In the first Palestinian Nakba of 1948, the grandparents and family of historian Muhammad Jihad Ismael were driven at Zionist gunpoint out of their mid-country town Shaphir—a centuries-old farming community that included a Muslim mosque, a Jewish temple and a Christian church (and is now a Jewish-Only “settlement” called Merkaz Shapira).
Muhammad’s grandmother, pregnant at the time with Muhammad’s future father, survived their march of almost 40 kilometers (with thousands of other refugees under fire from Israeli aircraft), and gave birth under a tree beside the road. So began four generations of exile in the Gaza Territory, and Muhammad was born there in 1985. Today he and his family live in Deir al Balah.
Muhammad has also published Fedayee & the Sea (2023) on experiences of Palestinians who fled by sea in 1948. These excerpts are transcripts of 30 questions from interviews in Arabic media.
I dedicate this book to my family in Gaza,
to my martyred young brother Ahmad Jihad Ismael,
to my martyred brother-in-law Muhammad Zeyad Al Alem,
to my martyred dear friend and the best poet of Palestine, Saleem Al Naffar,
and to my family in Crete (Jack, Angela & Vicky)
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…Q: How do you understand Israel’s motives in this latest war?
I can really see only what they do. But the present members of their government make clear that Israel’s actions now run with their deepest roots as a society with a defined agenda. Say what we will about religious and cultural conflict, Israel’s central priority is and always has been the “exclusive” political possession of the land—down to every last acre.
As soon as we look at their ancient roots and modern agenda, their problem is the same: the pre-existence of Canaanite and Palestinian civilizations, which for them must be exterminated and erased. Those are the commands of their Torah, but Palestine knew a general coexistence until the Zionist invasion of 1948, when British weapons gave Israelis the strength to resume such murderous conquest.
There is much to detail about both sides’ ancient origins. For now, there is no hope of mutual healing until we recognize the genocidal agenda that begins as early as Genesis 9—the verse that begins with the lovely “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the Earth.” How many people know what comes directly next? “Be the terror and the dread” of “every living and crawling thing”: “I give you everything,” first of all the entire inhabited land “from the wadi of Egypt” meaning Gaza “to the great river Euphrates” in verse 15, and with it a “curse” on Canaanite outsiders, who, if they survive, “shall be [Israel’s] meanest slave.” Every book of the Torah repeats and amplifies their priesthood’s genocidal orders. Indeed the first people murdered for the god of Sinai were Israelites, told in Exodus.
Nor can anybody claim “they know not what they do.” This is clear not only from the obscenely cruel videos by IDF soldiers on TikTok. Look at Genesis 34, where the latecomer Israelites confront the ancient city of Shechem. The Canaanites propose peace through intermarriage. The Israelites reply that if Shechem’s men are circumcised, “then we will give you our daughters, taking yours for ourselves; and we will stay with you to make one nation.”
Both sides know this is the path to peace, but instead the Israelites attack when Shechem’s men are “still in pain,” and loot “everything to be found in their houses.” So, yes, “religion” plays its part, but exclusive possession of the land is the central goal—even if, as Israel’s tale of Shechem concludes, “our name is now in bad odor.” Do not worry, says Deuteronomy 1: “we shall gobble them up.”
Q: What has been your share of the daily human crisis now in Gaza?
When people wonder “How can this be any worse?” others reply, “Do not ask, because tomorrow will answer.” As Israel’s attacks began with shelling, strafing, bombs and rockets, we cowered in one room of our house in Balah. Our terrified children lost control of their urine, and one night a chunk of shrapnel tore through a wall to land on the pillow between my wife’s and son’s heads.
Somehow our house withstood the total destruction of our neighborhood, which killed hundreds of people—but when white phosphorus began to fall, we had to leave. So we walked south together among thousands of homeless starving refugees and sheltered for six weeks in an UNRWA-adapted school in Khan Younis, but conditions were appalling. Every person looked pale and weak with anemia.
Soon, with Israel’s claims that each town in turn was a Hamas headquarters, we evacuated to Rafah, and lived in a warren of plastic tents that absorbed heat and leaked in the rain. Mosquitoes, flies, rats, scorpions, snakes and attacks by wild dogs were constant. So was the bombing, wherever the IDF told us to go. At last we decided to live or die together back in Balah, and our march was a 13-kilometer nightmare of dead bodies, mountains of uncollected garbage, open creeks of sewage-water, and armed killer-drones buzzing overhead. Every collapsed building smelled of decomposing flesh, including schools and hospitals. The counting of our Palestinian dead has hardly begun.
One lucky meal per day, less clean water, and no medicines or hygienic supplies against disease and infection. Items of foreign aid, clearly labeled “Not For Sale,” we had to buy from Hamas and other profiteers—and most was rotten because Israel still delays it in miles-long queues of trucks. If the ruined American “floating pier” worked to feed us for about 20 days, their parachuted air-drops crushed dozens of people in their tents. Well, our experiences are only typical of Gaza’s millions. And now that a new Israeli highway has cut Gaza in two, over 400,000 people are trapped in the northern half, where things are unimaginably worse. We go where they order us, they kill us anyway, and there is no place of safety or escape.
