Muhammad Jihad Ismael is a Palestinian living with his family in Gaza. At 36, he is a popular writer of short stories, scholarly articles and journalism, published so far only in Arabic. He first contacted me early this year about my novel People of the Sea (2017), which details the Late Bronze Age founders of Palestine.
Muhammad’s grandparents, originally from the multi-ethnic village of Shaphir between coastal Ashdod and Jerusalem, were among many thousands of Palestinians dispossessed from their homes in 1948, and forced to walk to a refugee camp in Deir el Balah (near the middle of the Gaza Strip). Muhammad’s father, Jihad, was born by the side of the road as they walked, and they lived there in a tent for five years until able to build a small house in 1954.
Muhammad’s wife’s name is Ghada and their 3½-year-old son Jihad bears his paternal grandfather’s name. We have talked many times via Zoom (Skype does not seem to function in Gaza), and this is a transcript of the interview he granted in three parts: his family’s memories, life in Gaza since their arrival, and their hopes and prospects now and for tomorrow.
While Ghada is now pregnant with twins, she is diagnosed as “anemic” and unable to afford or obtain needed medicines and vitamins (let alone good fresh food). Many times as we spoke, the roars of Israeli jets and bomb-explosions interrupted our discussions.
PART 1
MUHAMMAD: Hello again Jack! To answer your first question, I was born in April 1985 in Balah, about 15 kilometers south of Gaza City. [The entire “Gaza Strip” is 5 miles wide/25 miles long, and Balah has been an important community since the days of Egypt’s pharaohs.]
My father Jihad earned his degree as a geography teacher at university in Alexandria. Our first small house in Balah was only three rooms with a bathroom and kitchen, and grew very crowded with our extended family. So, when I was five years old, we were able to build a better house not far away in Nuseirat, between Balah and Gaza City. We lived there for about twenty years, and when I reached 25 years old, we managed to buy some land back in Balah, and built the house where we all still live today.
JACK: Can you share some aspects of your family’s story from the 1940s beginnings of Israel?
MUHAMMAD: My grandmother named Nazira gave birth to my father along the refugee road from Shaphir to the Gaza Strip, without any help from a hospital or doctor. Nazira carried my father in a basket packed with soft stems of wheat—you know, like the infant prophet Moses—which she carried on her head as they walked to Gaza. The people there asked Nazira, “What are you going to call this boy?” And she answered them with the name Jihad, which means “struggling for freedom.” When you are attacked and occupied, you must struggle for your freedom. So when my son was born, we gave him the same name.
JACK: As an historian, I knew a Native American colleague who once said, “I am my father, and my father’s father, to the beginning of time; and I am my son, and my son’s son, to the end of time.” What have your grandparents told you about life in their original village Shaphir, before they were forced to leave in 1948?
MUHAMMAD: My grandfather passed away when I was 10 or 11 years old. But my grandmother Nazira, who is still alive today, is a brilliant storyteller. Since I was a boy, she has told me many stories about Shaphir. The village stood on the main road from Ashdod on the coast to Jerusalem, and it was famous for its plantations—growing wonderful tomatoes, watermelons and sesame. So Nazira and Rajab were farmers, or “peasants” like about 95% of the people there, growing their food and making their living that way, while the other five percent worked in different industries.
JACK: Of course, with so many terrible Near Eastern events in the decades from World War I to WWII, how did your grandparents remember the life in Shaphir?
MUHAMMAD: Shaphir was a multicultural village. Muslims, Jews, and some Christians lived there. My grandmother told me that all of them lived with tolerance toward each other—even with love. They felt that they were all family. And she told me that this was mostly how people were living in the villages and towns all over Palestine. And, she told me that the Jewish people used to deny and condemn the doings of the Zionist militias, the Hagganah and other militant groups of their own people, who used to kill Palestinians and expel them from their homes. She told me that a great many native Jews did not agree with these actions, and they used to stand with us, and told the militias “Do not come here, this land is for Palestinians, and we have lived here in love and peace for centuries.”
That is why both of my grandparents, and my father also, used to tell me not to think that all Jewish people were Zionists. A Jew might be a very good person, but it was the Zionists who expelled or killed us, and made themselves our enemy.
JACK: So with this life going on for so long in Shaphir, how did your family’s actual expulsion happen?
