We speak with Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa, who is in
Cairo and just returned from two weeks in Gaza. “What’s happening to people
isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration
of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed
personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible, and I
will call it a holocaust — and I don’t use that word lightly. But it is
absolutely that.”
What I Witnessed in Gaza Is a Holocaust: Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa |
Democracy Now!
Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa joins us for Part 2 of
her interview from Cairo after two weeks in Gaza. She discusses the impact of
“unlimited weaponry” supplied by the United States for Israel to bomb and
starve civilians there. “Language is really inadequate and insufficient to
capture the enormity of this moment,” says Abulhawa. “What I’ve seen is really
a fraction of the totality of this horror.” She is the founder and co-director
of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization, and the executive
director of Palestine Writes Literature Festival.
Back from Gaza, Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa Says “Language Is Inadequate”
to Describe Horror | Democracy Now!
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Back from Gaza, Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa Says “Language Is Inad...
Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa joins us for Part 2 of
her interview from Cairo after two...
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A selection:
SUSAN ABULHAWA: I think the absurdity of the United States trying to airdrop —
or, rather, it’s a theater, to airdropping a handful of boxes of aid to people
who are starving because a key American ally, to whom we have been providing
unlimited weaponry and financial aid, is actually doing the starving and doing
the bombing, I hope will become, or if it’s not already, apparent to the
American people.
I mean, I think, you know, hearing that clip, people still talking about Israel
defending itself is — it’s difficult for any sane person to, or any person with
a conscience or, you know — to understand how this language is still being
spoken in public discourse. Gaza is a principally defenseless civilian
population in the most densely populated place in the world. They have been
imprisoned in what is tantamount to a concentration camp for over — for nearly
20 years. They have been occupied. They have been bombed repeatedly by the most
powerful military in the region. And we’re still talking about this nuclear
power defending itself from civilians. How do they — how is this even spoken
with a straight face is beyond me.
Now, this absurdity is apparent to most people in the Global South, who have
been victims of Western colonialism. But for some reason, it still seems to be
an effective claim among Western societies, although less so particularly with
younger generations who are more sophisticated when it comes to acquisition of
information. Despite the pervasive censorship from social media platforms,
people are still able to get some information from the ground, and, you know —
and then we see acts, selfless acts and extreme acts, like what Aaron Bushnell
did.
And, you know, I, frankly, don’t pay much attention to what I feel is political
theater, when it comes to official spokespeople and electoral politics. I’m
more interested in where change actually is cultivated and where it comes from,
which is from the bottom up. I’m interested in the protests that still happen
on college campuses despite the doxxing, despite the targeting of students and
faculty alike. I’m interested in people who continue to pour into the streets
all over the world into capitals by the hundreds of thousands. I’m interested
in people in the movements to boycott Israel. I think this is where my focus
is. This is where my interest is. Nothing is going to come from a ruling elite,
that seems, frankly, hell-bent on accomplishing this genocide with — and at the
same time trying to pay lip service to assuage public opinion that is
increasingly oppositional.
I spoke with a lot of women, in particular, who were recovering in a hospital
or were there — or, you know, being with their children who were recovering.
The stories they told me are just — are out of like a Hollywood horror film. I
mean, there are — I have photos of the backs of men where Israeli soldiers
carved pictures, smiley faces, Stars of David, etc., in their skin. These women
narrated stories to me of, you know, Israeli soldiers laying them — laying
hundreds of women on the ground and then taking their guns with the laser and
laughing, and then wherever the laser landed, they shoot.
I spoke with a woman whose 3-year-old daughter had both of her legs shattered,
and she was in the hospital recovering. It was an intentional — she was
intentionally shot by a soldier. And this happened to her daughter after they
killed her son, shot him through the head, in what she described as tank fire
toying with them for about 30 minutes before they finally delivered the final
blow that took her son.
People being forced to walk from hospitals, severe injuries, people being
forced to walk for hours to get to safety. Children and people, you know, who
were fleeing their homes, trying to get to the south, having to walk with their
hands up, with their IDs, and if anybody dares to look down or pick anything
up, they’re picked off. They’re literally shot by snipers.
The scenes that they narrated to me — I spoke with a little girl who was about
8 years old, whose face was badly burned, but her injuries were the least in
the whole family. The entire family had third-degree burns all over their
bodies. And what she explained to me, again, you know, I don’t know how a child
survives that.
I spent time in a hospital, in a maternity ward, where there were newborns who
had either — who were unknown or who were known but whose family was just
absent and no longer there, or nobody knows what happened to them. These
newborns are spending 24/7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in incubators
without any human touch, really, except when they come to feed them, because
the nurses and the doctors are so exhausted and so overworked. People are being
discharged from hospitals with wounds and going into tents where they don’t
have running water and proper hygiene, and they’re getting horrible infections
and dying from sepsis.
You know, life on the beach, you know, the beach is where Palestinians used to
go for fun, to love, to be with family. And it’s torture now, because a lot of
tents are pitched in the sand, and the sand is in everything. People’s skin is
scorched. I mean, children walk around with cracked cheeks from the sun and
sand. The sand gets in every bite of food.
The food that does come in, into Rafah, is primarily canned food. And most of
it — and I think you hinted at this earlier, and I’ve seen it and tasted it
myself — it is stuff that has clearly been sitting on shelves for decades. And
all you can taste, really, is the rancidity, metallic taste of the can.
You know, this is — people schedule their days, they plan their days around
trying to get to a single shared bathroom that’s shared by hundreds of other
families. They try to do their best with hygiene, but it’s impossible. And when
you have — when people succumb to living in filth, people — you know, I think
maybe people in the West sort of have this impulse thought that most Black and
Brown people sort of live like this. So it’s a little humiliating to have to
explain that we don’t actually live in filth. And it’s degrading, beyond
anything you can imagine, to be forced to live like this months on end, to have
no way to protect your children, no way to give them hope, no way to calm their
fears.
You know, there’s no privacy in the tents, because, you know, there’s not
enough tents for families. So families are actually separated, with, you know,
dozens of women in one tent and dozens in another. So spouses cannot even hold
each other at night when they need that care the most. It’s these details that
are traumatizing en masse for children, for parents, for elderly.
People don’t have medicines. People are dying from lack of insulin, which, by
the way, Israel has banned from coming into Gaza. And they’re dying from
diarrhea, because they’re drinking polluted water, and Israel has also banned
water treatment, water filtration systems, even handheld ones, simple personal
water filtration systems that, you know, Americans use when they go camping.
The degradation is total, Amy. And on top of that, they’re bombed, day in and
out, even in Rafah. When I was there, there was not a single night that we
didn’t hear bombs, and at least once was close enough that the building I was
in shook, and we thought our building had actually been hit. But it was the one
— it was one over from where I was. And there was another moment, too, when a
tent by a hospital, where we had just been, was bombed. They bombed a tent. And
it actually happened to be the tent that is adjacent to the tent that Bisan
Owda was in. And they were sitting, eating. They were sitting on the ground
eating, and shrapnel just came above their heads.
You know, this is a daily — this is a daily life, and everybody is expecting to
die, expecting to lose the people they love. And they are. And I think, you
know, there is something that I’ve noticed that happens. There’s a kind of
detachment when people tell you what’s happening to them or what has happened.
There’s a kind of numbing, that must be, I suppose, some kind of a defense
mechanism. So, when they have a chance to breathe, I think these demons, this
horror, this trauma is going to be another layer of catastrophe, generations
just lost.
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