2nd of December 2024
My sister and I were scrolling Instagram and in four days European kids are going to celebrate Saint-Nicholas. Yes, world, you don’t see us, but we see you! Kids get sweets and gifts in the morning. A holy man leaves it for them in their shoes. Well, not really, of course. But sometimes men dress up like this Saint-Nicholas and visit schools and nursing homes and stuff. One of the families staying with us is a Christian family and they say they know of the tradition, but don’t practice it.
Strangely this Saint-Nicholas was from a town in what is now Turkey. And they they don’t like migrants. To make things even stranger he has a black servant. Some ‘woke’ people now want to ban the black fellow, cause he the slave of the white Saint. But the non-woke (the sleepy folk??) folk are against that and say he is not a black slave, but a guy covered in soot cause he climbs through chimneys to deliver the toys and the sweets to the kids. I guess that when nobody is bombing you, you have a lot of time to pick fights over whatever.
He must be a black guy, cause there are not many chimneys in Europe anymore, as far as I know.
Would be nice though if this Saint-Nicholas could come over here with his servant, hopefully not a slave, and drop some sweets in our shoes.
He’ll have it easier, since we’re closer to Turkey than Western-Europe.
With nothing to do we spend a lot of time online. I am addicted, I must say. I have a whole routine. A cycle of five apps I go through over and over again. It’s become so automatic that sometimes I find myself standing in a room scrolling and I don’t remember what I went online for or why I went into the room am standing in.
Some of the things that bother me the most.
We were not all dancing on October 7th. The only time I have seen people dance on the street was when it started raining here. No candies were handed out. Maybe in Gaza and maybe those images were taken out of context. Hey, there are two million of us, you can find nutcases everywhere. If I go and film the wildest people in San Fransico and then claim that all Americans are like that, how would they feel?
Not everybody here supports Hamas. My father thinks their attack was irresponsible and an invitation to Israel and their puppet to do the worst to us. My mum does not care for Hamas one way or the other, but think that at the very least it’s making people talk about Palestine again and that serving in the IDF should never be risk free. Oppressing us should come with a cost. It’s easy to demonize Hamas, but in the end they are the only ones who dare stand up to Israel. I am not a general, so I can’t say what they did was smart, but they are not afraid to die and not willing to let us rot away here. I mean the ones who are here, not the ones going on talk shows from abroad.
None of us believe the rape allegations, though we fear that some of the atrocities comitted may be real. There are thugs everywhere in the world and those around here spilled across the Apartheid wall in the wake of Hamas and went on a rampage. It’s ridiculous that everyone thinks everyone is Hamas here. Hamas has enemies here. Father thinks that only having a common enemy keeps them from attacking each other.
Generally I would say there was some sense of relief that Hamas was able to hurt the IDF. The occupation soldiers have been tormenting us for decades. I know children, younger than me, who have been taken away by the IDF. They were terrified. One of them pees his bed every night and it started when they took him and held him for four hours in the middle of the night. I only know this because his older sister told me. He and his family live close to the Apartheid Wall. In the West Bank these ‘arrests’ are much more common and they don’t keep you for four hours, but for years if you are unlucky. This never makes headlines. And if me and my sister can talk to people in the West Bank online and listen to their horrible stories, so can any western journalists. Many Palestinians speak English, especially the kids.
Another thing that bothers me is that online everyone seems to think we are all muslims, but that’s simply not the case. There is a Christian family in our apartment right now. Ok, you would never be able to spot the difference without talking to them, but they’re not muslims. I also don’t see why it should matter which religion we have around here. The IDF would still be killing us if we were all worshipping the ancient Egyptian Gods.
My cousin is still making make-up tutorials, but she is running out of inspiration. To be honest, she’s not offering anything new. She’s still getting likes, but not as many as she’d like. I told her she needs to offer more than just that. She asked: ‘Like what? Like weight loss tips?’
And I said: ‘That’s easy, tell them to move to Gaza.’
To which Zainab said: ‘That’s ridiculous. The Israelis are not letting anyone in.’
To which my sister, Jenisa, said: ‘If the Americans discover they can send their kids to fat camp in Gaza for a cheap price and with a 100 percent success rate, the border will be open by noon tomorrow.’
Zainab: ‘You can’t say “fat camp”, it’s offensive.’
Because, of course, that’s what’s going to destroy this business. Political correctness…
She said the sitcom Friends was going to be cancelled in the US, because there were too many fat jokes in it. She saw a girl talk about it on Tik Tok.
So tonight we’re going to watch some Friends episodes to see for ourselves. I’ve seen plenty of memes with the six characters, but have never actually watched an episode. We won’t start with the first one, because Zainab wants to druel over George Clooney and he appears in some later episode. She is by far the most superficial person I have ever met. Maybe her father lied to us and left her with us to get rid of her.
I shouldn’t say that. My cousin is like kannafeh, you know it’s bad for you, but you can’t stop craving more.
Maybe I am the nastier one, because at the end of the day I am very sure only one of us is writing shitty things about the other… Maybe I just want to be as crazy about myself the way she is crazy about herself.
Meanwhile she’s turned my sister into something like her personal assistant and the boys are like her bodyguards. Yesterday she convinced all three to dance for her, even though they all claim to hate dancing and of course she uploaded the video to her Tik Tok account, even though she promised them she wouldn’t. The video has been seen 800 times. They dance like bricks who’ve grown little feet, but they don’t dance terribly enough for the video to go viral.
It looks like the explosions we keep hearing are moving closer, I could even feel the floor shake a second ago, so am gonna stop writing and be close to my family. It’s less scary then.
4th of December 2023
Am surprised I’m alive. Whole neighbourhoods have been destroyed. The old market is gone. The fish shop, the bakeries, the repair shops, the library, a wharehouse, the only playground in town, all gone. There were bodies everywhere, screams that cut through your bones, the smell of burnt meat everywhere you go. We all walk around in a daze as if we’re sleep walking. One of the boys, the youngest one, is no longer staying with us. They have set up some improvized hospital at the local health center, which has some medical facilities, like my dentist works there, but it’s nothing like a real hospital to deal with severe injuries. He’s there now, with his parents.