MUHAMMAD: My grandmother Nazira remembered that it began to happen gradually, with a few Arab and Palestinian families at a time being “warned” by Zionists that they had better leave. But those people of Shaphir used to protest and make some resistance. When the British Army interfered and began to support Hagganah and these Jewish groups, there was no more balance, because of Britain’s great military power. Nazira said it was their force that turned the tide against us.
JACK: This agrees very strongly with a recent film produced by journalist Abby Martin called Gaza Fights For Freedom. It documents that Arabs and Palestinians at first used to hide and protect young Jewish men from being forced into Zionist militias. But when British forces turned the tide, those young Jewish men now with the Zionists—compelled to it, or otherwise—could not or did not protect their Palestinian neighbors in the same way. Now there is a popular saying in Israel, that “The coffee was still warm on the table” when they took over Palestinian homes.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. My grandmother told me a similar story. She used to bake bread in their household oven, which the family loved to eat with okra, and basil, and tomato. I smile now because I know that flavor, and the best olive oil along with it makes my mouth water! Nazira told me that one day in 1948, the Zionists came to the door, and into the house, and they beat people of the family, and destroyed all the house’s furnishings, and stole many precious things. They told our family, “You are to leave, right now, or very bad things are going to happen: you will be killed.” And so our family’s midday meal was still there on the table when they were forced out.
My grandparents said that this how it happened in other villages also, not far from Shaphir. The Hagganah militants told people, “If you do not leave now, we are going to destroy your house with artillery fire,” and in many cases, this happened.
JACK: And so the family walked from Shaphir to a refugee camp in Deir al Balah, where you were born in 1985, and moved from there to Nuseirat. Why was that the best thing to do?
MUHAMMAD: As I told you, our first house in Balah was very small and crowded. So we moved to Nuseirat, where at least the prices for land were not too expensive. With my father’s income, we built a better home there, and were also able to obtain human services from UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
JACK: In the next part of this interview we can talk about your father’s and your family’s life as they began again in the Gaza Strip.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. But I want to tell you an important testimony told me by my grandfather, Rajab, before he died. He told me, “Muhammad, you know of the Israeli leader Moshe Dayan. I knew Dayan’s father personally, in the days of the British Mandate, and used to work with him as a laborer. He was a good man.
“And when his son Moshe began to kill Arabs and Palestinians in 1948, he told his son, ‘Moshe, you are wrong to do these things. Do not kill our friends. They are our neighbors. We all have lived and grown up together. We have lived many years together in love and peace. Do not do this.’ So Moshe Dayan’s father himself used to denounce all of these crimes.” And I have never seen this story told in any other place.
PART 2
JACK: Muhammad, please describe your young life—your education, your community, and what you cared and dreamed about, in those days of the First Intifada from 1987 to 1993.
MUHAMMAD: When I was a little boy, I rode a bus every day from Nuseirat to my primary school about 12 kilometers away in Gaza City. It was a Christian school with a church nearby. I did not yet imagine being a writer, but I loved to watch the world soccer matches with my friends on an old black-and-white television in our house.
At that time, the Israeli army used to enforce a strict curfew in our Nuseirat neighborhood. Almost all the people living there were refugees from other villages: thrown out of our first homes, now we could not leave the ones we had. One day in 1992, when I was seven, my maternal grandmother Fawziah felt severe pains in her chest. We did not have a telephone, so my mother hurried me to go to our neighbors. They might have some medicine to help her, or could call an ambulance.
Just a few steps from our house, I ran straight into a group of about seven Israeli soldiers. They caught me as if I were a baseball landing in a fielder’s glove. And without a word, they began to beat me all over my body with their batons and the butts of their rifles, until I was covered with blood and tears and the dust of the street.
My mother was crying and shouting from the window, “Let him be! He is a child! My mother is dying, and he has to bring help!” But they continued with the beating until an Israeli officer, a good man, came and told them to stop, so I could go to bring the help we needed. My friends and almost all the Palestinians in our area took beatings like that, and there was no possibility of a complaint or justice about it.
JACK: Yet, somehow, you continued your education.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. You see, ours is a relatively intellectual family. My father was a teacher, my mother is a brilliant painter, my brother Ahmad very skilled in sculpting. We usually did not get involved with the great protests, the marches and street-fights and throwing stones. Obviously, actions like that against tanks and soldiers in body-armor were mostly symbolic expressions of our desire to be free and equal citizens able to decide our own destinies.
