Reclaiming Our Narrative, Telling Our Stories
Ghada Ageel
I LOVE LISTENING TO and sharing stories. I owe that love to my grandmother, Khadija, who, each night, used to tell her grandchildren stories from real life and from fiction, too. Stories of the former include the tale of our village, Beit Daras, prior to its destruction, in the 1948 Nakba and the loss of the homeland. These stories recount the Badrasawi traditions that we need to preserve. When asked where we are from, we will state proudly that we are from Beit Daras. My grandmother narrated her story, the Palestinian story, with passion and love. To this moment, I can repeat these tales with the same facial expressions and body movements, while telling the stories to my children. These stories shaped my life and, to a large extent, my vision and even my future. My grandmother’s storytelling became the recipe for my life of storytelling. Her narrative was not metaphoric or abstract but embodied and physical; she was reliving the story which had occurred in reality, not as myth. As listeners, we responded in kind: when her voice creaked or broke, so too, did our hearts. Thus embodied, she narrated both the personal and the political. The ingredients of her life fill the pot of our national story: one spoon of happy, two spoons of sad.
In this short essay, I will share part of our story/history, which stands as a counter account to mainstream narratives, hoping that such a small part of an individual account can convey a clear picture of the communal one, a representation of the collective Palestinian struggle for rights and freedom. The chapter also aims to invite readers in, at both the moral and epistemological level, and to open new venues for conversation which break the intellectual apartheid imposed on Palestine. This account, as the rest in this volume, attempts to offer a vision for decolonization and contribute to de-colonial scholarship by centering the lives positioned on the margins at the heart of the conversation and research.
I am a third-generation Palestinian refugee from a village, Beit Daras, a place that no longer exists on the world map. I inherited the genes of a refugee from my father, Abdelaziz, the eldest son of my grandmother, Khadija, who was expelled from her home and land during the Nakba. She lived a harsh and often cruel life, struggling through poverty, misery and the humiliation of losing everything overnight. Growing up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, decades after the destruction of Beit Daras, my grandmother told me the story of our village. At this time (the late 1970s), it was too dangerous to even mention the word “Palestine.” We were denied the right to study, read or possess anything related to our homeland. My grandmother stepped in to fill that gap of historical denial by passing on her story. Our land was in her memories every day.1 The story of our lost village was, in the words of Ramzy Baroud, “a daily narrative that simply defined our internal relationship as a community” (2009). Telling the story of her village, Khadija knew, would not bring back the dead from their graves nor would it return Beit Daras to existence, but telling the story would help to prevent Beit Daras from being exiled from human memory and history. It would also help us—the new generations born in the camps—to learn and preserve our history. That was her mission and, to a large extent, she succeeded in it (Ageel 2016).
The Khan Younis refugee camp is the place my grandmother and my parents called their temporary home while waiting to return to their original home in Beit Daras. Khan Younis is also the place where I was born, raised and educated. It is also the place where my grandmother, my father and I, like every other Palestinian in Gaza, were imprisoned in our houses every night when the Israeli military imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. throughout the six years of the First Intifada, 1987–1993. This is the place into which I was pushed and squeezed, leaving me feeling like an exile in my own land. This is also the place where I will always think of Beit Daras and Palestine and of my grandmother, a grand tower of resistance who passed away in 2016 and was buried in the family cemetery in the camp (not in Beit Daras, the village from which she was expelled, 71 years ago.2)
To make a hole in the wall of poverty, to secure a place under the sun and to be able to shorten the distance between ourselves and Beit Daras, we, the generations born in the camps, were taught from a very young age that education is the way forward.3 Education was both part of our national story and also a methodology for imparting it. The annual tawjihi exams (high school graduation exams) are a key moment in the Palestinian calendar for liberation. Even during times of war, exams are rarely canceled, only postponed or deferred. The euphoric release of exam results is a moment of enormous celebration, where the nation marks the ability of our students to overcome whatever has been thrown at them.
So, as with others in Gaza’s camps, my parents invested heavily in educating us. Despite the curfews, school closures and the ongoing attacks and harassment during (but also prior to) the First Intifada, I studied tirelessly, and it was no surprise that I obtained the high marks required to join a good school—in Palestine this typically means to study medicine or engineering. My family was very proud when the tawjihi results were announced. To celebrate my achievement, my father, Abdelaziz, made a big pot of tea and bought a box of Salvana chocolates and rushed to the family Diwan where our Mukhtar, Salah Aqil, prepared the Arabic coffee.
