — Hebrew for borrowed village. To Palestinians everywhere — those enduring on the land and those of us displaced and uncomfortably out of joint — it will always be Deir Yassin.
No place ever clarified my purpose like it. It’s because of Deir Yassin that I see everything today through the filter of the Nakba. It’s why I see Gaza through the lens of sumud.
Dancing on our graves
In underserved serenity, the village houses psychiatric patients who live out their safe, protected lives within manicured courtyards without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. This picturesque village also serves as a cultural hub for Woodstock-style music festivals, where callous revelers come to dance on the graves of its original occupants.
A unique torment flashes through my veins at the thought of the buried souls patiently bearing this ceaseless contempt.
Remnants of gravestones stand as vanguards against amnesiac narratives, crashing against the mythical utopian Zionist myths of the past and present. They are testaments that the Nakba remains a haunting presence everywhere Zionists impose their hollow, artificial presence.
When I return to Deir Yassin, I stand behind a spiteful fence preventing me from touching my grandmother’s stone home. My heart feels firmly lodged in my throat, trapped and disturbed by the feeling that I’m the one intruding on my family’s village.
When I return to Deir Yassin, I stand behind a spiteful fence preventing me from touching my grandmother’s stone home. My heart feels firmly lodged in my throat, trapped and disturbed by the feeling that I’m the one intruding on my family’s village.
Transfixed, I think about how everyone who lived before me there had to choose to survive. For Palestinians, living has always existed in the present progressive tense. Every breath they take is a choice to survive just a little longer.
In the distance of this tortured landscape fractured by settlements stands the massive Yad Vashem memorial, amplifying Zionist hypocrisy with panoramic visibility. Every time, I feel the rage brimming. I worry that the stones holding the homes together can’t possibly contain me, that I’ll raise my head once more to take in the view, and the fury will shake the entire village down.
I feel the anguish of generational trauma claw at my consciousnesses. It pierces the fog of grief, burning battlefields, and Orwellian doubletalk, replacing it with focus and clarity.
Against the backdrop of genocide, I remember Gaza.
Sometimes, I can’t find enough words to cry out the ocean lodged in my throat. Other times, I’m utterly speechless as I witness Zionists shamelessly flaunt their exterminatory zeal, livestreaming a genocide with impunity.
From Deir Yassin to Gaza, atrocities continue to sear our collective memory. Deir Yassin is not Gaza, but it is undoubtedly our shared heritage.
I close my eyes and see piles of rubble and flesh — strata of memory everywhere. I hear agonizing screams through concrete and see children standing amidst piles of stone with determined eyes. The gray pavement looks like it will burst into disconsolate tears at any moment. Gray — ultimate and ubiquitous; this color is everywhere in Gaza.
An enclave decimated to make room for luxury housing projects is no longer conspicuous or theoretical. Promises of security are music to Zionist ears, but that sinister song will be drowned out by the blood-curdling cries of Palestinian children echoing from the rubble.
From Deir Yassin to Gaza, atrocities continue to sear our collective memory. Deir Yassin is not Gaza, but it is undoubtedly our shared heritage.
We’ve seen this before
A single day in history paved the way for the collective annihilation of the Palestinian people in earnest. Israel’s Final Solution didn’t begin on October 7, 2023. It started the morning of April 9, 1948, when the militant Zionist groups, the Irgun and Stern Gang, invaded the quiet village of Deir Yassin. The terrorist groups disemboweled, mutilated, and raped villagers, slaughtering over 250 people in the butchery.
In a matter of seconds, Zionist thugs stripped innocent men, women, and children of everything that defined them. By nightfall, they dumped 55 surviving orphaned children in an alleyway near the Holy Sepulcher Church in Jerusalem’s Old City.
One of those children was my grandmother, Fatima.
To note the brutality committed in Deir Yassin would be to remark upon the earth’s roundness. Why continue to commemorate a massacre so long after the event, especially when its enormity pales in comparison to the genocide that Israel is committing as I write this?
Beyond mourning the whole of this tragedy, we commemorate Deir Yassin to remember the abstract, dehumanized, faceless piles of numbers. Remembering allows us to imagine children, alone and terrified, piled onto trucks and paraded through towns, fleeing from the only homes they’ve ever known. Children who were hungry, thirsty, alone, confused, frightened, shocked, in their nightgowns and soiled underwear, the smell of blood and urine, tremors terrorizing their tiny bodies.
It’s all hauntingly familiar. You see your own eyes reflected in theirs; your family’s faces replace their indistinguishable ones. We see children just like these in Gaza on our phones and screens. The images of parents carrying the shredded remains of their children’s bodies in bags are scenes that you’ll never be able to ingest as long as you live. They will never leave you.
And all of them have molded into one unanimous cry of pain. Palestinians have endured hearing the drumbeats of dehumanization for a century. This dehumanization does more than just enable genocide. It generates an annihilating energy through which atrocities and destruction multiply exponentially.
When we remember Deir Yassin and Gaza, we restore the dignity of the anonymous mass of pulverized bone and ash so that they again become the Fatima, Hind, Reem, Tareq, Refaat, Shaban, Soraya, Sakeena, and Ahmad we knew.
When we remember Deir Yassin and Gaza, we restore the dignity of the anonymous mass of pulverized bone and ash so that they again become the Fatima, Hind, Reem, Tareq, Refaat, Shaban, Soraya, Sakeena, and Ahmad we knew. We remember the treasured human beings whose sacred lives remain a part of our history and marrow.