His two brothers are still with us. One of them hasn’t spoken a word in two days. The other one, who said I have an ugly nose, keeps asking everyone where he will go after he dies and if people who die can find each other in the world beyond this world. My sister keeps telling him that all will be well and that in the end God decides everything for the best, even if we may not see it yet. I do not have my sister’s faith, but I don’t comment on it. The boys were out playing soccer when the bombs hit. It was the largest bombardment we’ve experienced so far. It’s also the first time tanks and other Israeli vehicles passed through town. They were randomly shooting at buildings. There was some gunfire here and there, so maybe there are millitants here after all, but nobody knows where they are or who they are. My father says he’s certain one of the Israeli soldiers got hit, because at one point he could hear some soldier scream in Hebrew: ‘If he dies, we will burn down the entire town.’
They were here for about 8 hours. They left at nightfall yesterday. We expected them to return during the day, but the sun has set and nobody came. When it comes to fear, today was the absolute worst, because we were all wondering where to crawl to in case the tanks came back. We’re not off the hook in any way, it’s likely they will return at some point. We have no idea what they were doing here or why they decided to leave here. My father says they don’t want to spend the night in urban areas for fear of being overrun in the darkness.
The boy has lost his left foot, several fingers, has a serious concussion and has burns all over his arms and legs. He’s so shocked he doesn’t even make any sound. His brothers told me. The foot was still attached to his body when they found him, but barely. It came off when his brothers tried to drag him to our place. As if we could help here. Everybody knows you shouldn’t move injured people. We had a first aid class in school once. Some other kids were dead immediately or died on the way to the field hospital. Well, it’s not in an actual field, but you know what I mean, it’s simply the spot where they are taking the wounded. Mother and the other woman staying with us have been there to offer help, but help is not the problem, they have enough hands, it’s medical supplies they are missing. I never realized how many trained nurses live in our little town.
Outside there are always drones overhead. You can’t know for sure if they are there to strike or if they are merely observing what’s happening on the ground. I’ve heard stories of people being killed by very small drones while they were outside on the toilet or latrines. They’ve dug a lot of latrines where the wharehouse used to be. My sister was there and she says it’s the worst stench she could ever imagine. I haven’t been there and, this is embarrasing to write, I try to stay inside as much as possible and use a bucket. I get up early before everyone is awake, cause I don’t want anyone to see me, and empty the bucket in a field behind an old garage.
I keep the bucket behind the washing machine. It’s the only place in the apartment where nobody comes now. It’s time consuming, but to use the communal toilets outside is just mortifying and I can’t bring myself to do it. So even calls of nature are just a source of extreme discomfort. And you’d be surprised, but not eating much doesn’t necessarily mean you go to the toilet less. I feel really bad for the boy. His name is Dawud and he’s only 7 years old. I don’t know him well, but all he talked about was Ronaldo and how he wanted to be just like Ronaldo. Ronaldo is some superstar from Brasil or Portugal, I don’t know, he speaks Portugese, so it’s one of those. Am assuming players from Angola or Mozambique wouldn’t rise to such fame.
It’s a horrible feeling to be uninjured and relatively safe, knowing that this boy is in excruciating pain and has seen his dream evaporate. All they could give him was Ibuprofen. The same I used to take whenever I had a headache. We have none in the house now. Mum took everything we had in the medicine cabinet to the health centre, even though my father tried to convince her not to. Even my cousin is a lot less energetic and hasn’t made any make-up tutorials. She made a 40 second video where she basically screams that one of the boys here lost a foot and that nobody knows how horrible it is here and how she can’t believe the world is allowing this. She’s lost some followers and now she’s terribly upset. One reaction read: ‘Maybe you can use his amputated foot to practice your nail polishing skills.’ So I guess make-up and war reporting don’t mix.
5th of December 2023
You lock a guy in a prison cell and the man tries his best to make that prison cell his home. Think of the movie The Shawshank Redemption if you watched it. A visitor comes and says: ‘You have a beautiful home.’ The man points out that it’s still a prison cell. The visitor goes: ‘Am sorry, but it looks too nice to be a prison cell, how can you claim such an outrageous thing?’
That’s how we feel here in Gaza. We can’t say we were living in a concentration camp, because we had some restaurants here and we could go to the beach. Yes, forget about all the unemployment, forget about how hard it is for people to get in or out. Forget about how cancer is much more of death sentence here than in other countries, because Israel doesn’t allow us to build the proper facilities to treat cancer and at the same time often denies cancer patients to travel outside of Gaza for treatment.
Not only did we live in a prison, ok, a prison with a lot of beauty, but now I see we also live in a small box in the western mind. A small box that has us categorized as primitive savages who want to do nothing else than kill Jews and martyr our children. Online you see people claim we breed like rats to have more suicide bombers. I do not know of any woman here who would like to see her child die.
There are about ten universities and institutions of higher learning in the Gaza strip. Ten!
Palestinian parents are obsessed with their kids getting good grades. Our parents push us to do really well in school. We take great pride in eductation. You have three options here, you can become a doctor, you can become an engineer or you can dissapoint your parents. Am joking, but Palestinian parents expect a lot from their children. My education did not involve a field manual on how to blow myself up at a checkpoint. My faith doesn’t run as deep as with my sister, but am religious enough to consider committing suicide a huge sin. Even worse when you drag other people with you to their deaths. What my education did involve was my mum not talking to me for three days because I failed a physics test.
I grew up on a steady diet of Western, but also Arabic and some Israeli culture. I’ve watched all the recent movies, and a lot of movies from the nineties, it’s my favorite decade. Weird, cause I wasn’t even born yet. I feel nostalgic about a time before I even got into this world.
I also watched a lot of the series and I read some of the same books a girl my age in say, Canterbury, England or Boston in the US reads. I was reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo in Arabic translation the week before October 7th. In my room you can find all the Harry Potter books in Arabic. I cried when I watched The fault in our stars. I also cried when I finished reading Of mice and men. Of course I have also read some novels that American girls are most likely not reading. Last year I read Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani and also Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. For my mum these books were compulsorary reading the first year at university.
I also started reading A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall. It’s about a father’s struggles in the West Bank after his young son dies a horrible death. I confess that I couldn’t finish it. It was just too painful. But I will get back to it, because I feel it’s my duty to honour this man and his son by at least knowing the details of their story, no matter how much it bruises me. If all Americans could read this book I think they would reconsider their unconditional support for Israel, but maybe am being too optimistic. To Americans everything they don’t like is propaganda.
I went on a bit of a rant here, because I don’t want to think about our current situation. Because of the bombardment the supply of food has broken down. Many people are afraid to go out, so there is also less bartering going on.
Today we just sit inside and we play Settlers of Catan. Sometimes some of the adults join us. It’s of course impossible to overlook certain similarities to our own situation. I mean, just look at the name of the game… Settlers.
In the game you have a robber, that’s what it’s called in the rule book, but when we’re playing we just call this little black figurine we all dread, cause it allows other players to steal from you, ‘The Israeli’.
Am sure some American university students would feel almost as unsafe as we here in Gaza if we’d ever get the chance to play this game on a US campus.
So far I’ve won most games, but now that I’ve said that out loud, my losing streak will start, because God punishes hubris. God throws you good fortune and if you get too cocky he takes it all away in an instant.
6th of December 2023
Today kids in Western Europe get candy in their shoes and here Dawud, 7, gets gangrene and has no use for shoes anymore. His stump got infected and without access to antibiotics there was nothing they could do except to re-amputate. Meaning that he hasn’t just lost a foot now, but most of his left leg below the knee. I shudder to think of the pain he’s had to go through.
My mum tells me it’s still a million times worse for his parents. They would both gladly give both their legs if Dawud could get his leg back.
We aren’t able to enjoy anything since father told us the news. Everyone cried, except for me, even though on the inside my heart fell into a thousand little pieces which fell and tore my stomach to shreds. My cousin had to then stomp on my already broken heart by saying: ‘You are a total psycho. You haven’t cried even once since this whole thing started.’ I was ready to smack her.
The morning started out well enough. My sister surprised me by putting some gifts in my shoes. They are vouchers for candy, a neck massage and brushing my hair. To be collected any time, except for the voucher for candy, cause there is none to be had at the moment. It was a very nice gesture. I asked her if this is her way of saying she would like to have a muscular personal assistant like that Saint-Nicholas from Turkey and she said I have always been able to read her mind. My cousin was visibly angry, because my sister didn’t put anything in her shoe, which is indeed not a great move of my sister.
So eventually I put some gifts into her shoe and my sister’s shoe. I wasn’t very original and copied my sister’s idea of writing them vouchers. Vouchers for a fancy meal in a French restaurant (to be collected only after I get a well-paid job), vouchers for a pillow fight, vouchers for making them virgin Mojitos. I have no idea how to make those, but am sure I’ll have time to figure it out. Of course my cousin had to brag and say that she would drink real Mojitos with alcohol. When I scoffed and said ‘I highly doubt that’, she went all in and claimed she had drunk plenty of alcohol and got hammered many times. I said: ‘Gurgling mouth wash doesn’t count.’
Sorry, but it drives me up the wall that she always has to tell these tall tales to make herself look more special, more sophisticated, more experienced, more rebellious, more whatever. She hasn’t spoken to me since and of course, like the little child she is, she had to put the vouchers I gave her in my shoe. Deep sigh. Only my cousin’s ego is big enough to drown out the horror of the war zone she is in. I envy her.
My sister says we are like Little Women.
Little Women versus Big Bombs.
And right now I can hear my cousin scream on Tik Tok how they are cutting up Dawud’s leg like salami. Since she’s ditched the make-up tutorials and started venting her anger she’s finally found a bit of an audience, but she doesn’t understand why she has 900 followers and some pro-Palestinian accounts have 100,000 followers or even more. I told her to shout a little less and present more facts and to not think about followers, cause she comes across as needy then and it drives people away. To which she said I clearly don’t know how social media works. She’s also on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called now, where the whole day she gets into vicious shouting matches with pro-Israeli assholes who say the same three narrow-minded uninformed things over and over again just to trigger people.
They are not there to have a serious discussion, they just want to piss people of, cause that’s what they enjoy. I told her to stop giving them attention, but her idea is: ‘As soon as these fuckers go online they should be in pain, in pain, in pain, they should be humiliated and dragged through the mud every time they open their filthy mouths so they never get it into their stupid little heads that anyone is going to like the garbage they repeat.’ I told her that she is giving them exactly what those people crave when she gets angry and replies to them. Her ‘arguments’ involve a lot of creative comments on the certainly diminutive size of the Pro-Israeli Twitter crusader’s reproductive organ.
I must say she does keep them engaged, because these attention seekers can’t resist responding to the silliest insults. They didn’t take that Churchill quote to heart. ‘You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.’ If they could only understand that responding to the crude insults of a 15 year old failed make-up tutorial influencer is not exactly the passtime of great men with a rich inner or outer life…
On Twitter she is called The Real Queen Zenobia. It was some queen born in Syria who succesfully invaded the Roman empire. You can guess why my cousin would identify with someone like that. If she’s still called that way, because she’s already changed it like twenty times hoping to find something that gives her 1 million followers. I am completely fed up with our situation. For the first time I feel truly hungry and there’s almost nothing now. We had couscous for lunch and peas and carrots out of a tin can. We have some American aid packages, but they are tiny and the only thing that tastes kind of ok is some peanut butter out of a little plastic tube with tiny crackers. It’s a joke and not a funny one.