Happiness, alas, does not last long in Gaza. Israel’s decision to close all the Palestinian universities in 1988 deprived me, as well as the 18 thousand students who finished tawjihi that year, from pursuing higher education. That short-lived joy was snatched in an instant. The occupying power’s decision shattered my dreams and left me in a state of deep despair. I had to wait for six full years, dreaming of the day that I could join university in order to continue my education. During those years, I kept clutching tightly to my dream and never let it fade away. Mahmoud Darwish was right: Palestinians are diagnosed with an incurable disease called hope. Yet, for me, the spark of hope took an entire month to get ignited. During that month, I could not comprehend my situation. For me, the sky had crashed. 1988 became like 1948, the Nakba year, my own Nakba that struck at my ability to think or even engage in a rational conversation.
“Fi el harakeh barakah,” my grandmother would tell me when she saw my tears. Yes, I know our proverb “In moving there is blessing,” I would reply, angrily. Then my father would gently remind me of one of the proverbs that I had learned and liked when I was preparing the school morning program, “’From the very small window of their cell, two captive people gazed out: one looked at the sky and the other looked at the mud under his feet.’ We still have the choice of where to gaze,” he would say, when he entered my room and saw me looking at the floor. I had little to no response to my family’s constant attempts to get me out of the state of loss and limbo that I found myself in. I spent that month in my room/bed crying, unable to deal with my Nakba.
Then one morning, I woke up feeling sick and tired of crying and sleeping. I was weary of gazing at the ceiling of our room and its floor. My body was aching, and I needed to move. I felt I was suffocating, and I needed a bigger space to breathe. I missed looking at the sky. I waited until everyone went to sleep, then left my room at around midnight and sat in the small yard gazing at Gaza’s vast, clear sky. It was so beautiful and full of stars. Without doubt, Gaza’s sky is the most beautiful sky I have ever seen. I kept gazing for hours, absorbing deeply the beauty and greatness of our sky. Suddenly, something clicked inside me. I started to think of my dad’s and grandmother’s words. Then I heard the voice on the army megaphone, announcing that the curfew on the camp was lifted. Neighbors started to wake up and move into their homes. Because the houses are so close to each other in the camp, I could feel them moving about. The Imam called for the Fajr (morning) prayer, and I went to pray. I felt an inner peace inside me; I felt I was back on track. Like the people around me waking for a day of activity, I, too, needed to move.
During the Intifada, young people had a lot of time on our hands. Paradoxically, the very restrictions of the occupation created a fertile ground for activism and community work. So, the following week, I joined the Intifada volunteer team that managed the camp’s social affairs and became involved in the educational committees that helped young students during closure of schools. We gave lessons at mosques and homes, and sometimes we had to jump from wall to wall to reach students at their homes to avoid arrest by soldiers for breaching the curfew.4 Two years later, I found myself a job as a teacher in a kindergarten in the eastern part of Khan Younis town. I was paid $8 a month, of which $4 went for transportation. In the following year, 1991, I also registered to take Hebrew classes which were offered in the evening. Many Palestinian men knew Hebrew because they worked in Israel as laborers, but very few women could speak it. I felt that communication with the occupation soldiers who bombarded the camp daily, chasing children who threw stones at them, was a necessity. During the Intifada, curfews were imposed often. Men between the ages of 16 to 64 were regularly ordered to leave their homes and head out onto the streets to be searched, interrogated and possibly arrested. At the same time, soldiers would conduct house-to-house searches, rampaging through our homes. Language seemed to be a way to help in some way. Knowing Hebrew would not result in different treatment, but it could serve as a bridge. Sometimes, it was the Palestinian sense of humor that enabled the expression of our common humanity, and this helped.
This was the case for my relative, Ahmad. One day the curfew imposed on Khan Younis was lifted for a couple of hours. Only women were allowed out to buy necessities. Ahmad did not care. He put on his Jalabiya (traditional Arabic dress), took his donkey and his cart and went out to buy a sack of flour for his family. He was caught by soldiers, who started attacking/beating and threatening him for breaking the orders. They reminded him that only women were allowed in the streets. Ahmad answered, “Who told you I am a man? I am a woman today. Look at my dress…We swap in my home,” he continued. “One day I am a woman, one day I am a man. Luckily, today I am a woman. And so, I’m out. Do you want me to break my word before my wife?” The soldiers laughed and sent him back home!
