Daybreak In Gaza Stories of Palestinian Lives & Culture. Ed By Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller. SAQI books. Profits donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
The Jewish Museum in Frankfort has a room with walls lined with post-cards. On the front of each, black and white photos of people of all ages. On the back details of how they died in a concentration camp. I could only read a couple, anymore was too distressing and pointless. What can you do for the dead? This book creates the same sensation about the still living; every chapter detailing a life in anguish, that could end violently at any moment. The preface by Muna and Teller, calls it a collection of, ‘Gathered, transcribed and translated testimonies,’ from Gaza, some face-to-face others on mobiles in the early hours with bombing heard in the background, each a ‘snapshot of a single moment,’ of trauma. No one knows if the writers have survived.
Most of us are astonished to see on the TV news another genocide, after the Nazi’s Final Solution, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur, committed before the world’s press, with impunity. These sixty-two accounts on on-going murder make this situation even more inexplicable and the reader more helpless. The pages take us into a Hades of random violence, ‘I drive to Rafa and see people and fishermen gathering on the shore, the clear water invites those who have no water at home to take a dip and wash. I see dozens wading into the sea with their shower gel and their joy. Suddenly I hear engines. I see two gunboats racing towards the beach. As they approach the fishing boats, they open fire.’ In this quagmire people attack and rob each other. ‘A friend went to check on his home. He found a group of thieves armed with knives occupying the building. Hunger has pushed people to steal aid from trucks.’
The book offers an insight into Gaza before it became famous for death. Almost unbelievably it was once prosperous, a place of orchards. The father of one writer became rich there, trading wheat, corn, and oranges to Europe. He became the Gaza agent for Shell and Mobil Oil. All that ended in 1967 when Israeli companies took over and Shell left Gaza. What is now a narrow prison cell was once, ‘A frontier zone for all of recorded history’. Five thousand years ago, before the Pyramids, Egyptian travellers built houses there, due to the expansionism of Narmer, the first ruler of a unified Egypt. He was known as ‘the Catfish King’ due to his hieroglyphic. A few centuries later Hyksos, Canaanite people, moved there dealing in luxury goods and exquisite jewellery, which can be seen in the British Museum. Historian, Katherine Pangonis provides a chapter on the history of Gaza’s fabrics, heavy linens dyed with indigo and cotton gauze, which may take its name from Gaza. Weaving, and Tatreez traditional Palestinian embroidery go back three thousand years, the legacy of women. ‘No weavers remain in Gaza,’ she writes cryptically.
This book, completed in three months from March to May this year, with editors in Europe and the Middle East, might be essential reading but it’s really only half a book. There’s no mention of Hamas, the group ruling over Palestinian lives. No one describes the problems of dealing with them or gives any views on a democratic alternative. There’s no mention of the Nova Music Festival massacre of October 7th 2023 which led to the current disaster. One entry from October 9th written by a doctor is just generalised bleak despair. He writes about the ongoing Israeli bombardment as if nothing has changed. ‘Unbelievably, my building was one of the only ones to survive the deadly attack on my neighbourhood last night. We do not sleep much. Food has started to run out. We lack phone signal and electricity and barely speak and interact with each other. We grieve the loss of so many, silently.’ It’s as if the clouds of dust from Israeli bombardment have blinded everyone.
