Lines in the Sand: The War on Gaza and the Sandcastles It Dismantled

* Collage by Nama’a Qudah

01 April 2024

Last night, I had a dream that I was eating pomegranates on the beach in Gaza. I knew I was in Gaza, even though I have never been there before. I sat on the sand and watched the waves come and go as I carefully peeled the pomegranate skin. What has this sea witnessed? How much death and destruction had it swallowed over the past five months? We speak to the sea but don’t expect it to listen. We take its silence as absence, forgetting it has endless capacity and to remember all that it had seen and heard. 

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Palestinian refugees speak about the sea with a deep longing — how much they want to visit  and see it again, especially the first generation of Palestinian refugees who were displaced from coastal cities, such as Yaffa, Haifa and Akka in 1948. On the other hand, those who were born in the camps long to a place they have never seen but heard so much about. They imagine what it would be like to cross Palestine and make it to the other side, where the sea meets the sky. Too many borders stand between them and that moment. They spend their lives awaiting the dismantlement of those colonial borders that stand between them and their return, with the distance separating them from the sea being as much temporal as it is spatial. In a way, the sea is still set in 1948, the last of Palestine Palestinian refugees saw as they got on the boats that carried them to the camps in Lebanon. To others, the sea is where the edge of Palestine is, resembling the last piece that was lost, the furthest point that was occupied.

What was later produced as the Gaza Strip, by turning what used to be  a number of different cities and villages into one open air prison through colonial production of the border, was lucky enough to neighbor the sea. Amidst all what was taken from them, Palestinians in Gaza at least have the sea, the only window to the outside world, the only moment of contact with something beyond.  

They had the sea and  the sky, as well. They were extended blue bodies that allowed them to breathe and unwind when everything else was blocked, closed, and heavily militarized.
During this genocidal war, which is about to enter its sixth month, that same sky and sea have fired bombs and missiles over Palestinians in Gaza. Death came from all directions, blurring the boundary between the vertical and the horizontal, between land and sea.

Where were people supposed to go?

Surrounded by wires, walls, and fences from all directions, the war on Gaza reminded the world of how much of an open air prison the Gaza Strip is — one that Palestinians have been locked in for the past 17 years, isolated from the rest of the world with material structures interrupting their movement and means of survival. Now, even the sky and the sea are closing in on them, furthering their isolation and entrapment as they attempt to survive in a huge and compact refugee camp on an island where death escalated towards them from every direction. .   

*** 

There I was, on the beach, suspended in time and place. I was surprised  I had even managed to sleep that long, long enough to have a dream of that vividness. Like many people, I have not been able to sleep well for the past few months, nor engage in any kind of daily activity without carrying  a feeling of dread, swallowing the colors from everything I look at, pushing my body to the ground, making me feel like I weigh a thousand tons.

I have watched so much of what I know about the civilized world dismantled in front of me, like sandcastles, unable to withstand the rising tides. Was that where all that sand had come from? I lost faith in Western academic institutions, the ones that I have sought for education and knowledge for the past 20 years of my life. In the middle of completing my doctoral degree, I find myself helpless, unsure whether there is a place for me within this world that was so complicit in my people’s annihilation. I also lost faith in many of the Western academics that were so vocal about many issues but suddenly lost their ability to speak when the war started in Gaza.
If you made a living from writing books about war and conflict, would it not make sense to speak up now? Many of the  people I know were remarkably comfortable being that racist, that Islamophobic, that anti-Palestinian.

Others tried to lump Palestine with the rest of the Middle East, driven by Orientalist motives that Edward Said had already highlighted and challenged back in 1978, as a way of expressing their concerns regarding the rising levels of violence “in the region.”
Has nothing changed at all? Are we still living in a colonial world where there is us and them, the Occident and the Orient,the civilized and the savages, the white, the black, and a few shades in between?

Have we convinced ourselves we have moved past that point in history by introducing new notions, such as post-colonialism and neo-colonialism, to indicate we have moved forward? 
In that sense, the colonial production of history that disconnects the present from the past, as a way of excusing the colonizers from the atrocities they have committed, is complemented by the production of a colonial future, one where the very colonial structure that is maintaining the colony’s continuity is made invisible.  This was a notion introduced by Ariella Azoullay in her book, Unlearning Imperialism. She explains that this phenomenon is achieved by portraying life on colonized land as one that is democratic and free and settlers as people who have always been there as peaceful civilians who just want to live their lives in their homes (that are not stolen) on their land (that is also not stolen) without causing harm to anyone (despite their enrollment in the army and their violent personal histories).

I don’t remember how I had gotten to the beach because the dream had started with me sitting there. Without anyone around me, I knew my feet would have left clear and recognizable traces on the sand, alongside a line of movement that would easily indicate my point of departure and the path I took. To get there, I have walked that distance, each footstep following the other, allowing me to trace back the sequence of events. History, in my understanding of it, was not very different from that. When studied, it can help us understand so much about the present, about why things are the way they are, and what happened before to produce the reality we are living in today.

Similarly, the 7th of October did not happen in a void, nor was it isolated from a longer colonial history that produced it. The 7th of October was preceded by 75 years of violence, land theft, and massacres that have systematically paved the way to the settler colonization of Palestine.

It also produced what we know as the Gaza Strip today after drawing lines on the sand and turning those lines into walls, fences, and crossings that continue to lock Palestinians inside. After 177 days of the war on Gaza and more than 32780 martyrs, Palestinians in Gaza are dying from bombs, ground invasions, and starvation, far away from the rest of the world that begins only a few kilometers away. Yet there they are, too close to the Israeli missiles and tanks that have destroyed all of life’s infrastructure and worked on making that land inhabitable,for years to come, or until the next settlement is built. These colonial motives have already been announced in Israeli conferences and through 3D architectural drawings of proposed housing projects that are ready to be built to inhabit Gaza’s future as part of the Israeli colonial future in which people just show up, and life just seems to begin.

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Nama’a Qudah is an interdisciplinary feminist researcher, currently completing her doctoral degree at the Architecture Department at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the architecture of displacement, particularly Palestinian Refugee Camps, with the help of methods from the fields of architecture, visual arts, anthropology and creative writing. Her professional career is divided between practice and academia, having worked between Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Jordan. Follow her work on Instagram and Everyday Wehdat Camp, and read more pieces on her blog.