The air in Glasgow reminds Isaaf of home. She makes a point of appreciating it with long, deep breaths, looking back at me to check if I am following. I mimic her instinctively.
It is her first trip to Scotland, possibly her second day, and she takes more of a liking to the port city than any of the European towns she visited in the 80s. I had certainly never heard her comment that England held any resemblance to Palestine.
So Glasgow is like Gaza in some ways, I slowly reiterate, but she tuts before I can dare finish as if I had deeply misrepresented her. As if she had just remembered who I am, someone who had never actually stepped foot in Gaza. Or maybe what I am, the reason she never returned.
'Well, nothing is like Gaza', she asserts, fixing me with a long look. 'There is no place on Earth that can compete with Gaza'.
What she had meant to say, I later came to understand, is that breathing in the fresh air had taken her back to chewing sunflower seeds on the Gazan coast next to her husband.
Back when achieving freedom sounded like a 'when' rather than an 'if', moments like these felt like you chose to be there. You had the sea and olive trees and everyone you love all in one place. You forgot you were locked in because there was nowhere else you'd rather be.
I also learned it is a grave mistake to compare a land to Gaza. This would still apply in 2024, five years after this conversation.
She spends our time in the park caught up in her head. I pretend to be busy, too, looking at two dogs barking at each other from afar and trying but failing to read her thoughts. We are both layered up in beanies and scarves and fur to stay warm in the Scottish autumn.
Within her many monologues about how lucky I was to be born a Gazan, there was an underlying sentiment not to romanticise an identity where you could only ever be born in debt. As long as your people were not free, neither were you. Your joys were limited, your sorrows not. Our dream was to be envied, our reality not.
For a long time, I thought I knew how to labour away such a debt.
You had to learn about the Nakba, both of them, and know exactly where that small dot sits on the map and sing our anthem on cue and keep za'atar within quick reach in your kitchen and recite Mahmoud Darwish to your lover on lonely nights and break out into Dabke at any given opportunity and retell the anecdotes of living under the British Mandate that your grandparents had passed onto you and distinguish the Tatreez patterns of each region to our friends and read Ghassan Kanafani on the train to inspire passersby and strum the Oud on Saturday mornings and make Sumaggiyeh on special occasions and quote Edward Said in your essays and dream of a Jerusalemite honeymoon and learn why good people sometimes do bad things and how to pass through Israeli checkpoints and when to spot a Zionist comment in casual conversation and who you would have to kill if you could turn back time to change history.
I thought that I had to imprint everything there was to know into my mind and spurt it out to anyone I met, be it at a mosque or a bar. I tried to convince Isaaf that I could feel it too, the foot on the neck, but it was anticipatory grief at best. I pretended that I, too, could exhale the pain of being born a Palestinian. I promised the both of us that it wasn't psychosomatic.
The pain did feel real at the time, as if I had been there too. It didn't feel like it was all simulated from guilt. Not in 2008 or 2014 or 2021. I thought I understood what we had to do, and at some point, it felt like we were on the right path, like everyone was trying the situation for what it really was. Then, that Saturday came along, and nothing that took place before then mattered. It took October 7 for me to finally understand that my pain had always been psychosomatic. Isaaf was right to say that I would never grasp what it really meant to be Gazan. I was an outsider looking in, just like everyone else.
I call Isaaf that night, six months ago to the day. She says she can't speak for long because she has to fix up a fruit plate for her husband so they can watch the telly before bed. I ask what they're watching, needing her to acknowledge the months upon us. She stays silent, then wishes me a good night's sleep. We both toss in bed that night.
That month, I learned that the only thing I have is my rage. If I could go back and change history, I would not stop at one person.
I forget to shower in the weeks that follow, but I still take the train during rush hour. I stay out late, putting on a nice smile and waiting patiently until it's the very right moment to ask what the person across from me thinks of what's happening. I keep my voice steady, curious, light. It matters because it is sad and confusing and trendy. It's driving traffic to news sites, yes, the same way that the war in Ukraine did. Why are they still fighting anyway?
I fantasise about the moment someone irrevocably says the wrong thing to my face. How I'd connect my fist to their face until I can hear the skin tearing on my knuckles. How far I'd go, far beyond when I knew they no longer deserved it, that they actually had nothing to do with it. How I wouldn't stop until it was over, until it was too late, until I had incriminated myself. The adrenaline of that visual keeps me up every night.
It's the only way I now knew of paying my debt.
I can't get myself to call Isaaf in the months that follow. I can't bear hearing in her voice that she doesn't want to stay alive anymore, either.
It got harder to form a fist as weeks go by, even when people tell me that it's getting harder to give me the benefit of the doubt and that Gaza is sort of like Ukraine and perhaps genocide is too strong of a word to use.
Isaaf spent most of her time there in Rimal, a beautiful upscale neighbourhood in Gaza City. Her father was among the first Muslims to move into the area, as it was populated mainly by Christians back in the 50s. They live in a villa made up of five floors, which makes it easy for her not to feel lonesome knowing she wouldn't be entrusted to go out too often.
She was a quiet kid who absolutely loved algebra and couldn't wait until she was old enough to work. There were many dreams, many visions. There was the admiration that came with being an actress, though it was deemed an inappropriate field of work. There was the respect that came with being a lawyer, though there were no universities in Gaza that could provide her with a law degree at the time. There was the wisdom that came with being a teacher. It was respectable and you could start working as soon as you finished middle school.
At seventeen, she started teaching refugees from nearby camps at an UNRWA school. The pay was good, naturally, as it was a foreign body, but it took a lot of work to teach girls whose parents didn't care whether their daughters were good at maths. They wanted them in school to read and memorise the Quran until they were old enough to hit puberty.
She married a lawyer two years later. In May of 1967, a doctor advised Isaaf's husband to go on holiday to ease off his obsessive worries that he was facing the symptoms of an oncoming heart attack after the death of a close friend. They followed his advice and booked a trip to Kuwait for a few weeks.
Several weeks later, Israeli troops would capture the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in six days, preventing anyone from entering or leaving any of the occupied premises. Isaaf and her family were still in Kuwait City at the time.
This would mark the start of 57 years of migration. Kuwait City. Cairo. Abu Dhabi.
On one of my many trips back to Abu Dhabi, I tell Isaaf that I plan to travel to Gaza as soon as I finish my degree in London, and she laughs like she believes me. She describes the sweetness of a limonana on the Gazan shore as we picture it together. 'I read somewhere that citrus fruits are the petrol of Palestine', she says, 'and it's true'. And I nod and she smiles and it feels like we are lying to each other but not in a way where either of us can help it.
To erase a people, you have to destroy any evidence that they have ever lived, to break apart their cultural fabric in a way that can never be restored. You can see it better than I can say it, how the city's heritage sites, archaeological landmarks and cultural repositories are a physical target, like the destruction of the Rimal neighbourhood. This even goes as far back as the Hebraization of Palestinian villages since 1948. My friend Zain does a good job of zoning in on the costs attached to the "autocratic practice of spatial annihilation in Palestinian history".
Isaaf and her family come close to travelling back to Gaza a few times, but their closest encounter occurs after they both retire and marry off their children. The plan is straightforward. Support their youngest after she gives birth to her firstborn and then make their return. That was 1999. My mother says they couldn't bear to leave when they held me.
There is no way for me to know that to be true or pretend to be able to imagine how heavy that decision must have weighed on them.
But I know what it feels like to find a home in a people. And I know what it feels like to love someone so much that you only have one choice in a matter. And I know what it feels like to love a land I have never seen because it is the land of those I love, and how it must hold a semblance of closeness to what it feels like to choose not to see a land you can never stop loving to be close to someone you love.
And I know what it feels like to be lucky to be born a Gazan.