At the end of 1992, and during the early days of the peace process, the so-called Israeli civil administration in Gaza, a body that oversaw education, health and social affairs, announced four scholarships to study Hebrew in the Akiva Language Institute, a language boarding school in Natanya city. At that time, I had finished three courses in Hebrew and so filed an application. I was over the moon when I won one of the scholarships. The problem now was how to convince my family to allow me to study inside Israel for a year. My grandmother and mother immediately rejected the idea, and so did my uncles. “What could we learn from those who destroyed our society and stole our land?” my grandmother said. My mother’s main concern was about the dangerous environment that her eldest but still young and single daughter would live in. She was concerned that I would be mixing with strangers, the settlers and newcomers who came to occupy our land. Each one of our extended family and neighbors had their own fears and worries. Despite the risk and the fears, my father saw it as an opportunity. Driven by my passion for education and excited by the possibility of securing a job after graduation, he talked to my mother for a good part of that rainy night. I could hear their voices breaking the silence in the camp and I was praying that my mother would reconsider her decision. The fears of my family started to find a place in my heart, too. I slept very little that night and, in the morning, my mother woke me up. Placing her faith in me, she told me that I could go. Feeling relieved but at the same time aware of the huge responsibility this put on my shoulders, I packed my bag and left.
The very minute I left the Strip, passing through the Erez Crossing which separates Gaza from Israel and stepping into the Palestine of my grandmother’s stories (now Israel), I felt like I had traveled through time and space. I felt like I had moved thousands of kilometers away from my camp—as if it was to another planet. It was hard to believe that I was less than an hour’s distance from Khan Younis. I remembered my grandmother’s words when she was exiled from Beit Daras. She told me that the minute she stepped into Gaza, she felt as if she was thrown from paradise into hills full of sand. (Khan Younis’ topography, at that time, was sandy hills.) For a short time, I felt that I was thrown from the hills of sand back into the lost paradise that my grandmother described.
Yet, that feeling was short-lived. In everyday conversation, I came to recognize the sheer levels of injustice, inequality and racism. I still remember the story of an Israeli student who came late to class because he enjoyed having his regular ten minutes’ shower. For the teacher, class time should be respected. For me, the issue was more about inequality and less about time. How can one individual consume, in a single shower, the same amount of water that is allocated to an entire family? Yes, each home/family in the Gaza camps—including ours—was allocated 15 minutes of water a day. It was also an awkward and painful experience to share classes with white foreign settlers coming from eastern Europe, mainly Russia, who possessed no connection whatsoever to my land, but enjoyed the privileges to study, live and gain citizenship. Yet we, the indigenous people of the land, still battle in our refugee camps. I started to imagine how my life might have been, had I not been thrown into the hills of sand that became Gaza’s refugee camps.
A month after I finished my study, I got a job as a teacher in one of Gaza City’s schools. Securing a job was (and still is) a farfetched dream that everyone in Gaza prays for.5 My worried family became happy. Now, I could help my father, my siblings and myself.
The following year, 1994, was an eventful one in my life. Besides getting a job, I also got my driving license, got engaged and started to work as an interpreter for a Japanese journalist. Studying Hebrew for a year had also helped improve my English and I learned a bit of Russian, too, as I needed to communicate with foreign students coming to learn Arabic in Gaza. In that same year, the Palestinian Authority was created as a result of the Oslo agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel. The Israeli authorities began to relax some restrictions and reopened the Palestinian universities, allowing my five siblings and I to join schools! What a tough year for my father to suddenly support this army of students! By the end of the year, I also got married. We moved from the camp and rented an apartment in Gaza City.
Because of my work and the new horizons offered to me, I encountered many interesting people over many years. Many years into the future, one such encounter was with a British judge who commented on a visa application I helped a relative obtain. His words have added to my understanding of disenfranchised groups:
Life is full of challenges and one’s color, citizenship and, possibly, some luck would determine the amount of hardship people may endure and the efforts needed to invest to succeed. When one is a Palestinian, they need to double those efforts.
So often we, the wretched of the earth, need to exert double, or even triple, the efforts compared to privileged groups. In the words of my youngest brother, Fahed, we need to exert 180 percent effort to be able to get normal things done. Or, in the words of my brother, Manar, who studied engineering in Germany, our efficiency should exceed that of a machine.
