‘If I must die, let it bring hope’

“You don’t have to speak up to be killed. You just have to be Palestinian.”

That line stayed with me long after the live webinar with Mosab Abu Toha was over. Organised by MECA (Middle East Children’s Alliance), a nonprofit humanitarian aid organisation that supports children and families in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, and the American literature festival ‘Palestine Writes’, the webinar featured the 31-year-old Palestinian poet speaking from Cairo about the harrowing experience of living through seven weeks of Israel’s genocidal attacks.

Waed Abbas, communications and outreach director at MECA opened the conversation. “It is not an understatement to say that we have been in a state of collective mourning […] How do we remember the dead?” In answer, Mosab, who also founded the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza, shared three faces familiar from his Instagram posts.

The first was 25-year-old Doaa Al-Masri, who worked at the library created “for kids to be around the music of books”. Now, that music was dead, and Doaa was gone, killed with her parents and siblings, their bodies unrecovered from the rubble. “If you want to dignify a death, you should bury the body.” That dignity was denied.

The second was Refaat Al-Areer, friend, professor, writer, editor of Gaza Writes Back, killed, along with his family. “He loved John Donne,” Mosab says. “He loved to teach Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, he loved stories, he loved to mentor kids.”

Every year he visited Mosab’s father-in-law’s strawberry fields, never forgetting to take some back for his mother and his children. “He is telling me: this year there are no strawberries, but next year you should put some on my grave.”

He was, Mosab says, “the Edward Said of Gaza, [it’s] an irreplaceable loss for the literary community”. He outlines the chronology: Refaat gets a phone call from the Israeli army, he leaves the school and goes to his sister’s house, which is bombed, killing Refaat, his brother, his sister and all her four children.

On his Instagram post of the last video recorded by Refaat, Mosab’s anguish blazed in the immediacy of aftermath: ‘If his assassination along with his family doesn’t end this genocide, then to hell with all the world.’

In the webinar, he moves, composedly, to the next slide. The face of Naseem Abu Shidiq, Mosab’s wife’s uncle, looks into the camera, intensely, quizzically. The next thing we see is Naseem’s body, sprawled on the ground, murdered by a sniper.

Naseem had been taken by the Israeli army, blindfolded and handcuffed, along with hundreds of other young people, to the Kamal Adwan Hospital, where they were stripped and interrogated. When he went back to the school sheltering his four-year-old child, he was shot.

His white clothes—a medic’s uniform, in lieu of his own clothes which were taken away—splashed with red. No one dared to bring his body from outside the school gates into the premises. Naseem was a deaf-mute. Mosab wrote on Instagram, ‘May the scream of his death break the silence of this world.’

His own loss, Mosab says, seems minor. “I lost my house, my books”—brought back when he came home from the US, many of them precious treasures, signed by his dear friends, their authors—“but the Palestinian children have lost their childhood”.

On 4 November, his family was put on the evacuation list. On 19 November, Mosab, his wife and son took a donkey-cart to cover the 12 kilometres from the Jabalia refugee camp to the checkpoint. There were people in wheelchairs, aged, young, carrying white flags. His nephew Ibrahim took off his white undershirt and attached it to a stick, waving it as they walked.

At the checkpoint, an Israeli tank controlled the movement of people—if it rolled forward it meant stop, if it rolled backward, it meant proceed. “My boy is American, he has red hair,” Mosab says. “I held up his American passport as the line moved.” That was when he heard himself being called by description: “Will the young man with the beard and a black backpack, holding a red-haired boy put the boy down and step forward.”

What follows is the chronology of a stripping, a humiliation down to the bone. He recites his Palestinian ID number—his UNRWA employee card is dismissed, as is his plea, “yes, I am a teacher”—and stands “naked for the first time in my life outside my own home”.

Dragged up the hill to the tent where the interrogation will take place, he keeps calling out: “Please someone, talk to me.” Nobody does. He starts speaking in English, saying, “I have a Master’s degree from Syracuse University, [I have spent time] at Harvard… I am a poet…” “You are a Hamas activist!” comes the whiplash. “Where are the hostages? Where are the tunnels?”

Rain and wind entered the interrogation tent. His teeth were chattering. The interrogators slapped his neck, and said, “You raped us.” Later, loaded into a truck with other detainees, someone threw a body onto his lap. “I asked the body,” Mosab says, “Are you a corpse?” The body was alive. The truck stopped. A gunshot rang out. “I thought, maybe that’s where they are taking us, to execute us, maybe now I will die, maybe I should die,” says Mosab.

Still blindfolded and handcuffed, they were taken to a detention facility in Be’er-Sheva, surrounded by fences. One of the detainees spoke Arabic. It was he who told them where they were, and how many.

On 20 November, the blindfold was removed, plastic handcuffs replaced by metal ones, followed by a ‘friendly’ conversation with the interrogator. A soldier told Mosab, “We are sorry about the mistake.” After 48 hours, he was driven back to the checkpoint, and reunited with his wife and child in Deir El-Balah.

Mosab is processing the guilt. “Why should a foreign national be safe and not a Gazan? Are Americans worth more than Gazans?” In 2009, at the age of 16, he was wounded, no one tried to protect him, or hundreds of Gazans and West Bank-ers.

“Everyone has the right to defend themselves, but you cannot destroy our children, our parents, you cannot destroy our schools and deprive us of the right to learn. […] By ignoring the calls for ceasefire, you, the US government, are unleashing never-ending misery and helplessness. What you are doing is illegal, illegitimate, inhuman.”

Before the session is opened to questions, Mosab reads Refaat’s poem ‘If I must die’:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.