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Massachusetts Review (Winter 2024) - The View From Gaza
MY HOMELAND IS BLEEDING. My family, my friends, and my community are in pain. This past year has been the most difficult I have ever experienced: the genocide in Palestine continues, the assault on Lebanon worsens, and the violence elsewhere in Southwest Asia intensifies. We bear witness to these atrocities and grieve our homelands from afar. On the news I heard a Palestinian boy say, after losing his entire family: “We have no soil left in Gaza to bury the dead.” This war has broken me in more ways than I thought possible.
The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza—and now Lebanon—is bleak. Having endured more than a year of genocidal slaughter, Gaza asks us all a vital question: What kind of future do we want for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren, and are we willing to fight for it? We are being asked whether we accept what is happening: the endless wars, the horror, the lies, the injustice, the loss, the unspeakable suffering, and the endgame of seventy-six years of terror in Palestine. Gaza is offering us a choice, but we must determine its future. Do we speak up and stand together for change, or will we let Israel and the U.S. slide the world into an abyss of hatred and endless wars?
In the face of unrelenting military aggression killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, telling our story becomes an obligation.
I am a descendant of Palestinian parents—Nakba survivors who were displaced from their homeland and made refugees in 1948. I carry their pain with me to this day. I was born and grew up in Lebanon. I have family and friends in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, as well as Beirut and southern Lebanon. Some have recently been killed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of residential neighborhoods; many have been displaced from their homes and are now in danger of being killed by airstrikes or starvation. I’ve known and witnessed Israeli aggression and terror throughout my teenage years—long before Hamas or Hezbollah were established. So when talking heads from the U.S. government and U.S. corporate media tell you that this devastation is a result of the attacks of October 7, 2023, I beg you, think again.
Despite what the leaders and mainstream media say, what we are witnessing is not complicated. It is not “an age-old religious feud.” And it is not “a conflict by extremists on both sides.” Israel is a settler-colonial, nuclear-armed regional power backed diplomatically, politically, militarily, and economically by the U.S. Israel is waging war against an Indigenous people’s struggle for freedom, equality, and an end to occupation. Such a cause cannot be defeated through military might. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora—with the global support of people of conscience—are determined to continue their struggle until liberation.
We are the story. And we are the ones to write it.
A special issue on Gaza is one way to fulfill this urgent need—to tell the story of Palestine and Palestinians in our own words. It is an attempt to bring back and amplify suppressed, censored voices.
The Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul has observed: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the war planes must be silent.”
This issue of the Massachusetts Review offers a collective voice, a chorus of Palestinian voices demonstrating the determination to write in spite of the rumbling of war planes, undeterred by the bombs falling from the sky, and in defiance of unspeakable hardships and intolerable living conditions. These voices speak to us from the heart and document the atrocities that seventy-six years of history have wrought. They offer us an unflinching look at the unbearable pain and wounds that have afflicted Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as the diaspora.
This special issue makes space for Palestinian voices so that others will not take advantage of their silence or absence. These essays, poems, and stories examine a broken time where Western governments, universities, corporations, and mainstream media outlets have aided and abetted the genocide in Gaza and provided tools for oppression and apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Literature breaks these chains of complicity; it eases the numbness and keeps the light of hope alive.
It is our hope the day will come when Palestinians can find safety, dress their wounds, and become free so they are able to hear the birds sing again. Until that time, Palestinian literature has found safety in the pages of this issue.
Michel Moushabeck
for the editors
The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza—and now Lebanon—is bleak. Having endured more than a year of genocidal slaughter, Gaza asks us all a vital question: What kind of future do we want for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren, and are we willing to fight for it? We are being asked whether we accept what is happening: the endless wars, the horror, the lies, the injustice, the loss, the unspeakable suffering, and the endgame of seventy-six years of terror in Palestine. Gaza is offering us a choice, but we must determine its future. Do we speak up and stand together for change, or will we let Israel and the U.S. slide the world into an abyss of hatred and endless wars?
In the face of unrelenting military aggression killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, telling our story becomes an obligation.
I am a descendant of Palestinian parents—Nakba survivors who were displaced from their homeland and made refugees in 1948. I carry their pain with me to this day. I was born and grew up in Lebanon. I have family and friends in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, as well as Beirut and southern Lebanon. Some have recently been killed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of residential neighborhoods; many have been displaced from their homes and are now in danger of being killed by airstrikes or starvation. I’ve known and witnessed Israeli aggression and terror throughout my teenage years—long before Hamas or Hezbollah were established. So when talking heads from the U.S. government and U.S. corporate media tell you that this devastation is a result of the attacks of October 7, 2023, I beg you, think again.
Despite what the leaders and mainstream media say, what we are witnessing is not complicated. It is not “an age-old religious feud.” And it is not “a conflict by extremists on both sides.” Israel is a settler-colonial, nuclear-armed regional power backed diplomatically, politically, militarily, and economically by the U.S. Israel is waging war against an Indigenous people’s struggle for freedom, equality, and an end to occupation. Such a cause cannot be defeated through military might. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora—with the global support of people of conscience—are determined to continue their struggle until liberation.
We are the story. And we are the ones to write it.
A special issue on Gaza is one way to fulfill this urgent need—to tell the story of Palestine and Palestinians in our own words. It is an attempt to bring back and amplify suppressed, censored voices.
The Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul has observed: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the war planes must be silent.”
This issue of the Massachusetts Review offers a collective voice, a chorus of Palestinian voices demonstrating the determination to write in spite of the rumbling of war planes, undeterred by the bombs falling from the sky, and in defiance of unspeakable hardships and intolerable living conditions. These voices speak to us from the heart and document the atrocities that seventy-six years of history have wrought. They offer us an unflinching look at the unbearable pain and wounds that have afflicted Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as the diaspora.
This special issue makes space for Palestinian voices so that others will not take advantage of their silence or absence. These essays, poems, and stories examine a broken time where Western governments, universities, corporations, and mainstream media outlets have aided and abetted the genocide in Gaza and provided tools for oppression and apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Literature breaks these chains of complicity; it eases the numbness and keeps the light of hope alive.
It is our hope the day will come when Palestinians can find safety, dress their wounds, and become free so they are able to hear the birds sing again. Until that time, Palestinian literature has found safety in the pages of this issue.
Michel Moushabeck
for the editors
181 pages, Paperback
Published December 20, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 28, 2025
A difficult and necessary read.
May 7, 2025
A must-read. I'm grateful to the Massachusetts Review for publishing these rich works of fiction and nonfiction to highlight Palestinian voices. These stories must be heard now.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews