Mohammed Abujayyab could no longer find what to do.
For six days he had been confined to his apartment in Los Angeles, sleepless and anxious, glued to the television and texting on his phone. The 39-year-old software engineer was trying to save his grandmother, who was thousands of kilometers away in Gaza. But she would not listen to his pleas for her to flee.
By then, Israeli warplanes had already dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza in response to the devastating Hamas attacks of October 7.. Entire neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble in Gaza, and the reported death toll rose by hundreds each day. Israel had just ordered more than a million residents to leave their homes in the northern part of Gaza and move to the south.
In frantic conversations on a family WhatsApp group, Abujayyab urged his 88-year-old grandmother Rifa’a to join the exodus of residents — even as dozens had died in explosions along the route. (Hamas blamed Israel, which denied responsibility.) But she refused to go.
His grandmother had already fled once, he said, in 1948, as one of the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the war that followed the creation of Israel. She ended up in Gaza, the populous coastal strip, where she spent most of her life under Israeli occupation and control. Seventy-five years later, she had no intention of running away again.
“He said it was better to stay and die at home,” said Abujayyab, with teary eyes, via video call.
History permeates everything in Gaza, particularly in its most desperate moments. For more than a century, the small strip of dusty land, at the hinge between the Middle East and Africa, has been controlled, often reluctantly, by different powers: first the Ottoman Empire, then Britain, then Egypt and, most consequentially, , Israel.
Since 2007, Gaza has been ruled by Hamas, the Islamist political and military organization — although Israel controls its borders through a punishing siege also enforced by Egypt.
But for its people, Gaza is defined by displacement. About 80 percent of its 2.1 million residents are registered refugees — Palestinians expelled from present-day Israel in 1948 or, for the most part, their descendants. That trauma is at the heart of his identity, said Azmi Keshawi, a Gaza researcher at the Crisis Group, a research organization.
“If you ask a 10-year-old where he is from, he will tell you the name of his village, his history, his land,” Keshawi said. “This is the education that passes from grandfather to father and son. Most refugees in Gaza still have the keys and documents to their former homes. And there is the expectation that one day we will return.”
The prospect of a Palestinian return to that land seems small and fading. In the past, even Hamas leaders have hinted that they might compromise on that issue. But many Gazans cling to their displaced identity despite, or because of, 16 years of suffocating siege.
“It’s the identity card you carry in your head,” Abujayyab said.
Gaza was not always at war. There were no fences in the first decades after Israel defeated Egypt and other attacking countries in a 1967 war, seizing Gaza.
Israeli leaders attempted to quell Palestinian demands for self-determination by offering economic opportunities. Gazans were allowed to travel freely within Israel, where tens of thousands worked, mostly as day laborers, including many of Abujayyab’s relatives. “You could drive to Tel Aviv or Jaffa for the day,” he said.
Still, frustration grew. The first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 1987, began with a traffic accident in Gaza, when a military truck crashed into a vehicle carrying Palestinian workers. As strikes and protests against the occupation increased, Israel restricted movement from Gaza. A fence, at first modest, began to rise.
“I would like Gaza to sink into the sea,” Yitzhak Rabin said in 1992, when he was Prime Minister of Israel. But since that was unlikely, Rabin added, a solution had to be found. A year later, he shook hands with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn to seal the first of the Oslo peace accords. Many Palestinians saw it as an important step towards their own state.
Sharing that optimism, Abujayyab’s family returned from Saudi Arabia, where his parents had been teachers, and returned to Maghazi, a crowded refugee camp in central Gaza. Abujayyab, then 10 years old, enrolled in a United Nations school.
“We imagined we would become doctors and engineers,” he said.
But during his senior year in high school, in 2000, a second intifada broke out. Cafes, hotels and buses in Israeli cities were targets of Palestinian suicide bombers, often prompting brutal security measures. Abujayyab joined protests in which students threw stones at Israeli military convoys.
“It felt like a rickety response,” he said. “As if we were bringing a knife to a gunfight.”
One of his friends died near the fence. But Abujayyab came through, winning a scholarship to study engineering in the United Arab Emirates. In 2007 he emigrated to the United States, where he later became a citizen. That was also a momentous year for Gaza.
Two years earlier, in 2005, Israel, under occasional rocket fire from Hamas, had withdrawn its soldiers and some 9,000 settlers from Gaza. Israeli leaders made hopeful statements that Gaza could become the “Hong Kong of the Middle East.”