As of age 13 in 1998, I went to secondary school in Nuseirat, a school close to our house. The Second Intifada began in 2000—and if the first uprising was an event in our civic life, the second was an outright military war that lasted about five years. Every day there was terrible fear and great danger that could come from almost anywhere—and, most of the time, for no reason you could understand. We were boys. Many I know were injured, harmed in the spirit, or needed my help to escape bad situations.
Through that time, as of 2003, I began to study comparative literature at Islamic University in Gaza City. The people there were mostly not refugees but original inhabitants, mixed with visitors from all the Palestinian territories, and with some Israeli settlers. It was a very multicultural city, and we students were considered as guests among them. But it was very crowded, and offered little chance to find any kind of work. And there were constant clashes between Israeli soldiers and various Palestinian political groups.
JACK: So just about every aspect of ordinary life was difficult.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. For example, in winter 2004, as all this continued, I had to take exams, or lose credit for my studies. So I had to go, although my mother begged me to stay at home. But there were Israeli tanks and soldiers at checkpoints along the main road between our home in Nuseirat and my Gaza City university. They said we were not allowed to pass, even on foot through the cold and heavy rain: “Go back!” So, although I might have been shot dead, I found a way through groves of olive and orange trees to the coastal road along the Mediterranean Sea, somehow reached the university just in time, and completed the exams.
JACK: I’m sure most people can see you and your family trying to live a normal life. But most do not live among brutalized refugees, surrounded by soldiers—or risk being shot to take their exams. As you began your writing career, how did you meet your wife Ghada?
MUHAMMAD: When I was 31 (in summer 2016), my mother began in our traditional way to seek out “a good girl” for me among our friends and community. Soon she introduced me to Ghada’s family, whose original home was Ashdod: that appointment was the first time I saw her. She was a student of Arabic Literature, and we were engaged for a year before we married. We liked to go sit beside the sea, where we could feel and taste the free air and the cool refreshing water. These I think are normal things most people do in courtship. But this was about all we could do—for we are two and a half million prisoners here in the Gaza Strip. And half of them are young children who have never known true freedom.
JACK: There are now multiple human rights reports telling the world that most of your available fresh water is toxic because the recycling plants are destroyed by years of bombing. Hospitals, clinics, marketplaces, even schools are bombed as Israel claims that they help or protect “terrorist” organizations. People with health problems die needlessly because they cannot get official permission for better care. It seems that all this must create terrible psychological problems in such a confined population.
MUHAMMAD: I am sure that if you conduct psychological tests, more than 90% of our people suffer mental problems created by our conditions. No one can sleep well through a whole night, there is always fear, despair, depression, frustration, hopelessness—everything around us is destroyed, and we cannot bring in concrete for rebuilding. Even those who say they are our leaders have corrupt monopolies on every necessity of life, so prices are double or triple what they should be for everything you need to live.
Israel even controls our diet, our daily caloric intake. If one day you can find a meal, the moment you finish it you start to worry about tomorrow’s. This does not mention the agony of not being able to feed your children. You cannot store food in your kitchen with almost no electricity each day. And there is not enough food coming into Gaza for more than day-by-day survival. We are allowed to import only 200 trucks of food supplies per day, and that is supposed to feed our 2.5 million people.
JACK: That means one truck of supplies to feed 12,500 people.
MUHAMMAD: It is simply impossible. Here almost everything of normal life is so, either closed down or destroyed. And that is why I must tell you of one of the worst problems we face—constant and increasing acts of suicide. People somehow find a bit of petrol or fuel. They go to a public square, soak their clothing with it, and then use a lighter to burn themselves to death. I must be honest, I must ask the world what else we can expect, when people cannot find a piece of bread to feed their children. Because almost half of our people have no work, they cannot buy a simple medicine when their malnourished children are sick.
JACK: And after so much resistance against these conditions, it was the everyday people of Gaza who created the 2018-19 demonstration called The March of Return. We can speak more about this in this interview’s final part. As I ask readers again to see journalist Abby Martin’s film about it, Gaza Fights For Freedom (at YouTube), how would you describe the Palestinian hopes that drove that demonstration?
