Ars longa, vitae breves
A review of We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey
The anthology We Are Not Numbers, The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, published by Interlink Books today, is a collection of essays by young Palestinian writers in Gaza, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey. This book will not end the genocide. Though all right-minded people surely hope otherwise, its publication is unlikely to save a single life—not even those of the writers collected within its pages. In his magisterial Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover draws on Thucydides to explain.
During the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, the island of Melos wished to remain neutral; in 416 BCE, however, Athens rejected this idea and demanded tribute from the Melians. The Athenians argued that “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” The Athenians first besieged Melos until it surrendered, then killed all the military-age men and sold the women and children into slavery. Their justification? “It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can. […] We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way” (Glover 28-9).
In political science circles, the action of Athens—and, by extension, that of Israel and Russia—is called “realism.” The foreign policy of the Trump White House, by enabling both Putin and Netanyahu, has thus been consistent, in a way that its predecessor was not. It seems unlikely today that anyone still repeats Melian arguments, believing that gods come to the aid of the morally just. The ultimate result of realism is blindingly apparent. Sacrificed at the tophet of realism is humanity.
In the week after October 7, 2023, my students and I were immersed in another Interlink publishing project. Extraordinary Renditions: American Writers on Palestine, edited by Ru Freeman, was conceived in response to Israel ‘s 2014 attack on Gaza, called “Operation Protective Edge.” Reading Alice Walker, or William Sutcliffe, or Naomi Shihab Nye, or Nathalie Handal, or Teju Cole, or Ammiel Alcalay, we could neither avoid the searing “ripped from the headlines” reality of the content, nor could we deny that each writer was describing a situation that already existed an entire decade ago, and for many decades before that. For some, the world irrevocably changed on October 7. But the ground truth of Palestinian history is continuity, not simply rupture.
We Are Not Numbers is a permanent, irrefutable, indelible monument to that longue-durée truth. As with Freeman’s Extraordinary Rendition, Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza is where this project begins. The Table of Contents organizes contributors by year, with the first chapter gathering essays from 2015, followed by chapters for each subsequent year, and ending with writings from October 2023 to the moment of publication. The book opens with a dedication to Refaat Alareer, “the teacher, author, mentor, and friend who guided so many of Gaza’s students and future leaders (including most of our writers).” After mourning Alareer’s murder by Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023, the editors also honor four writers from the volume who were killed before it went to press: Yousef Dawas, Mahmoud Alnaouq, Huda Alsoso, and Mohammed Hamo. I do not know how many other contributors have been killed since. Nor can I predict how many will die in the weeks and months to come.
The writers in the collection range from eighteen to twenty-nine, a group for whom, even before the genocide, there were few options and even less employment. As the editors note, before this latest war destroyed all higher education in Gaza, “many young people majored in English literature, in the hope that they would earn a better-paying job at an international NGO or secure a coveted international scholarship” (6). The goal in creating the WANN collective, they add, was “to create a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who could harness the power of their words to non-violently resist their oppression and influence public opinion about the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza” (6). The anthology features a number who have already achieved success in a variety of fields: Mosab Abu Toha, for example, is an award-winning poet and chronicler of the genocide, Said Alyacoubi is a UK surgeon, Malak Mattar is a successful artist and children’s book author, and Issam Adwan and Hind Khoudary are both journalists. Adwan has also been a target for the criticisms of the HonestReporting, an organization that calls itself “world’s premier grassroots media watchdog organization defending Israel against media bias.” Khoudary, working with Al Jazeera, reported just days ago on the five journalists targeted and killed by Israel during the Nasser Hospital attack of August 25.