And I shouldn’t be complaining. I have both my legs, unlike Dawud. The Israeli army hasn’t returned to our town, but there are more and more people streaming through on their way to the coast or to the south. They all say the same thing. Israel is destroying everything and pushing everyone out of their homes. They are also looting the houses, stealing money, going through private belongings. We’ve seen them proudly pose with their loot online. They make me sick to my stomach. What we fear the most is being wounded and losing limbs like Dawud or being forced out of our homes and being pushed to wander around, like all these people we can see on the roads in the distance from the roof top.
It’s dangeous to go up on the roof top, because those drones might think you are a spotter for snipers or something like that, but sometimes our curiosity gets the best of us. A week ago I still had hope there would be some deal and this would be one of their traditional two weeks long rapes of Gaza, but this is different. I think this may go on all winter. Am hoping that by March it will finally be over. I mean, how many more bombs can they drop on us? There are only 30,000 Hamas fighters and they have nothing like the weapons of the Israelis. So I don’t think this can last much longer. Am still hoping for some New Year miracle.
Maybe the US will stop it. So many of us are dying, I see many people getting angry online and for Joe Biden it would be good PR to have a peace deal at Christmas. Or maybe Hezbollah will invade the north, but if they want to do that, I don’t see what they are waiting for. The more we think about this whole mess the more we feel like we are being sacrificed as pawns in a much big bigger game. Am going to go and try make peace with my cousin. I mean, how can we hope for an end to the war if my cousin and I don’t even manage to be under the same roof without upsetting each other every five minutes?7th of December
Pearl Harbour
We are this century’s Japanese
Rotten to the core
In blood up to our knees
Dresden
We are this century’s Germans
Demonized in western sermons
Condemned to death by Biden
And yet it seems, it seems
we have such simple dreams
of sitting on benches
eating sunflower seeds
a world with no trenches
smiles for good deeds
walks along rows of cypress trees
and you are all your Beau sees
parents a bit peeved when you’re late
the kiss was worth the wait
we sprang from this earth
blossomed from the harsh soil
bombs can’t kill our mirth
a lashing hail, we don’t recoil
we have dreams it seems
we bury the ones you kill in the sand
and unearth our legacy, it redeems
you want the land, we are the land
we have dreams it seems
To nourish and be nourished
we have dreams it seems
To cherish and be cherished
Don’t you see?
For you to be, you need not stamp out me
we’ll forever fill your breakfast bowl
if one day you could just see us as whole
PS
My cousin can be sure am not a psycho now.
I’ve been crying for hours.
Dawud died today.
Blood poisoning.
To think he could have simply died without the agony of two amputations just breaks me.
8th of December 2023
My dad told me that on this day a singer called John Lennon was assassinated in New York. Officially by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, who is still in prison. My dad remembers where he was when he heard the news. He was 12 years old at the time and his father had taken him to a small restaurant in Tel Aviv. They had the radio on and BBC news announced it. They played Imagine. I looked up the song Imagine on Spotify and it’s good, it’s very melodic and the singer sounds very sincere.
The song is decades old and nothing has changed. There is no peace and people keep seeing themselves as sufficiently different from other people to have an excuse to kill them. This John Lennon was in a band called The Beatles and they got into fights and split ten years before his death. So you can sing about peace and have plenty of conflicts in your own personal life. From what I read he didn’t have a great relationship with his first born son, Julian, either.
I guess people are very complex at times. But the more shocking, let’s say, information is that my father, at 12, could just go to a restaurant in Tel Aviv. I have never been there, my sister has never been there and my cousin has never been there. Though if someone were to ask she might lie and say she parties there every weekend. That John Lennon guy, with his hair long, looks a little bit like Jesus. Add peace protests to that and hooking up with a woman from a different race and I start wondering why nobody shot him sooner.
Today brings more sadness. We’re still reeling from losing Dawud. His family has left. They took the body in the car. Several people made sure they had gas for a drive to the south. I didn’t get to say goodbye or to express my condolences and I feel bad about that, but I doubt they care. So it’s just the girls who are here now, the daughters of the Christian family. We still play Settlers of Catan and now everyone is obsessed with winning and we get into more fights. It’s the tension and the fear of death and the feelings of powerlessness. Deep down we’re all wondering who is going to be next. Like in a horror movie where a bunch of American adolescents go to a cabin in the woods, waiting around for whatever evil is trying to rip their guts out.
It gets really absurd when mum complains am making stains on the wooden coffee table with my maramiya tea. Who cares? Tonight or tomorrow or the day after that a bomb drops and incinerates the apartment, the wooden coffee table included, decapitates us or slices us in half. My cousin has been showing me what people write her on X. Not only are we being killed, but we also have an audience eagerly applauding and cheering on our deaths. They’ve come up with a new concept. Pallywood. We’re being accused of collectively faking our misery. They use behind the scenes pictures of a Lebanese war movie to pretend that we systematically stage all the atrocities. If only they could come and spend a few days with us.
Essentially they are sadists who think they’ve got the perfect moral excuse to enjoy the suffering of other human beings, but they’ll never admit that. Sometimes I think nobody is happier about October 7th than Israelis and their triggerhappy insecure American egotists. I’ve almost never seen someone defend Israel without coming across as deeply scared, insecure and angry who enjoys trying to hurt others with comments that aren’t even original. I guess people with any real talent or real fulfillment in life don’t waste it on writing simplistic one-liners.
It would be nice to find someone on the other side who could be honest enough to admit what role his own country has played in creating this mess. When my father was young he dreamt of a one state solution. He dreamt of having an Israeli passport. Now he says it’s a pipe dream. They’re obsessed with having a state where Jews will forever be a majority. They think we will all kill them otherwise.
They are using the fire power of the biggest military giant ever on us and they think they are the victim and the one who risks being annihilated. Make it make sense…
9th of December 2023
There was an Israeli raid last night. They surrounded the health centre with tanks. At around 5 am this morning they drove out the medical staff. All the male doctors, all the male nurses. Only the ones who had an international passport were not touched. An Indonesian, an Australian and a Danish one. Sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it? An Israeli joke with no punch line. They keep the punches for their captives.
