It has been more than a year of this genocidal siege on Gaza, with Israeli forces now expanding their attacks on people, homes, and hospitals to the West Bank and Lebanon. The loss, the suffering, and the violence are unrelenting. At every turn, we hear of entire family lines erased from the civil registry; that Gaza’s rubble could take ten or fifteen years to clear; that it could require three and a half centuries to rebuild; that every school and university has been destroyed.
And then there’s the incalculable loss of adults, children, and babies: gone. Sometimes, in the face of all this, it feels as though nothing can be said. And yet Palestinians in Gaza continue to write, even in the most difficult of circumstances. And they continue to imagine a different world. Here, we bring together Palestinian writers in and from Gaza to imagine a future. Recollections of this past year, reflections on where they are now, and thoughts about where they might be tomorrow all come together in this small chapbook.
We begin with a moment of silence. In his poem “Amjad,” translated by Wiam El-Tamami, Nasser Rabah writes about trying to find someone to listen to his grief about losing his closest friend: “Who will listen to me tell the story of Amjad? / Who will give me their heart—and a moment of silence?” After our shared silence, Nasser tells us about where he now writes, in his bombed-out home. “Only two rooms on the ground floor remain: this is where my entire family lives now. In a corner of one of the rooms, I curl up and write.”
The poet Batool Abu Akleen echoes what many have said about how they must go on writing, despite everything. She has been displaced, and she describes writing among the tents: “You’re sitting and everyone around you is just sitting and watching what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel good at all, but I’m doing it, because poetry is what keeps me alive. It’s what protects me from going insane.”
In her poem “A Miracle,” Asmaa Dwaima imagines not a future so much as a wonderment: “A miracle that allows us to start over. / The hand of God wipes away a year, / And takes us one year back. / A miracle: / That’s all I want.”
In this collection, we also remember the many journalists who were targeted and killed by Israeli forces. Poet Heba Al-Agha commemorates two of them in her poem “For Ismail Al-Ghoul and Rami Al-Rifi.” The pair were killed on July 31, 2024 while, according to Reporters Without Borders, they were in an isolated white car in the middle of an empty street, both wearing press vests.
We include one work by a writer who is not from Gaza: Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash.
The final poem in this collection is his “We Will Lose This War,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine, because it speaks so urgently to both loss and futurity. As he writes, “When our killers look into mirrors, / they will not see their faces, / but ours, many of us, in the mist. / They will finally realize that they have become nothing / but memories of ghosts in the great abyss. / They will never understand how they annihilated us / then annihilated us,/ then annihilated us, / and yet could not erase from their mirrors / our shining image.”
These poems and reflections do not exist separately from their authors, nor from the place and time in which they were com- posed. They are not here for passive reading. And so, at the end of this collection, we leave you with suggested actions.
As poet Rasha Abdulhadi has written:
“Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now.”
Pedagogy is one of the fundamental sciences when it comes to changing the world, which we do not like the way it looks right now. Pedagogy thus has the task of anticipating the socio-political utopia that we would like to see in the near future. Pedagogy should sow the desire in our minds and in the minds of our children to bring these ethical ideals forward in time, to stop dreaming about them and to experience them first hand. Any change in people and in society begins with the education of children and of society as a whole in the sense of lifelong learning.
‘Autonomous education builds different worlds where many true worlds with truths fit’, mural by a collective led by Gustavo Chávez Pavón, Zapatista primary school in Oventic, Chiapas, Mexico.
The pedagogy of human rights is also often mentioned. Children should be sensitised from an early age to grow into people who neither discriminate nor exploit others. They should develop into people who show empathy, oppose violence and war, and work actively and dynamically for a better world in the spirit of peace and justice. They should grow up to be tolerant and cooperative people who support the weak, oppose all violence in their environment, denounce racism and discrimination, advocate for a just starting point and think in a tolerant and open way.
But for people who have been subjected to extreme oppression or genocide, human rights education is not enough. In an environment of total dehumanisation, where the killing and suffocation of every human life dream is brutal, no pedagogy for human rights can take root, because that would mean that people have not been deprived of their humanity, but that is the case. Because the narrative of genocide requires the dehumanisation of the enemy. I can only kill if I know that there are no humans in front of me. Only then can I pull the trigger and only then can I kill children en masse. And that was the case in the Nazi regime. And it is being repeated today in Gaza. The victims are children who have been dehumanised in advance so that they can be killed coldly and without any ethical consideration.
What we urgently need in an environment of dehumanisation is not a pedagogy of human rights, but an education in resistance. And the goal of this resistance, which is the result of the pedagogy of resistance, is the renewed recognition of the humanity of the dehumanised, along with overcoming their role as victims and their reification.
What Theodor Adorno says, albeit with some ethnocentric restrictions, applies to all of humanity. In his essay from 1966, the Jewish philosopher expressed the following view on the ‘never again’ of the concentration camp of Auschwitz and the killing of fellow citizens who were gassed because they belonged to a Jewish and thus inferior Semitic ‘race’:
“The first demand of education is that Auschwitz not happen again. It precedes all others to such an extent that I believe I neither have to nor should justify it. I cannot understand why it has been given so little attention to date. Justifying it would be monstrous in view of the monstrosity that occurred […] …. Any debate about educational ideals is futile and irrelevant compared to this one: that Auschwitz must never be repeated. It was barbarism that all education is directed against.”
And this paradigm of the pedagogy of resistance is precisely the common thread running through the book by the Colombian history professor Renán Vega Cantor, entitled “Education after Gaza”, which I have just translated from Spanish into English and German.
Resistance in such an enclave, which symbolises the quintessential example of Zionist, imperialist oppression of the Other, is not only a universal right, but a universal obligation that must come from both within as well as from without. Educators from all over the world are called upon to name Israeli human rights violations and denounce the brutality of this genocide. Because neither Auschwitz nor Gaza must be repeated. Resistance to the killing machine of the Zionist state, which completely reverses Jewish ethics and religious thought, can only be guaranteed by this reversal: the children of Gaza are not victims, but fighters.
The Palestinian-Brazilian poet Yasser Jamil Fayad has summed up this concept in a few brief but eloquent words:
“Running/ Dancing/ Crying/ Kissing/ Loving/ Suffering/ Helping/ Screaming/ There are countless verbs in life/ I am only Palestinian/ My verb is fighting!’
This is the pedagogy of resistance that we need worldwide. This is a paradigm of pedagogical thinking that will take its place in schools all over the world.
The No is a universal No to the dehumanisation of any human being, of the Jews of yesteryear and the Palestinians of today.