We also remember Deir Yassin so that we never forget that violence cannot exist in a vacuum; it is invariably intertwined with lies. The framing here is crucial. There was no ceasefire on April 9, 1948, or October 6, 2023, or any day before or after.
Deir Yassin established Zionism’s rinse and repeat, in which one Israeli assault picks up where the last one left off to complete the insidious campaign of forced displacement, dispossession, demographic control, and extermination of Palestinians. The massacre set the precedent for what would become an accelerated, live-streamed genocide in Gaza today because it provided the framework for what remains Israel’s official doctrine today: the slaughtering of millions of Palestinians for rising and daring to resist their annihilation.
Zionists have committed Deir Yassins thousands of times over, in scale and barbarity. They’ve burned, raped, beheaded, and exterminated Palestinians for nearly a century. Israel’s every action is predicated on protecting its interests; the lives of all others be damned. Unfortunately, it will continue to do as it pleases, so as long as it remains unconditionally supported by the rapacious financier of our families’ catastrophic misery and suffering — the United States.
Inevitable implosion
Seventy-seven years ago, the name Deir Yassin struck fear into the hearts of Palestinians everywhere. It was gut-level. It invited fear and sowed panic and terror in hearts, impelling flight. Today, Deir Yassin still commands our attention and invites a response. But not in the way Zionists had hoped for.
Today, Palestinians have learned the horrific lessons of Deir Yassin. The imagery and fearmongering that once provoked hysteria and struck fear into the hearts of millions have proven to be in vain. Palestinians in Gaza remain steadfast, unwavering, and determined to return to what homes they have left or to die with dignity in their homes under the hail of merciless bombardment.
Like human stones, adamantine and unwavering, they remain.
Seventy-seven years ago, the name Deir Yassin struck fear into the hearts of Palestinians everywhere. Today, Deir Yassin still commands our attention and invites a response. But not in the way Zionists had hoped for.
Gaza ignites a sense of pride, not with a nihilistic “nothing to lose” mentality, but rather a sense of dignity that leaves behind an unyielding legacy of resistance. Gaza is not Deir Yassin, and it never will be.
Although Gaza evokes images of hell on earth, it instills an unprecedented sense of dignity and honor. Today, the world stands witness to the most incomprehensible atrocities and unfathomable trauma in the open-air crematorium of Gaza. But the terror that once gripped us since Deir Yassin is no more.
An indestructible sense of liberation replaced it because Gaza set us all free.
And the fact of the matter remains: Zionists will inevitably fail, like all oppressors before them. Their time is measured, and their satanic lust for human greed and cruelty will prove to be catastrophic failures. They have never been successful at breaking the resistance of the Palestinian people with massacres or isolation. They indulge in orgies of air terror and have yet to achieve any of their objectives.
The ocean of blood they spill with their fanatic hatred and exterminatory zeal will stain their charge sheets and bring virtue to the oppressed. Their nationalist myth will inevitably implode with a startling ferocity like their incendiary bombs that rip through bodies and unearth the ground. The endless bodies they pour into this pit of slaughter will ultimately bury them. And through it all, they will continue to drive the Palestinian people and the world together, not apart.
A cauterizing moment
My body carries my grandmother’s world. Her story kindled my purpose, punctured my comforts long before 9/11, and shattered illusions of empire. Listening to her testimony viscerally evoked terror from decades ago as if it had only taken place days earlier. It steadied me like a second skeleton, and my bones have carried this trauma for generations.
It is the lightest weight I’ve ever carried.
And I will continue carrying it, though it is an infinitesimal deed, negligible and unseen at best. A fingernail’s scrape on a prison wall compared to the sacrifices of those steadfastly fighting on the blazing battlefields of Gaza, Jenin, Tulkarem, and beyond.
In the hearts of millions of Palestinians, there exists a sanctuary where they carry grief in guarded seclusion. In measured sentences, they share the horrors they witnessed, the violence committed, and the reality of which is all too difficult to articulate. Their narratives are silenced, erased, and pushed to the periphery of socially sanctioned frameworks of meaning.
My body carries my grandmother’s world. Her story kindled my purpose, punctured my comforts long before 9/11, and shattered illusions of empire. Listening to her testimony viscerally evoked terror from decades ago as if it had only taken place days earlier. It steadied me like a second skeleton, and my bones have carried this trauma for generations.
It is the lightest weight I’ve ever carried.
The world has accustomed Zionists to seeing their reflection in all representations of humanity, past and present. They only notice when the world strips them of that façade. We must systematically excavate the landscape of arrogant silence so the world hears our stories repeatedly. Doing so will continue to disrupt the mechanisms that operate at the heart of genocidal violence as an enabling, indeed necessary, condition.
We remain the custodians of memory, persistently holding on to our stories. Our resistance remains in surviving the regimes that simply do not want us to survive to tell them.
We can’t afford to stay silent. We are all inescapably part of this cauterizing moment. We all have stakes in the stories told. Every voice raised against Zionism chips away at its power. Every word has consequences; every silence, too.
We’ve all got a choice to make. We can choose to be in the flames with the people fighting steadfastly on the burning battlefields of scorched earth. Or we can choose to be in the place igniting the fires.
The choice is ours.
Dina Elmuti
Dina
Elmuti is a trauma social worker and clinician, with a background in
developmental trauma, early childhood adversity, and generational
trauma. She has worked with NGOs serving children in Palestine and
refugee and immigrant communities in Chicago.