MUHAMMAD: Well, Western media give a mistaken impression of the people of Gaza. Let me tell you honestly—the great majority of us are, so to speak, against politics. The people of Gaza just want to have a life, a secure life, a normal life. Our demands are simple. We are not looking to force Jewish people off the land or into the sea. We want to live beside them, side by side, as neighbors. This is what we tried to show the world, with the courage of our hearts, in The March of Return.
JACK: As your grandmother and grandfather did.
MUHAMMAD: Yes, yes! But instead, for seven decades, and right now, people here suffer and die needlessly, unable to live or work toward their hopes and dreams. About this I have written a short story published in Arabic called “The Sacred Apple,” so allow me to close this Part 2 by sharing it with our English-speaking readers.
There was a young boy living with his parents in Gaza City. His mother, with an illness all her life, lived in a wheelchair. His father’s best chance for work was as a garbage-collector, and they were very poor. In the marketplace, they had to buy their foods carefully, because luxuries like fresh fruits were expensive, even though they grew on farms not far from Gaza’s walls and fences. So one day, the boy saw a TV cartoon in which some silly dancing fruits sang a children’s song. Of all the fruits from figs to bananas and oranges, the boy liked the big fat apple best.
He had seen heaps of apples in the marketplace, but his family could not afford them. The boy thought about them more and more. He even began to dream about having an apple, just to hold its perfect goodness in his hands, to smell the aroma of its fresh skin and the juicy meat inside. He knew it would fill him with nourishment and joy. So, he asked his father to buy him such an apple, just one, so he could taste it. And although every bit of their money had to pay for the most basic foods and his mother’s medicine, his father tried to put aside just a little, week by week, to buy an apple for his son.
But every day, there was some new emergency, or some more important thing that devoured the father’s secret savings. For six months the boy’s father kept on trying. Yet each day, he had to make some hard and honorable decision for his family, or to help a neighbor who was even more desperate. The boy noticed these things, and he knew how hard his father was trying to help him fulfill this simple dream. To the boy, the apple began to seem as sacred, but as far away, as the holy and happy place that we call Heaven in this life.
So, the boy tried to enjoy what he could, locked up like everybody in the crowded and horrible ruins surrounding them. One day he heard his school-friends playing soccer in the street outside. His mother was afraid for him, but she let him join his friends. And that was one of many days when Israeli jets flew over the city, and dropped bombs. The boy was killed. His flesh was flung about in a hundred pieces. And as people of Gaza collected these pieces of the boy and other victims, in buckets or whatever they could find, his mother cried aloud to God in Heaven. “Lord, Oh Lord! His dream was such a small dream—such an ordinary dream!”
PART 3
JACK: Muhammad, both of us—myself with the historical novel People of the Sea, and you with your Arabic writings and interviews—want readers to understand that Palestinians are, in fact, people, human beings who yearn and cry out to the world for justice and equality among their neighbors. A cease-fire has ended the latest 11 days of horror in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. And now you and your wife Ghada are expecting twins?
MUHAMMAD: Yes. The doctors have said they will be born soon, in June or the beginning of July. And this has been such a difficult time for Ghada. She is anemic because it is so hard to get good fresh food, vitamins and medicines. And like everybody, she sleeps only in a fragmentary way. Last night, there was a huge explosion just a few meters from our house. The attacks are always in the nighttime. Ghada woke up suddenly beside me as if she had a horrible nightmare. I always try to comfort her and keep her strong, and she asked me, “Muhammad, do you think I will be alive when the babies’ time comes?”
I tell her that we must trust in The Lord, that our destiny is the same as two-and-a-half million other people’s here in Gaza. And all I can do is give her some tablets for headache, since an American friend sent us a jar with 500 tablets—but we have in these last few days used up the entire jar. This has been like being in hell. The whole time, all of us stayed in one room, the kitchen, which we thought would be the safest in the house. We could only sit together, perhaps talking, eating something, trying to sleep, or telling stories. Ghada cannot believe that she survived these last two weeks. We had such terrible air-strikes that all of us simply expected death at any time, and to be buried under the rubble of the house.
