Living the Nakba, over and over

Palestinians check the damage caused after a 15-floor building was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, on May 13, 2021

Dima Srouji writes in +972, “My body is full of rage, shaking. The anger is not only due to the latest lynching of Palestinian citizens of Israel, or the assaults on Palestinians in Gaza, Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and our sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque. This type of rage is rooted in the intergenerational trauma that every Palestinian has inherited, and that we carry with us everywhere.”

“In a video going viral on social media, a Palestinian family in Gaza is seen panicking as the sound of Israeli bombs grows nearer. The father, who is filming off camera, is heard telling his children to get up from the mattresses laid out tightly on the floor to take shelter downstairs.”

“I am thousands of miles away from Gaza, but watching this video resurfaced the trauma of my own childhood, as a Palestinian who grew up in the occupied West Bank during the Second Intifada. The 10-year-old me laid down in a fetal position in our bathtub in Beit Jala, fully dressed, with a pillow under my head. My younger brother laid next to me, also in a fetal position, asking my mom for a blanket. She handed it over and said: “What chapter of Harry Potter are we on today?”…

Dima Srouji’s grandmother, Layla, was forcibly dispossessed from her home in Ramleh at 10 years old. 

“As I watch Israel’s assaults on Palestinians in Jerusalem, Gaza, and throughout occupied Palestine now, I can’t help but think of the children who will carry this trauma for the rest of their lives. These events are not momentary, they stay with you. Palestinian resistance is not a fight against a singular event, it is a constant state of being.” (more…)

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