But Israeli authorities maintained their control over Gaza, controlling its port, airport and much of its economy, as well as the movements of residents. Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. A year later, it violently expelled its main rival from Gaza and established complete control over the territory.
Israel’s restrictions became a suffocating siege, imposed with the help of Egypt. The security fence became higher and more elaborate.
“The fence became a bigger and bigger barrier that, starting in 2007, looked like a prison,” Abujayyab said.
In the United States, Abujayyab married, divorced, and moved from New York to Utah and then to California, where he worked for a large software company.
He visited Gaza between wars.
Gaza was consumed by battles between the Israeli Army and Hamas fighters in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. The number of casualties was greatly skewed — around 5,600 Gazans had died in conflicts as of 2020, and around 250 Israelis— but the siege seemed ineffective: Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel.
For ordinary citizens, life became unbearable. By 2015, the size of the economy had halved and youth unemployment reached 60 percent. On average, 4,000 people were allowed to leave Gaza each month, compared to 500,000 per month before 2000. Psychiatrists reported a high incidence of mental illness, particularly among women and children. Young men, who lacked jobs and the means to marry, were frustrated. Prostitution and drug abuse, once rare in Gaza, became more common.
Hamas prepared for the next war — digging tunnels, smuggling weapons and training fighters.
They were not the only source of resistance. Civil society groups led major protests to “break the siege” on the security fence in 2018. Israeli forces opened fire on protesters who threw rocks and cut the fence, killing 183 people and wounding 23,300, a report said. UN investigation.
Abujayyab became a food activist and helped establish a farm in the West Bank and a wheat mill in Jordan. He was stranded in the West Bank for a year in 2015, and Israeli officials prohibited him from leaving until his American citizenship helped him leave.
When conditions worsened, he decided to move the rest of his family out. In 2016, her parents emigrated to the United States.
Last year he paid for plane tickets for three of his brothers, who arrived in Norway, Brazil and the United States. A sister was left behind.
When Abujayyab first learned about the October 7 Hamas attacks on Instagram, he said he was shocked by what he saw.
Israeli and Western news coverage focused on mass violence against Israeli civilians: young people shot to death at a music festival and entire families shot to death inside their homes. By the end of the day, more than 1,400 civilians and soldiers had been killed, Israeli officials said.
But Arab television channels and news sites prioritized images of Hamas militants tearing down the security fence around Gaza with bulldozers and leveling the main crossing point with Israel.
When Abujayyab saw those images, “it was one of the most satisfying moments of my life,” he said. “When I saw someone tear down that fence, I felt like we escaped from prison.”
But that sense of satisfaction quickly evaporated when Israeli warplanes began pulverizing targets inside Gaza. Abujayyab began to worry about his sister, Doaa, 26, a computer science graduate who had been waiting for an immigration interview for the United States.
At her family’s urging, she moved to her grandmother’s apartment on the western side of Gaza, next to the Mediterranean.
As bombs rained down on Gaza and the death toll soared, Abujayyab’s desperation grew. His relatives sent messages asking for forgiveness — a sign that they were preparing to die.
“That’s the hardest thing to hear,” Abujayyab said. “They do not know what to do. They have nowhere to go. Has the world gone mad”.
The legacy of displacement also weighed on Israel, said Nathan Thrall, author of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” a book about the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. “Beyond the shock and atrocities of the attack, it stoked the deepest Israeli fears — that all these Palestinians, who live on the other side of the wall, will return and try to retake their villages and homes,” he said.
On the fifth day of the war, Abujayyab received devastating news. An Israeli airstrike destroyed a block of apartments in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing 45 members of his extended family. Among the dead was a one-month-old child.
“I consider myself a tough person,” Abujayyab said in a video call the next day, his eyes filling with tears. “But I had to take a moment and cry.”
Shortly afterward, planes bombed nearby apartments, blowing out her grandmother’s windows. With her sister, she drove away into the night along with 6,000 other people, sleeping on the side of the road. They eventually found refuge in a small hospital run by a relative in southern Gaza.
Abujayyab’s sister and grandmother had no power, internet was limited and more bombs were falling, his sister said in a voicemail to her family.
“There are many reasons why they can’t communicate with us,” she said. “Do not worry”.
By: Declan Walsh
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/middleeast/gaza-diaspora-families.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-03 15:30:08
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