Those three doctors from abroad are the only reason why the health centre can still be of some service, with the help of female nurses and a lot of volunteers. We don’t know where they took the other doctors and the nurses. They were herded onto trucks. I wasn’t there, but my father was already out, looking for water and fuel for the generator. They were handcuffed, barefoot and half naked. In winter. The soldiers were yelling insults, calling them the worst words you can imagine. In Arabic. They called them whores, filthy dogs, microbes, pests, ants, bugs, old women, goat fuckers, anything at all to humiliate them. One stupid IDF soldiers thought he was calling everyone ‘pussy’, but he mispronounced and basically called them something like ‘a loaf of bread.’ Their bombs don’t hit Hamas and their insults also misfire.
Their wives are worried sick. A few of them were there and they cursed the soldiers and even jumped in between the soldiers and their husbands, but the soldiers shoved them to the side. They kicked a pregnant woman in the belly. It’s not clear if she will be able to keep the baby. I haven’t asked about her, because am tired of hearing these sad stories.
To my surprise my cousin has talked about this new development on her Tik Tok channel in an almost serene voice, you know, for her standards. It’s her most popular video so far. About 90 percent of the comments express support, 10 procent call her a liar. Predictable. I don’t understand why somebody in the west would take time out of their day to go online only to call someone who simply reports what’s happening in her little town, thousands of miles away, a liar. What is at stake for them? They’re not Jews, they’re not Israelis, they have no connection to Palestine whatsoever, but they can’t stand the truth from coming out. The internet is exploding with horrific videos showing the damage here and then someone wastes time trying to deny what everyone can see. Just come and visit. Of course, they won’t. I’d like to be their psychotherapist and find out what drives them. What happens here doesn’t affect them in any direct way, and yet they are so emotional about it and hates us without ever meeting us or talking to us.
Luckily the vast majority of the comments express support. The support we’ve been getting is overwhelming and it’s one of the things that gives us strength. The world isn’t falling for the Israeli propaganda machine. I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but even my parents say they finally see serious cracks in the Israeli propaganda machine. Here and there you can even find a mainstream newspaper reporting ‘killed by Israel’ instead of the much more sterile ‘died as a result of a strike’, without naming who executed the strike.
When I think about what is happening to those doctors and nurses, people who dedicated their lives to saving the lives of others, I freeze. I should start indicating how many minutes I sometimes sit here staring at the paper without writing anything. Just numb and blocked.
When this started I wanted to keep this diary for myself to have some memory of everything that happened. Now I keep it so that when I die, hopefully someone will find this diary and tell my story and that of my family to the world. If it doesn’t burn along with our bodies and all the rest.
The days are very short. We have all become news junkies. My cousin fanatically engages people online. My mum has complained to me she doesn’t help with anything in the house, but she hasn’t told her directly. My sister helps mother the most. I swear I would help too, but my mum and my sister are so fast that there’s not much left for me to do, so I hide here on top of the washing machine, usless now anyway except as an oversized chair, and I write. It calms my senses. I think it’s something about moving my hand and the strokes of my pen. There is a soothing rhythm to it.
But eventually I run dry and can’t bring my brain to produce even one more word and my legs want to move or I prefer reading someone else’s words. Today I read the first pages of My First and only love by Sahar Khalifeh. It’s set in Nablus. I have never been there, but my mum has family there and was there often in the late nineties, before I was born.
When I want to go out I am afraid I will be shot and when I stay inside I am afraid our building will be bombed and will collapse on top of me.
So make your pick. Do you want to die under the rubble at home or do you want to bleed to death somewhere out on the street, near some place where you used to buy oranges or close to the mosque? Me and the girls often have this discussion. What is the best death we can expect?
My cousin doesn’t want to give any sniper the personal satisfaction of having shot her. She prefers a bomb dropped by Artificial Intelligence, because Artificial Intelligence cannot feel some sense of accomplishment for having terminated her life. She’s the only one who’s made up her mind about this.
It’s interesting how her pride makes everything so much easier for her.
That’s what I see with Israelis too. Their vanity makes them blind to their own inhumanity. They’re so vain that they can do evil and think they are doing the world a big service, because their pride makes them think they cannot do any evil. We are nasty termites and they are the pest control company, just doing their job.
They refuse to have any real dialogue with us or to acknowledge how we feel and experience, things, because if they did they would humanize us and then they can’t feel happpy about our deaths anymore. In their eyes they haven’t killed a single human being around here, they have only killed Palestinians.
10th of December
I’ve been talking to an Israeli guy. I found him on chat roulette. He’s a sweet guy, looks very melancholic. Kinda like young Johnny Depp in What’s eating Gilbert Grape? Yes, I have watched every movie with Johnny Depp and followed the Amber Heard trial. Hey, I have my guilty pleasures too. The guy’s name is Adam. He’s very polite. He went on chat roulette, which feels more like Russian roulette, cause you find a lot of drunk Russians on there, with the same intention as me. To find someone on the other side to have a real conversation with. We decided to talk over Skype. He lives in Haifa. He’s Jewish, his entire family is Jewish, except for the wife of one uncle. That uncle married an American Christian in Olympia, Washington. He’s not in touch much with the rest of the family.
Adam is 17 and he is planning to go to jail if he is forced to join the IDF. Or he will have a complete mental breakdown in the first week of training and they will kick him out. His parents have forced him to be in therapy, because they fear he could be a ‘self-hating’ Jew and swallowed too much leftist propaganda via Chinese sponsored apps. At some point they thought he was gay. They would have been ok with him being gay, but being gay and not wanting to join the army is somehow linked in the mind of his parents. He reads a lot and ever since Covid happened his social circle is very small. He doesn’t go out much.
