GAZA, A TALE OF LOVE AND RESILIENCE

Gaza…a tale of love and resilience

If Amos Oz grew up in Gaza, his autobiography would be of that love and anything but darkness. It is resilience that defines every single aspect of these people.

I cannot call them my people. They are at a level that is way beyond … I always thought that resilience is what characterizes Palestinians. However, when I saw Gazans. I could see resilience in motion.

How can people go such destruction? Brutality. Seize. Fraction. Limited resources. Demographic explosion. Humidity and surrounding leftovers of a non-ending war and memorials of what used to be a house and a poster wit ha photo and a name remaining from a son or a brother or a husband or father or a neighbor or a friend…

I entered Gaza with so many mixed emotions of nostalgia and humbleness mixed as well with sorrow and sadness of images that continue to repeat themselves in my head along the days. Images of death, blood, and destruction.

A city that embraces death with a smile and raising the hand. Resistance is all that it can have. Moreover, a beach of a sea that aggression cannot seize.

As the car was driving and the driver was trying to inform me about details of destruction that took place, which some were obvious and others no longer existed with buildings entirely wiped away. Stories of martyrs and descriptions of battles that took place … moreover, a story of human loss after a story of another yet to hear loss. People left with eternal disability along with yet again another displacement …

A population that is by more that eighty percent of its people refugees has found itself with high numbers becoming internally displaced …

Somewhere it is no surprise that struggle for survival in that spot of this nation is quite as a unique.

The images of death haunt the neighborhoods. The destruction and the slow rebuilding, temporary caravans, and any empty lot that can become a park as a recreation to a community…

A sea that embraces people. Washes away the destruction, the ambiguity, the fraction … a will to live … despite life…

Gazans, like their sea … on a quiet surreal current … it is hard to realize what they are up to … however, one thing for sure … their strong will to be.

Gaza might not be the most beautiful city, as Mahmoud Darwish once described, but now I understand what it means to be a town with people who insist on grabbing life from the mouth of death …destruction …

Gaza is a city of people ..who insist on burying destruction beneath the waters of its sea … and purify themselves after every death, every loss, every wound ….and embrace life yet again and again and again …