Yet, to focus this review on even the brightest stars in the dark night of Gaza would be to misrepresent both this publication and the We Are Not Numbers project as a whole. These pages present sixty-two short essays and nine poems, chosen from over 1,300 stories mentored and published on the WANN website. The full impact of this work is cumulative. Readers will surely treasure and identify most closely with individual voices, but only in reading the collection from beginning to end will they ride the tidal wave of history that has devastated every life across this narrow strip of land. As editors Alnaouq and Bailey aver, “The stories from We Are Not Numbers show two truths that cannot be denied: the extent to which WANN’s members are like young people everywhere, with the same hope and passions, and the significant talent they could contribute—if they were simply allowed to thrive” (8). Instead of thriving, they have been forced out of the homes repeatedly, shelled in every so-called safe zone, and left to starve. All this has been pawned off—and condoned or supported by all the world’s major powers, with the US at the head of the pack—as the “right to self-defense.” I repeat: What is sacrificed by political realists, in a word, is humanity.
First is a piece written by Ahmed Alnaouq, a young contributor who became the project’s leader. Its title is also a summary of its subject, “Ayman: To the World a Number; To Me, My Brother and Best Friend.” In the following chapter, from 2016, Enas Ghannam recalled how she felt when she saw a non-Palestinian friend’s social media posts about “‘Having a great time in the West Bank,’” about praying at al-Aqsa Mosque, along with his photos of the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Ashkelon, Nablus, and Jericho. She comments, “Only one question emerged clearly, ‘Why can’t I go there? What gives him the right to go? I’m OK with not being able to visit any other country, but shouldn’t I be able to visit my own at least?” (51-52). A few pages later, Salsabeel Zeineddin recounts how her father was jailed for two years and two months for graffiti during the First Intifada. She adds, “more than 800,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated by the Israeli government since 1967. That’s 25 per cent of the Palestinian people” (62-3).
In the following essay, Said Alyacoubi tells the story of a five-year-old boy who has lymphoma and dies, a death caused by bureaucracy rather than disease. In the next, Hind Khoudary recalls her father’s dreams for her. Though he passed away early from a heart attack, she tells us, “He wanted me to be a strong girl who nothing could break […] I’m working hard to make [these dreams] happen, to make him proud of me” (71). In the bio to her first piece, from 2017, Omnia Ghassan notes,
I look at my pictures from a year ago. They feel like they’re from a different life. A different dimension. A parallel universe where I’m still me. My niece stands next to me; she looks at the pictures. ‘It’s you,’ she says. Is it? Is it really me? How can she recognise me when I can’t even recognise myself? […] My friend texts me: ‘I miss you.’ I miss me too, I murmur. (83)
Ali Abusheikh, in an essay from 2018, remembers a day when he took the short walk to the al-Mina port from his home in Gaza City, “Once we found a spot with a good view, we sat and stared at the beauty of the sea before us. The glassy surface was very calm and a deep blue. But for some reason, and for the first time, the water before me looked very confined, deeply unsettling me. […] When I turned away from the sea to look at my home, Gaza City, I asked in confusion: What has happened? Why does your sea feel and look like a lake? Gaza replied: It was a sea, Ali. It was, but not any more” (108-9).
In one of several essays that recount the Great Return March of 2018-19, Manar Alsheikh tells how a fourteen-year-old girl, Menna Murad Qudiah, was mentored in photography by Yassar Murtaja, a journalist and photographer killed by an Israeli sniper a few days later. In class afterwards, her teacher alleged that the photographer died because he was not wearing his flak jacket. Menna corrects the record, despite a teacher and classmates that do not believe her. Neither tragedy nor derision stop Menna; “the youngest journalist covering the Great Return March […] continues to work towards her dream of becoming a professional journalist” (123-5). Neda Abadla describes her work with the NGO Médecins San Frontières, commenting that “Even though my work is exhausting, there is much to love.” As an example, she remembers Milaina Alhendi, who, during the Great Return protests, was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier. “I once asked: ‘How can you keep going on with your daily routine? How can you live or even sleep with pins in your leg?’ […] It was obvious to me that she was in pain, yet Milaina said, ‘This is nothing. I can deal with it easily’” (154).
