Trying Not To See The Future

I never foresaw a year of genocide. How will we deal with two?

Over a year ago I began receiving, watching and sharing videos from the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Gaza isn’t very far from me, about 4 hours driving if we could drive there, which we can’t. There was a time when people in Egypt could drive there. There was a time when people from Gaza could drive here. But honestly, it was never an easy trip and the politics of borders always made it much harder. Once the war started, the possibility of travel to Gaza went from normally difficult to insanely difficult to impossible as the not very simple border between Gaza and Egypt blurred into a crazy border of Gaza, Egypt, and Israel. And now after a year of watching Israeli military disrupt, collapse, flatten, crush, demolish, and otherwise destroy the children, the adults, the homes, the farms, the lives, the hopes, and the dreams of Gaza, we are having to be offered more to see if we can bear it. Now, not satisfied with the reshaping of Gaza into an Israeli tank storage unit, they are doing the same thing to Lebanon to their north.

I have lived in Egypt for over 35 years. In all of that time I have never visited Gaza. I have visited Lebanon, however, in the years after the wars of the 80s. In the early 90s my husband and I were invited to a trade conference for the grain industry in Beirut, which was the first time I had seen Lebanon, although I had spent a summer in Cyprus becoming friends with some Lebanese boat people, who had sailed to Limassol on sailboats, power boats, even relatively small fishing boats when it became clear to them that while they might not be able to save their homes from bombs, they might be able to save their children in their boats. Much of the damage that I saw in Lebanon in the 90s was not the damage that is being inflicted today. At the time, I was stunned to see apartment blocks without a front wall overlooking the sea, and the mad tangles of telephone and powerlines that were trying to serve a city that was crippled. The war during that period was more among the Lebanese than an all-out attempt at obliteration that is now being carried out by the Israeli airforce. The Lebanese and the Palestinians whether in the West Bank or Gaza do not have the means for such obliteration as the Israelis have employed over the past year.

People who live in Europe, the Americas, Asia, or even in Africa probably have a very difficult time imagining just how tiny the countries of Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine are. Israel is the largest country of the group, being about the size of New Jersey, while Palestine that is being eaten alive by Israel is the smallest of the countries, and Lebanon is roughly half the size of Israel. Of the three countries, only Israel has the ability to flatten the other two countries. The combined area of them all is roughly that of Massachusetts. The Gazan refugees that we have been seeing at the farm are here in Egypt mourning homes and farms that are obscenely close to the places where they are currently trapped. Chris Hedges spoke his piece at the Oscars a year ago. It was incredibly powerful then, and it has only increased in power over the year. With all that has happened in the meanwhile, can any of us imagine how we can answer the children of Lebanon and Gaza next year?