He described how bad it was when there were air raid alerts in Haifa and how he had to go to a bomb shelter. That’s the only time I got annoyed, because it’s just ridiculous he feels like suffered much because an air raid alert forced him to stop what he was doing and go all the way to a bomb shelter. My dear… I wish we had air raid alerts and bomb shelters to hide in. I rolled my eyes, but you can’t spot that so easily on a video call. Real eye contact isn’t possible.
He was willing to admit that what Israel is doing now has nothing to do with self-defence. His parents are very different and say we shouldn’t have voted for Hamas if we didn’t want to be bombed. His older sister is in the IDF. He didn’t want to tell me online where she is or what she does for fear that sharing that info online could put her life in danger. I asked how that would work, but he said it was just a feeling he had.
He recommended an Israeli show called ‘In Treatment’, ‘BeTipul’ in Hebrew. It’s from around the time I was born. It’s a very simple formula. Each episode is a therapy session. I must admit it’s quite good and I want to know how it continues. It also makes me wish I could go and drop by at a psychotherapist and have someone hang on every word I say, because he is being paid to give me 100 percent pure attention with the intent of improving my life. Who would not enjoy that? Well, Adam, he hates being in therapy and says his therapist is a million times more lost than he his. Most of the time they talk about the problems of the therapist. The therapist is terribly envious of one of his more succesful colleagues. He wrote some mental health bestseller.
I told Adam to watch the movie ‘Friends… and no dearer’, it’s a remake of an Italian movie called ‘Perfect strangers’. It’s funny.
We agreed to talk again tomorrow.
My cousin wants me to ask him what he is doing to stop Israel from genociding us. I told her he doesn’t want to serve in the IDF, but she says: ‘yeah, yeah, they all say that, they’re all peace activists and then they put on a uniform and go and terrorize kids in Hebron or at the Apartheid wall. Don’t put your time into that zionist pig.’
I told her he’s not a zionist pig, but she said:
‘His fucking sister could be torturing our doctors right now. He has a sister in the IDF, he is a zionist pig. In the end he will manipulate you into feeling sympathy for poor little Israel which has to kill us and they don’t feel completely ok with the BDSD they get from bombing babies’
I said she meant PTSD and that the only one trying to manipulate me was her.
She said: ‘If he has an X account and retweets my posts I will give him the benefit of the doubt.’
Queen Zenobia is nothing if not pragmatic.
11th of December
‘What’s the point of zionism?’, is the question I wanted Adam to answer. He said zionism is necessary to keep Jews safe. Without the state of Israel the Jews would be at risk of being annihilated. His proof was: ‘Now the Jews have a state and the surrounding countries and many people in the west want to destroy it.’ I said this had nothing to do with the Jews, but with the way Israel functions. Many Jews point that out. I said Israel, as a nation, believes in its own supremacy and will stop at nothing to get what it wants. It either lies when it says that everyone is out to destroy it or it’s deranged and paranoid if it truly believes that. Adam countered with that typical one-liner: ‘If Hamas lays down its arms the war ends and if Israel lays down its arm it gets wiped out.’ I said that many countries in the world would be overrun by a neighbour if they stopped having an army. I also said that Hamas would also be wiped out if it laid down its arms. I asked him if he seriously believed that if Hamas had no more means to resist Israel would just let them live happily ever after. I asked if Israelis could do what ever they wanted with Hamas members, how many would survive? He conceded that none would survive. But of course he called them terrorists. Implying that it’s ok if they die.
Israel bombs us indiscriminately. It programmes AI to kill us, claiming that they kill terrorists in those strikes. People who have fled from the north and try to return are shot by the Israeli army. Refugees have told us this again and again. There is no doubt Israelis are shooting defenseless civilians for some politicial gain. That is terrorism pure and simple. There are IDF soldiers bragging about how they killed babies online. He could only say: ‘That’s terrible.’
I asked him why he doesn’t want to join the IDF if he supports so many of Israel’s policies. He repeated that he thinks the IDF has gone too far.
‘Where was the turning point? Where did you draw the line? When Israel led the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla take place back in the 80s? When future Israelis launched terrorist attacks against the Brittish back in the 40s? When Israel closed off Gaza and didn’t let even our cancer patients travel? Back in 2014 when they invaded killed and wounded thousands and destroyed many buildings? When it hit children on a beach? Where came that point: “Ow dear, that’s too much! Now am not joining the IDF!”’
He said he couldn’t point to an exact moment in time. Maybe since the second half of the 2000s. He saw documentaries with testimonies by IDF soldiers about what they did in Hebron, for example. He saw Israeli veterans brag about how they killed Arabs in 1948.
I told him he seemed to support Israel too much to refuse to join the IDF on those grounds. I told that maybe he was mostly on board with Israel’s programme, but too shy to be in the IDF. He said it wasn’t true. ‘If Palestine was an independent state on the 1967 borders and THEN decided to attack us, I would immediately join the IDF and defend my country. It’s just that what we are doing now is not defense. Or maybe it is, but it’s overkill.’
‘When would it not be overkill? When does it go from self-defense to overkill? 1,000 dead children? 5,000? 10,000?’
‘When too much is being bombed without producing any results. Like what we see now.’
‘So you would be ok with killing, let’s say 15,000 civilians if it also killed every Hamas member?’
‘It’s hard to answer that question’, he replied. ‘I don’t know how to put a number on it. Theoretically even one child would be too much.’
‘Yes, but it’s not possible to destroy Hamas and kill no children. In fact, I think you cannot destroy Hamas. You can just kill all the children.’
‘Yes, but Hamas forces us to kill children if we want to get to them.’
‘You’re attacking a densely populated area. Where should Hamas go so you wouldn’t kill children? Stand in an open field and die in a few hours? You’re expecting them to commit mass suicide.’
‘You are expecting us to commit mass suicide if we do not destroy Hamas and, unfortunately, kill lots of children. Unfortunately. I mean, if you don’t want children to die you can ask Hamas to surrender.’