An architectural engineer, Eman Shawwa writes about how, in 2020, she was working to restore and preserve Gaza’s historic urban sites. Five years ago, she was already asking how, “If still-living souls, crying out from Gaza to the outside world, are barely heard, how will ancient stones fare any better before they erode away, taking with them the history of a city and a people?” (195). Writing in 2021, Hassan Alalami pens an ode to the humble Gazan donkey cart: “used as mobile markets throughout the city. Owners sell goods like fruit, vegetables and fish from them. Many Gazans buy from donkey carts to save themselves the effort of paying a visit to the market. Other carts sell swimming gear for kids near the beach.” He notes, however, how “there is another, relatively recent additional use for donkey carts, […] to remove stones and damaged steel from the Shujaiya neighbourhood east of Gaza […] and from the many other neighbourhoods that were targeted and destroyed by Israeli air attacks” (215).
In an essay from 2022, Israa Mohammed Jamal describes the dust that comes into her kitchen window from an airstrike: “I turned off the oven and ran to put on a long dress and hijab, so I’d be ready to evacuate the house as fast as possible” (233). After the sound of drones stops, her nephews join some children from the refugee camp, playing football in a street full of rubbish. Their father sees them and suggests that they first collect the trash, then continue playing. One son gets a shovel and the other asks for a broom. Before long, however, they’re all back inside, because “the drones and fighter jets had appeared again” (236). After discussing ways to escape and where to reunite outside, they repeat verses from the Quran and “somehow manage to sleep.” The essay, appropriately, is titled “One Day in Gazan Life.”
A 2023 account from Yousef Maher Dawas recalls an attack in May 2022 where his father, “a farmer on land that had been in our family for several generations,” leaves their home after receiving a phone call. Upon returning, he reports that “Our trees in the fields have been turned to ash.” He adds, “I planted those trees. I nurtured them and watered them with my own hands. Week by week. Month by month. Year by year.” On the point of tears, he concluded, “Those trees were older than you, Yousef” (245). The essay’s bio note reminds us that “Yousef, who was studying to be a psychoanalyst, was the first WANN writer to be killed in the genocide by Israel, on 14 October 2023. He was killed by an Israeli missile strike on his family’s home in the northern town of Beit Lahia.
In the second of his contributions to the collection, editor Ahmed Alnaouq recalls how his older brother and his three other childhood friends would meet on moonless nights at a local cemetery. He remembers how serene they felt sitting at the gravesite of another friend, killed by Israeli soldiers in 2008. One night they gathered around an open grave that had been readied for a burial the following morning. A friend dared him to climb into the grave, so he did. His friends covered the grave and left him there, with no fresh air or light source, not even a cell phone.
Ahmed tells us,
It was after midnight on one of those hot July nights, and I felt no fear whatsoever. I was thrilled to be calmly experiencing something that many would think terrifying. I remained in the covered grave for about ten minutes. During this time, my friends pretended to leave in an attempt to frighten me. They were disappointed; I was not frightened. When they discovered I was not going to plead with them to let me out, they opened the grave and congratulated me. “You win” (87-88).
Two years later, in 2014, Israel would kill Ahmed’s brother and three friends together, in a single missile strike. He hasn’t been back to the graveyard since.
In short: No words are capable of performing what must happen, what therefore will happen. When we say that speech acts are performative—including this urgent, essential collection of testimony about young lives in Gaza—we do not mean that words can countermand orders to turn high-tech killing machines on civilian populations. Words did not stop the slaughter and enslavement of the Melians, and a book will not feed starving Palestinians.
Yet when we say that speech acts are performative, we also do not mean that they have no effect. The We Are Not Numbers project will outlive its writers, will outlive even the buildings and stones of Gaza.
We Are Not Numbers takes the voices of Gaza’s youth out beyond the walls of the world’s largest open-air prison, now become a killing field. As Naomi Klein comments, “This book is a jailbreak—and a miracle.” The prison that Israel has made of Gaza will go the way of all prisons: in the end, its walls will fall. The Athenians lost their war with Sparta and were expelled from Melos; the Melian survivors were repatriated. Centuries later, the island would be among the first to join the Greek War of Independence.
What will be left, in the end, has been written by Palestinians—a people who will never relinquish their humanity.
Huda Skaik’s words close the collection:
Tell them,
we are more than numbers,
more than silent echoes
in a ledger of loss,
we are families
entwined in love,
friends,
living in the shadows
of our hopes,
bound by dreams.