JACK: Ghada woke up as if from a nightmare, and the real world had become a nightmare. I read a report in the UK Guardian that at one time there were no less than 52 Israeli attack-aircraft in the air over Gaza.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. And when they come to attack, they fly at low altitude. You cannot hear them coming, but suddenly they are right on top of you, with a roar of thunder that sounds like it is tearing open the sky. Can you imagine the noise they make? Also, besides the aircraft and missiles, there is bombardment by tanks and artillery—it makes a horrible sound like something coming from hell.
JACK: And through all this, you continue to work on your writings.
MUHAMMAD: Well, I try! One new project is an historical collection of writings about Palestine and Gaza by people who traveled there. One of them was a 16th-century Jewish poet named Israel Moses Najarra. He lived here in Gaza. But publishers say that a writer must pay some of the expenses. So I try to find some cultural association or supporters who can help me to preserve the Palestinian heritage.
JACK: As if the writing itself is not difficult enough! Readers will wonder how you live and work at all in these conditions. Looking ahead, do you see hope in the reports by Israel’s B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, which agree that Israel now truly is an apartheid state?
MUHAMMAD: Of course. We must win international support and outside help to improve our situation. But let me tell you something. Back in the 1990s, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu published a book called Israel: A Place Between Nations. Make no mistake about this man. He is a very cold smart strategic thinker. He looks far ahead. In the book, he presents a plan to reduce the West Bank Territory which we see in action every day, the burning of olive groves, the removals of people and towns, so that the West Bank can never be a Palestinian state that leaves northern Israel only a narrow strip of land between there and the Mediterranean Sea. Everything in former President Trump’s policies and his “deal of the century,” you will find in this book of Netanyahu’s.
JACK: And right in the face of such plans came The March of Return in 2018-19—such a brave and brilliant nonviolent effort to demand Palestinian freedom in the full sight of the world.
MUHAMMAD: Yes. Our family did not take part, for different reasons. But we knew Israel would respond with violence, even against peaceful marchers walking to the border. That is the only response they have now. Hundreds of people were deliberately killed, and thousands were crippled too, now needing artificial limbs and wheelchairs, besides everybody grieving for family and neighbors shot by Israeli snipers.
JACK: Maybe Netanyahu did not realize that actions like The March of Return would move the world to demand real solutions. His plan was for the entire country, but never considered Palestinians except as quiet, obedient laborers. What do you think must come next?
MUHAMMAD: That march was truly an action by the Palestinian people. Why? Because we must have new leadership. A Palestinian man or woman with a charismatic presence, with a strong character, and a mind as dedicated as Netanyahu’s. Right now, our leaders are bad lawyers with a good cause. But we have so many young people who are brilliantly talented. They speak like poets about today and our future. We have to protect them, and nourish them, so new ideas and actions can be born.
JACK: And right now [May 30, 2021], that nourishment is even more difficult. For the cease-fire began about six days ago, but you say that Israel is still not allowing resumption of those 200 daily trucks of food-supplies into Gaza, and the simple act of fishing is now totally prohibited.
MUHAMMAD: That is correct. We do not even have clean water to drink. I challenge anyone to come and taste the water we have, which is destroying people’s teeth, their stomachs, causing cancers and many problems. Fortunately, there are many small farms and gardens in the Gaza Strip, we are having a good early-summer harvest, and we survive on cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, onions, and other produce. There must be pressure from outside our world even to bring us back to the starvation and crisis we faced before.
JACK: If you could ask Mr. Netanyahu one question face-to-face, what would it be—and what do you think he would answer?
MUHAMMAD: I would ask him, “Mr. Netanyahu, would you accept this sort of life for your wife and children, for your family and neighbors?” I think he would answer “No” but also say that this situation is our own fault, that Palestinians are the sinners, that we are helping “terrorists” by letting them hide and operate in Gaza. To that I can only reply as before: for the great majority of Palestinian people, that is not true.
Let me tell you what is true, in my own heart and in the hearts of every Palestinian I know. Sometimes I dream that one day, I wake up and find all the guns in the world transformed into guitars. It’s a utopian dream, but it’s a real one: instead of guns and bombs, beautiful melodious sounds. I think The Lord is witnessing the truth of my heart—that I hate the shedding of blood no matter whose blood it may be. That I hate to see my wife and my boy Jihad crying and afraid every day and night. We do not want Jewish people out of the land. We want to live a good life beside our neighbors, and we know this can be—because it has happened before.
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