‘Am not in touch with any members of Hamas. And why would they surrender? They’re not cowards. They would become the laughing stock of the world if they did that. They are getting a lot of praise for putting up a stubborn fight against a gigantic enemy.’
‘Well, then maybe, it’s a situation where nobody has a good choice.’
‘You refuse to join the IDF. You made that choice. The IDF could refuse to kill everyone here.’
‘But then Hamas does another October 7th.’
‘How would they do that? Surely the IDF is not going to be so stupid to be surprised twice?’
‘We can prepare for an attack, but clearly there are always ways to find some new tactic and surprise us.’
‘What if you allowed us to have a state, stopped blockading us, stopped killing us? There would be no more reason for any of us to fight you.’
‘How can we be sure of that?’
‘How can we be sure you don’t want to kill all of us after everything you’ve been doing?’
We went back and forth and it went nowhere. At times I was shaking with anger or almost crying or both at the same time. I could see he was getting angry too. So after some awkard silence we changed the topic. He asked what I wanted to be after school.
‘I don’t know yet. I think my parents would like it if I did something in the medical field, but to be honest, I’ve never been very interested in biology or chemistry.’
He said his parents were both doctors. His mother is a dermatologist and his father is a cardiologist.
I didn’t tell him the professions of my parents and he didn’t ask, for which I was grateful, because I felt shame. And now I feel shame for feeling ashamed about their professions. My parents both work very hard and have nothing to be ashamed about.
Eventually I said I wanted to have my own business, but I didn’t know what kind of business yet.
He would like to have his own IT-company one day.
We’ve agreed to talk more later, but we were both a lot less enthusiastic.
I didn’t tell my cousin some of the things he said, because she would never leave me in peace until I block him on all channels.
My hand hurts from writing, it’s getting dark, am hungry and I can hear explosions in the distance and the traffic through our town is enormous. You see sad faces pass all day. Some are crying, because they’ve lost relatives. So am going to break it off here and pretend everything is ok and play ‘truth and dare’ with my cousin, my sister and the other girls who are still staying with us.
I now write every diary entry as if it could be my last. So in case I die, just so you know: I never wished you ill and you killed me anyway.
12th of December 2023
The Christian girls who are staying with us, Christina (11) and Magda (10), are used to having an advents calendar, with chocolates inside, in December, but not this year. They are wondering if there is even a point to celebrate Christmas now. Both of them would like to go to the midnight mass in the Church in their town. If it’s still standing. It’s in the north and their parents don’t have much information. The youngest one is asking why Jesus, peace be upon Him, doesn’t appear in Damascus and bring the world to an end and weigh everyone’s soul. She also asks: ‘Is this the apocalypse?’
The town has been hit again. The mosque is gone. Several buildings have crumbled. Lots of windows broken. You see a lot of cars without windows as well. We call them Zio Cabriolets. We go out from time to time, because to sit inside makes you overthink. We never go alone anymore. In a group we feel safer, but it’s an illusion.
When you pass bombed out homes you can smell a foul stench. If you linger you might vomit. We pull scarfs in front of our faces. We douse the scarfs with some old bottle of eau de cologne we found. It will run out eventually. We’ll find something else then. The worst is seeing body parts. Nothing can prepare you for that. They look very different from what you see in horror movies. I saw a cat lick blood. My sister saw a dog run off with a forearm. Things that made us scream, cry, fall on our knees in despair weeks ago still hit a nerve inside, but on the outside it’s as if nothing can faze us.
Mum says it’s because of hunger. You can’t care about anything when you’re hungry. ‘Maslow’s pyramid’, she said. At first I thought she meant a pyramid like the ones in Egypt, but I looked it up and it’s about how some needs need to be fulfilled before you can fulfill other needs. I found a funny meme that said that the most basic human need is WiFi.
Well, that’s a lie. I would give up our internet connection for cupboards full of food in a second. My cousin wouldn’t of course. If she dies of hunger we’ll find her with her phone clenched in her hands typing penis insults to zionists who fire racist jokes back.
Like the one she got today: ‘What is the difference between a camel and an Arab girl? You can fall off a camel’s back, but not off an Arab girl’s back because she has much more hair on her back than a camel.’
You know, they’ve never slept with an Arab woman, they can’t have us, so they have to try hard to pretend we’re covered in hair like monkeys and make us as undesirable in their minds as possible. At 15 my cousin is those perverts wet dream. Arab or no Arab. I saw a teacher of Arab say on YouTube: ‘If Americans learn Arabic in college it’s so they can try and sleep with the Arab girls on campus.’
I think you can only truly hate who is similar to you, but has something you can’t have.
13th of December 2023
They look like ghosts, the people they pull out from under the rubble. The white dust makes them look like that. Mum calls it angel dust. Father and the other men do nothing else the whole day except for looking for survivors. When they find them they take them to the health center. They are wounded, dehydrated, their body temperatures drop to below 30.
My father, who normally never says anything to upset us, can’t stop talking about what he’s seen. A small boy with his brain bulging out his left temple. Presumed dead, but then suddenly gets convulsions, his limbs start twitching. Rushed to the few doctors we have left. May survive, but will probably never fully recover. Blind in one eye for sure. Half his body could be paralyzed. Brothers hugging as they died. A baby sucking the breast of its dead mum and actually drinking the blood of its own mum that is running down from her neck. A father begging to be killed, because his entire family is dead, but he is still alive, although he’s lost an arm. A woman bombed while hanging out the washing, bending over a hamper when the bomb hit. Her buttocks torn off. The back of her thighs slashed away. Brutal injury, but not fatal with modern healthcare. Vagina burnt to a crisp. Doctors had a hard time getting a catheter into her to allow her to pee.
I’ve heard enough medical terms to pass a few entry level exams in med school. And I have never been very interested in medical stuff. Even reading about the side-effects of paracetamol used to make me dizzy. Now I hear father talk about collapsed lungs, squished rib cages, torn spleens, ripped kidneys, sepsis, jaws torn off, broken noses, facial burns, people’s gut hanging out down to their knees, arms and legs frazzled by bombs. It’s like hearing Death recite its wish list. I never expected to get so used to this so fast. It’s the same with everyone else. The ones who are too affected, the most sensitive and emotional ones break down, stop eating, vomit up what they do eat and don’t make it.