This was exactly my situation from 1994 to 1999. I was teaching at one of Gaza’s schools in the morning, studying at university in the afternoon and, in the evening, teaching Hebrew to Palestinians and Arabic to foreigners at a language center in Gaza; meanwhile, I also acted as an interpreter whenever an opportunity arose, all the while leading a family and raising a daughter, who was born in 1996.
Although Gaza was being opened with the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, it was envisioned to become the Singapore of the Middle East. Yet for myself, leading the life of a young mother, activist and educator still had many of the features of a life under the thumb of another. We were still an occupied people and, although my life was full, it was still not free. In Gaza, even under the Oslo period, only the birds remained free. Our water still only ran for limited periods. Our movements were still subject to suspicion and scrutiny. The underlying structure of occupation remained ever-present: although we were allowed out of the cages, we were still kept as if on safari where, at any moment, the occupier could return us to them. I graduated in January 1999 with a GPA that offered me a springboard to dream further and to look for opportunities beyond Gaza’s sky. Education was the path. I started applying to universities outside Palestine to do my Master’s degree. To secure acceptance and possibly a scholarship, I needed a good TOEFL score. The language proficiency exam was offered twice a year, but I had already missed the first one. I studied hard, filled dozens of applications with the help of my foreign students who joined my Arabic classes at that time. In July 1999, I got an acceptance letter and a scholarship from the political science department at the University of Exeter in the UK. That September, I boarded a plane and headed to the UK, leaving my three-year-old daughter, behind, although we were all to be reunited in Gaza a year later, when I finished my degree.
The Second Intifada erupted in September 2000 while I was finishing my thesis and nursing my two-month-old son, Tarek. Yes, I planned to have my second child while doing my MA! The joke was, if I could not pass the exams, then at least I had a ready-made excuse!
I submitted my work in early October and, on the same day, flew to Gaza. It was just days after the murder of Mohammed Al-Durra, a young child who was shot and then bled to death in his father’s arms. Gaza’s population and infrastructure were under full-scale assault by the American-made Apache helicopters and the F16. This raised the violence to a new level which I had never experienced before. When I stepped into the Strip, I did not recognize the area: everything was wiped off the map. The level of destruction was beyond my imagination. I was interviewed by the late Bob Simon who was in Gaza for 60 Minutes, and I spoke about the pain of encountering this new reality.
Upon my return to Gaza, I found myself at a crossroads with little direction about where to go and how to help. The situation was like that of 1988, during the First Intifada, when I felt/got lost. It did not take much time, though, to get back on track and to find in education the way forward and the source of empowerment. I was better educated now than I was in 1988, but how could I utilize this education to better advance both myself and the cause? I was no longer willing to return to my old job to teach and manage the language center. I felt, as many of my generation in Gaza, powerless and helpless while seeing our homes being bombarded, destroyed and our men and young people assassinated, shot or in chains.
Despite the intensive coverage by the western mainstream media of the situation in Palestine, our story was always, somehow, missing. Even when it was covered, it had little resemblance to our reality. There is a huge gap between the Palestinian lived experience and what is reported in the media about it. I felt the same gap in academia and in literature when I was doing my MA in the UK. Both my study and work with media exposed me to the prevalent narratives that bear little resemblance to our lived experience, and which serve to defame Palestinians as a group and, in addition, to exclude their voices from international discourse. This exclusion is further complicated by narrative deformation. As pointed out by Ramzy Baroud, Palestinian discourse has largely been supplanted by an assertive narrative representing Palestinians as irrationally angry, reactive actors, hapless multitudes of passive victims rather than having the ability to act as agents. Additionally, whatever (little) knowledge exists of Palestinian life before the foundation of the state of Israel is largely determined by mainstream media coverage, Western and Israeli academic research and Zionist-oriented narratives, commonly reducing Palestinian history to a collection of stereotypes.
The more I read about and watched our story screened on TV, the more exasperated I became. This feeling was shared by an Australian friend, Barbara, who was working in Gaza and joined one of my Arabic courses back in 1998. Barbara was amazed at the rich history, generosity and beauty of Gaza and its people—one that clashes, to a large extent, with what she learned in school and from the media. She conceived the idea of conducting an oral history project, recording and publishing the authentic version of the Palestinian story in English. As a Palestinian, born and raised under occupation, and who had never had the chance to learn our history, I became very enthusiastic about the idea. I saw in this research project a way to place our story at the center when talking about Palestine. Research emerged as a further methodology to break down the superimposed narratives which keep us in the frame developed by the oppressors. Research itself became a way to contribute to the struggle.
We started the project, and in no time, I gained back some of the energy and motivation I have always enjoyed. The oral history research was my way forward out of the state of powerlessness and a source of empowerment and enlightenment. It also offered an attempt to create and project an alternative approach to communicating the history of the Palestinian people and as such, a step towards decolonization. Adopting the discipline of “History from Below” and “Herstory,” a term often used by feminist historians and activists telling the untold life stories of women, particularly marginalized women, over a period of two years we interviewed seven ordinary women, but especially sought those with a variety of experiences and a good memory who were, thus, capable of conveying the depth, diversity and richness of Palestinian life. The life-stories of each and all these women highlight everyday experiences in Palestinian villages and towns in pre-1948 Palestine and the Gaza Strip as well as their experiences of war and exile, of two Intifadas and their thoughts on the future. In 2020, the first story, A White Lie, came to fruition. The second, Light the Road for Freedom, followed in 2021, while the rest of the series will be released in the coming years.
Barbara and I became the midwives of these voices. In so doing and joining other academics and activists who preceded us (of whom I knew little in 1999), we acted against the “voice-cide” of established patterns of academia and media by assisting indigenous Palestinian voices to have their own space, which, in itself, is a revolutionary strategy of resistance which has the power to topple oppressive discursive regimes. Across walls in Gaza and the West Bank, the phrase “to exist is to resist” is written in simple black letters. These stories become acts of resistance by virtue of their sheer existence. They add drops to the ever-growing sea of knowledge which washes Gaza’s shores. They place Palestine in the context of other global struggles against colonialism, racism and apartheid because, with a human lens, they demonstrate the impact of such policy on the lives of people.
The 2021 attack on Gaza was also a turning point in the journey along the freedom highway. When I visited Gaza in the summer of 2021, I witnessed how young people, in particular, were countering the narrative of Palestinians as mere supplicants to the aid industry or as grim statistics in a war between two sides of equal status. Instead, this summer of 2021, again the boxes of chocolates and the tea were distributed in the streets and Diwans, celebrating the achievement of Gaza’s students who occupied the majority of the top ten places in all Palestine, despite the brutal Israeli attack that ripped through the ravaged and besieged Strip just weeks before the start of the exams.
These young people were/are not the helpless and hopeless Palestinians who are often presented to the world through grim statistics or chronicles of events. These young people were successfully molding the concept of hope into a revolutionary tool in the battle for dignity and freedom. They were equipped now with a story: a story of brutality and ugly violence by an occupying power and of life lived in response. With this powerful tool in their hands, like each preceding generation, they would send this story into the world for all who had ears to listen.
The fragmentation and separation which is endured by Palestinians should have been intensified by this war on civilians but instead, the collective resolve was strengthened with a message of its unity.
As I was packing my bags to return to Canada, I said a tearful goodbye to my family. Rafah Crossing was a short drive away and, on the other side, would be a journey into the pain of separation from my homeland. As I said goodbye, my family tried to lighten the load with some smiles and humor. (Naturally but ironically, the ones staying in Gaza were bringing the laughter!) Playing on the old prayer of the Passover Seder, their words echoed in my ears “Next year in Beit Daras.” Insh’Allah!
1 Contrary to the prediction of David Ben Gurion that the old generations would die and young generations would forget (Ben Gurion 1948, cited on Al-Awda website, https://al-awda.org/).
2 Ageel, Ghada, Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada : The University of Alberta Press, 2016).
3 In the mainstream Israeli narrative Palestinian education is described as a methodology of hatred. Our school texts come under scrutiny from foreign governments and funding institutions and media. But, for Palestinians, education is a form of liberation. Thus the highest status job among the prisoners is the librarian, the holder of stories, the passer of secret messages. And the highest accord one offers a friend upon greeting them is not “sheikh,” a religious title, but “ustaaza/ustaaz,” teacher, professor, friend of wisdom.
4 This is an echo of Freire who argues that through education and the relationship with action liberation is uncovered. “As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations.” (Freire, 1970, p98 as found at https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf)
5 Gaza’s unemployment rate continues to impose a massive impact on society at large (43.1% in December 2020) and for women in particular as high as 60.4%. See Gisha, “Gaza’s workforce continues to shrink, 43% unemployment in the last quarter of 2020,” April 13, 2021, https://gisha.org/en/gazas-workforce-continues-to-shrink-43-unemployment-in-the-last-quarter-of-2020/.