Gaza’s Tears

By Akram Attallah

This city is not like other cities. Gaza is a heart, a soul, a mind and a memory that cannot be confined to paper; it stretches through the streets of history, carrying on its shoulders this bloody legacy without pause, as if it has made fighting its profession and never known unemployment in the trade of blood and tears it chose when it first began to crawl as a child, only to be orphaned early and cry out “we are alone,” a slogan that has remained a companion like its shadow, summoned whenever the darkness of a night without dawn tightens.
Everyone has been harsh to poor Gaza: the enemy who struck it without mercy, the brother who denied it, and the friend who never stopped humiliating it.
Worse still, its own sons were harsher, for they never ceased sowing hatred and killed one another over control of a territory with few opportunities and resources.
The scarcity of opportunities created fierce competition, making conflict among its people since the establishment of their rule the defining feature of Gaza — a competition that was resolved by force, by killing and expulsion.
Since then Gaza has entered the final chapter of its bloody tale, moving toward an end because those who ruled it did not appreciate its place as it rewrote history; they governed it with a lightness unworthy of its dignity while a savage enemy lay in wait.
The longest mourning procession of the 21st century is now moving from the city of sorrow toward the tents of grief.
People walk away leaving behind everything they own — memories, homes and alleys that bore witness to their lives — carrying the diaries of lives that were once, like people, until the blood and tears of those memories flowed on the city’s pavements, a city that never stopped living before it was smothered by the dust of silence after the dust of the rockets.
What mad enemy has history chosen for it, and what kind of sons are so heedless?
This is one of the most brutal wars in its madness, the kind of criminality humanity has seen carried out by an Israeli force that did not moderate in its mastery of death by all means and weapons — terrorizing and starving and everything in between — and an ideology that indulged its latent desire for three quarters of a century, waiting on the edge of the camp, training for opportunity and stockpiling its arms, which arrived on a platter from ignorance that toppled a city once pregnant with memories … and with hope … before extinguishing its ember in the eyes of those leaving for the tents and the pain … how the cries of a man who can no longer bear burying so many children kill me, and how the feet have cracked from too much departing.
How painful it is that women flee embracing fear and humiliation, eyes hardened against tears behind the dams of their eyelids, emotions clotted to the point of astonishment.
How painful it is to force a child to eat whatever soil laced with gunpowder he can find because the world could not deliver a piece of bread; what about pregnant women, newborns and infants? My God, to flee even the thought is survival of the mind so it does not suffer a stroke of thought and collapse, for what is happening defies comprehension — what is this?
Gaza is not buildings and streets trodden by people. Gaza is the daily details: the street vendors and the coffee shop of moods, the Corner Market and the Samra bathhouse and the Omari Mosque and the Qaysariya market with its small shops whose roofs look like overturned plates. Gaza is Firas’s market in the morning as he begins his day by reciting the city’s opening and sending life into its living arteries…. Omar al-Mukhtar Street and Ansar and the Yarmouk stadium and the alleys of every old neighborhood in Daraj and Tuffah and Sabra and Shujayea and Mount al-Muntar — Gaza is breaths that have clotted through time and remained scattered across generations, each handing the keys of the city to the next.
Gaza is the spirit of Imam al-Shafi‘i.. Gaza is the grandeur of Fahmi al-Husseini and the might of the al-Ridwan family.. Gaza is the ink of Mu‘in Bseiso and the dreams of Haroun Hashim Rasheed … Gaza is Yasser Arafat reciting the chapter of the sacred homeland to the children … Gaza is the moral biography of Haydar Abdel Shafi and the stature of Rashad al-Shawa.
Gaza is the city that the sea leans on for fear of drying up and the sea sleeps reassured, not fearing pirates … Gaza is the shore that never sleeps, guarding grains of sand that never cease to caress the hair of the waves and to pray … Gaza is the echo of a long history scattered in buried jars that are anointed with sacred talismans along their rims to protect them from invaders, yet whose fate is written by a new fascist and the ignorance of the sons.
Who convinced the decision-maker that he had weapons enough to protect the city, its history, its people, its children, its homes, its elders and its women? How did he think as he decided on this vast assault without understanding what Israel is — an aircraft carrier grounded on land, a weapons depot for the Pentagon, an atomic reactor, aircraft and, above all, a deranged mind ready to crush and annihilate? How did it occur to him to gamble with the finest treasures of history? With the tears of people? The city is now stripping itself and bidding itself farewell. This is not like other wars and Israel is not like other invaders: the city has been drained and burned and its residents forced out so that its final page can be written without farewell rites.
How did all this happen?