My parents say your best chances to survive a situation like that is to fight fiercely to keep others alive, not just yourself. Even though it’s winter we sleep outside in the courtyard behind the main building. With lots of blankets, it’s not so bad. This was our second night outside. I kind of like the cold air on my face if the rest of my body is warm. We sleep outside because we don’t want the rubble to crash down on us. Not after everything we’ve seen. We only go inside when we really need to.
Our car has been hit. It’s a scorched wreck. We had nothing inside anymore. The windows were knocked out by explosions more than a week ago. There was almost no gas in it. Father said it was just a car and nothing to be mourned. After the war he wants to get a big go-cart where we can all sit. Doesn’t need gas and it’s good for your heart health. He’s joking, but it’s not a bad idea. The people who have donkeys and horses are now much more mobile than some of those with cars.
I saw a horse dying two days ago. It had been horribly hit by shrapnel. The sound it made… Even worse than the screaming of people. I saw a man hit it over the head with a metal rod. He did it to put the horse out of its misery, but the horse didn’t die and he had to hit it like ten times till it finally died. The man was crying, sobbing, like I have never ever seen a man cry, all through the ordeal. I hope to never see something like that again. My whole body hurts when I think about it.
Adam has contacted me. He merely asked: ‘What’s up?’ I replied: ‘Not much is up here. Most things are going down.’ He asked what I meant by that. I didn’t respond.
14th of December 2023
Found a dog with no hind legs this morning. Wanted to take it with me, but my cousin said it was too badly wounded. I said that leaving the dog to starve was cruel and that I would never forgive myself nor her if we did. We found it in the rubble of the bombed out candy shop we used to go to once a week. We were curious to know if it was still standing, but it wasn’t.
We carried the dog home in my coat. It got stained with blood and urine and shit. The dog defecated along the way. Shit got onto its wounds. It was awful. A shivering blob of furry pain. My parents were angry when we finally got home. There was nothing to do for it. We petted it and dad asked us all the leave. He hit it over the head with a shovel. We, the kids, buried it and had something like a ceremony. 5 girls of mixed faiths sending off a dog to the afterlife. We buried the dog in my coat. It was too disgusting to even try to wash it.
My mum says I look 25 and not 15.
We got one small lollipop neatly wrapped out of the rubble. The only thing not destroyed, as far as we could tell. We didn’t comb through the rubble for long, because of the dog. I gave the lollipop to my sister. Strawberry flavor. She cried and gave it to Magda and Magda gave it to her sister Christina who gave it back to my sister. No idea who has it now. Nobody wants to carry the guilt of being the one to eat the last lollipop.
18th of December
My focus is not there. I try to read a book and I notice I keep reading the same sentence 50 times without absorbing it. All I can think of is food. I would walk a 1,000 miles if at the end of the hike I can eat whatever I want. There is now nothing that can take my mind of food. Except for when we’re under bombardment. I bet you can find some Israelis who will claim they are bombing us so we won’t feel hungry.
There are cases of tuberculosis in town. When my mum heard that she cursed in a way I have never hear her curse before. There are cases of scurvy. You get it from not eating enough fruit. When we get our hands on an orange we keep the peels and suck the peels for hours and hours. I have an orange peel in my mouth right now. It’s two days old, but I still get some taste out of it.
Our Christian guests are planning Christmas. I think the mother of the girls is bartering ‘her ass off’, as Americans would say, to be able to bake chocolate cake for us. Even if she finds the ingredients she will still have to get the oven going. Maybe we can build one of those clay ovens.
There is no more electricity, no running water. To get online you have to find someone with a phone that still has an internet connection. People are very generous. If you request something of anybody they will agree. For this reason we are reluctant to request anything, because we know people will not refuse. Although our circumstances are dire, we did not turn on each other.
The scariest moment for me, so far, was when our town was under artillery bombardment. It’s different than air strikes. You can hear the shells whistling towards you. There are the booms, but also the screeching sounds. The explosions leave craters. I did not know there can be such a difference between explosions. The human creative drive to kill other humans knows no bounds. Artillery fire is truly terrifying. My sister compared it to the screaming of witches who are flying in on their broom sticks looking to snatch you. That image stuck with all of us.
Without internet access my cousin uses her manic energy to pick fights with everyone, especially me. I don’t have the same energy and just let her bash me, basically. When I don’t react she finds a different target. My theory is that her father wanted to have his own company, like his brother who moved Beirut in the late nineties, and instead he became a school principle making almost no money and all that frustration went into her. It’s just a theory of course. I haven’t told her. She’d scratch out my eyes.
One positive thing about starving: my mum says that eventually we will stop having our periods. One worry less.
By the way, the artillery bombardment hit nothing at all of military value. Nobody knows what the point of it was. It did kill one family. They were sleeping in their car. Refugees from the north. They are not sure how many of them there were. They found pieces of them even 30 meters from where their car was parked.
We hear these stories and still we walk around town and chat about everything we are going to do as soon as the killing stops. We talk about which dresses we will wear, what food we will eat, which friends we will visit, how we will study for exams.
I think humans everywhere on this planet live their lives as if they are immortal.
We would skip so many activities if we were fully aware of how very little time we all have left.
Nobody on his death bed thinks: I wish I had watched more cat videos. I wish I had consumed more news. I wish I had looked up more fat loss tips. I wish I had got into more arguments. I wish I had worried about my next pay raise more.
If I survive I hope I will do only meaningful things.
I never want to forget what the sound of incoming artillery shells taught me.
That happiness comes from dedicating yourself to improving the lives of the people around you.
Focusing on immediate pleasure for yourself is like drinking salt water. It will never satisfy.
Help me publish a book
€2.00
The Confessor 