Back in 2017 I published People of the Sea: A Novel of the Promised Land, about the adventures and historical importance of post-Minoan refugees from ancient Crete—whose tribes including the Pulesati eventually reached the Near Eastern cities of Gaza (whose original name was Minoa), Ashdod, Ascalon and other living-places of old trading-partners, and in a few generations created the new land today known as Palestine.
There were a few good reviews and notices, but the one most important to me came a few months ago from a Palestinian writer living now with his family in Gaza itself, Mr. Muhammad Jihad Ismael. Muhammad, at age 36 already a well-published author in Arabic, was very pleased and excited to see that the pre-Biblical, pre-Israelite half of this history was being told at last, using the latest archaeological fact to show that these Philistines were actual human beings—people.
When Muhammad posted an appreciation of this on his Arabic Facebook page, the public responses were likewise wonderful (translations available there with a click), and we have been talking via Zoom almost weekly since. He is one of the warmest, most forthright and positive-spirited people I’ve ever known, and given the horrific conditions of his family’s and kinfolk’s captivity in the world’s largest prison-camp, this was all the more uplifting and inspiring. In short, since I have known this man, I know better than ever that I have no problems—None that can even begin to compare.
So Muhammad and I have begun working together on articles to help make the world understand that these Palestinian people—of The Gaza Strip, The West Bank, and Jerusalem—could not be more deserving of political action on behalf of their right to remain in or return to their original ancient homes in those places.
Their oppression has no less than three levels. Dispossessed and interminably confined by the Zionist Israeli agenda which denies their human rights and takes their lands by so-called “settlements” (as if these occur in wild uninhabited landscapes), silenced by the once-helpful but now corrupt and thuggish leadership of Hamas (which has jailed Muhammad for his brave criticisms of their dead-end policies), and ignored by the stagnant anti-democratic rule of the Palestinian Authority (which works in fact for Israeli interests and denies their people the right to new elections), the vast majority of millions of Palestinian people want only to live normal lives side-by-side with Jewish and Christian neighbors, as their grandparents actually did before the Zionists’ racist invasions began in 1948.
So here below is a short article we created together, just published at the progressive news-gathering site called Common Dreams. This is our second joint work, the first being an extended interview on Muhammad’s family history including their expulsion from their original village home (soon to appear here).
We hope these make you wonder how you would respond to their obscenely outrageous situation—and, that they move you to contact your representatives in the United States Congress and White House, without whose nods, winks, and murderous weaponry, none of this could continue.
PEACE—and Sincerely yours, Muhammad Jihad Ismael and Jack Dempsey.
GAZA’S PALESTINIAN FAMILIES
FACE ANOTHER SUMMER OF NEEDLESS SUFFERING
My family and I—my wife, our young son, our elders, and the twin baby girls who will be born to us this week—ask the world to hear the conditions of our lives here in Deir el Balah, after 14 years’ captivity in the world’s largest toxic prison-camp, and since the May waves of Israeli tank shells, artillery shells, rockets and bombs have stopped exploding in our midst.
In some ways this calm is harder than open war. Right now, war continues in the dispossessions of our cousins from the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Here, most of the Gaza Strip’s assets, infrastructure and services are in catastrophic ruins. So, there is almost no water fit for drinking, washing, or just cooling off in this season’s volcanic record heat, no water that will not rot our teeth and ruin our stomachs, almost no water for the vegetable gardens that keep us barely alive. With luck, we have 8 hours of daily electricity even to pump it into household holding-tanks.
As May began our crucial fishing season, Israel banned our boats altogether from the sea. Now that boats can venture at most 6 miles out (or take fire from gunboats), their catches are as insufficient as the mere 200 daily trucks of other food allowed into the Strip by Israel. (200 trucks divided by 2.5 million people = 12,500 people supposedly fed by a single truck.) Desperate for protein and nourishment, we are forced to buy frozen fish from the trucks. This is often spoiled when it reaches us, and what can a captive do, complain? To whom, with any hope of a hearing?
We hang on with raw courage and creativity. Palestinian and Egyptian bulldozers labor in the heat, clearing mountains of rubble from streets and crowded neighborhoods, filling in craters from bombs aimed to block crucial roads to our hospitals. We do all we can even as Israel obstructs our funding for rebuilding and materials. Qatar, for example, sent monthly financial help to about 100,000 of our poorest families, but this is now frozen by Israeli financiers. Last week, UNRWA professionals distributed food parcels, but somehow not including powdered milk—which might have replaced the tanker-trucks of milk so needed by our young ones, but now forbidden us (with no explanation) by Israel.
For all this, restrictions on trade and traffic in and out of Gaza are more severe than ever. Marketplace stalls are missing many important items, while other goods pile up unsold because people lack money to buy them. Workers and farmers lose the pittances they could earn, for their employers can scarcely get hold of raw materials or export their products.
14 years of brutal mass confinement, chronic malnutrition, trauma, psychological problems, and thousands of people maimed by weapons from land, sea and air: these go on deepening Gaza’s widespread depression and suicidal despair. Yet, in the face of life itself grinding to a halt, we dream and work for new, full and fair elections. This week we will celebrate the birth of our two daughters. And in both ways, we Palestinians will go on struggling for equality among our neighbors in accord with international law. In the face of so much needless human suffering, we ask the good people all over the world to reach out—to us, and with us—into action for true justice.
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