Q: What do you see ahead in this war’s aftermath?
I foresee a worse version of our 17-year “normal” imprisonment. Chaos, suicides, mental disorders, hunger and untreated illness, increasing crime and civil war. And, cancer—because Israel has poisoned the land, water and air with tons of explosives’ toxic residues. Even the few fruits of trees, herbs and vegetables that sustained us at times will be inedible. In the endless rubble you have to imagine decades for any effort to rebuild. So, without some kind of radical new peace based in the end of apartheid, it means that more generations will grow up in tents and constant deprivation, with no horizon of hope. History just keeps repeating itself, because our so-called leaders refuse to learn. They are addicted to the status quo.
Q: Let us close with a very big question. In the Gaza of 2018, we saw Israel’s answer to nonviolent Palestinian protest. Those who insist on a “Greater Israel” are as dedicated as Palestinians to what they believe are their rights. Is there any path to a peace that lets both sides live as who they are?
You ask me to climb the last hill and see the land of milk and honey! I can only share what my observations, research and best understandings suggest.
As a Palestinian with eyes and ears, I know that most of our people want peaceful coexistence achieved by nonviolence. This was the spirit of their Great March of Return in 2018. And Hamas had no part in it—not until the second day began, when they and Jihad planted snipers among the crowds and, yes, killed not a few IDF soldiers. We must have honest accounts of what happened.
When Israelis responded with snipers, then too came the slings and throwing of stones, the hurling of iron construction-bars, even balloons of fire that burned Israeli farmland. Hamas also used the March to reconnoiter the border for the plan of October 7th. They exploited and wrecked the March’s first aim. And finally, when they forced their green flags into television-clips of the mourners at 2018 funerals, this to our families was the height of illegitimacy—just like Hamas’ righteous forbiddance or destruction of pre-Muslim Palestinian heritage.
What is it to be Palestinian? It means that we are the living inheritors of all the traditions that have named and shaped this land, an archaeology of 9,000 years. Curiously, Israel’s own best digs reveal wave after wave of immigrants here, from the first Natufians to Canaanites, Edomites, Philistine Sea Peoples who named this land Palestine, and to Hebrews and Israelites.
Palestine embraced the earliest Hebrews, sharing life from agriculture and trade to some religious practices. They were all, as the digs say, entangled in the normal human affairs of coexistence. The Torah too includes hybrid names born of family intermarriages. Yet under the new law of separation from the latecomer highland Israelites, who did not trade even with their midland cousins, entanglements like marriage “had” to end. After all, it facilitated coexistence, and such is the law again in Israel today. This is the ignorant ground for Israel’s paranoid hostility toward an Iran as their peer and neighbor.
It may surprise that I have no problem with a Zionism that means Jewish nationalism—as long as we too have a state. But I oppose all separation, racism and expansionism. From there, we must notice that Greater Israel is rooted in a “right of conquest.” We once believed in The Torah’s tales of Joshua’s campaigns; then archaeology disproved them; and yet, now, if you put the best datings of destructions of Canaanite-Philistine places in time-order, you see that only about 200 years transformed them all into the first state of Israel. So we come to the crucial word—legitimacy.
One cannot argue that the Israelite conquest of Palestine erased all indigenous rights. For how then did Israel’s legitimacy survive their own conquerings, in turn, by Assyria, Babylon and others? We begin to see the difference between demonstrable attachments to the land, which both sides can show to different degrees, and a grandiose neurotic protest that only certain people deserve exclusive possession and expansion.
Yet, The Torah and its child apartheid Israel now dream of taking Sinai, as a land so key to their ancestors; Jordan, as the land of their tribes Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh; southern Lebanon, as the inheritance of Asher and Naphtali, and southern Syria as lands of Manasseh too.
Those who believe in exclusive rights and expansion against other human beings must intend their violent subjugation. Israel’s most desired goal of legitimacy, however, cannot rest upon violence. For me, the secret of an honorable legitimacy hides in plain sight. Look at the two simple paragraphs of 1917’s Balfour Declaration, which Israel venerates like holy writ. The first condones an Israeli state—on the condition in the second paragraph, quote: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” So, it seems clear that their true legitimacy is a long way off. First, there must be a rigorous reckoning that dismantles apartheid and repairs so many hideous mistakes.
Is this impossible for Israelis? I see their spiritual strength and I do not think so. In closing, let me point to the counsel of Israel’s distinguished journalist Richard Ben Cramer. In Hebrew, he says, there is a verb—l’hakshot—which means their tradition of fearless, relentless interrogation of facts toward genuine truth. Is there any more honorable application of learning? Such a self-interrogation, Cramer says, would make Israel more Jewish, not less. And that is no threat to Palestine. If they can do it, so can we. As a poet said, the ego blames, but the soul forgives. All we see now is the mutually murderous futility of trying to build a real world on mal-education, falsehoods and addictive hypocrisy.
I thank you for these questions, thank our listeners and readers too for this chance to be heard. Every single person has a stake in the resolution of this conflict—because, if you will not act to foster justice for everybody, you can only be sure that each day, fewer people will act toward justice for you.
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