Editor’s Note: The Genocide Lives in My Body

Image: poison hemlock, wildflower from Palestine. 

I convince myself I am resilient. I am consuming the trauma just like you, through my screen. But as a journalist and editor, I convince myself that I am a tool, not a person. I’m here to tell stories, not live them. 

But they live inside my body. Every testimony I publish, every story I edit and re-edit. Read twice, five times. With every grid of photographs I examine, zooming in, looking for the geography and the names. With every source, I scroll through: back once to '82, the bodies on the ground, scrolling up to 2024, the limbs in the rubble.

I am resilient.

I learn the names of the martyred mothers and grandfathers of my writers. I learn about the drone that almost killed one father and about the starving little brother who misses his murdered mother’s shawarma. I learn about the hair that was cut off and the eyelashes that burned. I learn about the child who wants to die outside of Gaza after evacuation. I learn about the roads leading to their homes and the distance between our Arabic dialects in WhatsApp voice notes. I learn the history of the villages they were expelled from. I memorize the imagery when I leave comments, suggesting the rewording of a sentence so it can be readable to readers so we can keep them reading. 

I learn the family tree when I hyperlink news of a massacre.

The screams live inside me, voices crawling through my headphones as I clip and paste footage, fast forward, pause, looking for information to update a newsbrief. 

She looks like my sister, he sounds like my father, their childhood was mine and now it's neither of ours. I wipe tears away when I resize slides for Instagram, mark a writer's name, correct a typo.

I text them and email them: I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you for your writing for us. Please tell me how I can help. Do you need an e-sim card? Thank you for your testimony.

I am resilient. I am resilient. I am dying.

I keep up cheer in conversations, during meetings, and on phone calls. I don’t know how to mourn in public. I don’t need to. I am resilient, like my mother. She doesn’t speak about war, but once, in passing, I learned about the silence that dawned over her aunt’s house during a sleepover, when Israeli boots descended on the roof in Saida. 

My mother’s faith is strong. Our conversations always end with her reminding us to pray, followed by a WhatsApp message containing prayers to recite, and lessons from the Qur’an. Every time we have a familial or health crisis, she says, “May this be the biggest catastrophe,” in an attempt to calm our anxieties. I know, of course, it doesn’t calm hers.

When the genocide began, I started having nightmares — no, to describe them as nightmares isn’t accurate. My soul would be transported in my sleep; I was in Gaza, ghouls tearing at me, violating me, and the world was red. I jolted awake several nights a week, sobbing. Panic engulfed me when my mind failed to rationalize that I’d woken up. 

On Oct. 13, Israel killed Heba Zagout, a new friend and an artist from Gaza. For Nakba Day last year, I helped translate a video message that she shared with the Palestinian Feminist Collective. We then connected, because she wanted help reaching English audiences on social media to share her artwork. 

On Oct. 11, she had sent me shaky pictures: two of her children crouched on the balcony. One looks at the camera, eyes wide in terror. Behind them, a cloud of smoke from a nearby airstrike. “I can’t sleep from the fear. Pray for us.” I prayed, and God took them away. 

My sleep worsened. I refused to leave the house for weeks. The sight of other people going about their day, dressing up for Halloween, shooting at young men in keffiyehs, stabbing Palestinian children in their homes, terrified me. When I eventually stepped out, it was to the Emergency Room, once, twice, and three times. I couldn’t breathe, my body ached, my heart was trying to break free. 

“May this be the biggest catastrophe,” my mother told me. 

On Nov. 24, Israel killed Mohammed Hamo, a young writer I was mentoring with We Are Not Numbers. We spoke whenever he had access to the internet during the genocide. We talked about his grandfather’s garden, his destroyed university, and about drawing and playing with his baby cousin, Yamen, to pass the time. About the airstrike in the neighborhood that killed 16 members of his family, the leaflets dropped from the sky. 

He told me about his mother, an Arabic teacher, who, on the first day of the genocide, had gone to school early for a play rehearsal with her students. She wouldn’t answer her phone when the airstrikes began, so he went with his father to look for her. They found her in the principal’s office with a student: she had refused to leave before every single child was fetched by a parent. He was excited to share a draft of a story with me, about his experience during the 2014 war. But Israel killed him mere hours before the temporary ceasefire began last November, during the umpteenth war. I cried. I still cry.

Eventually, I had my panic attacks under control. I read about the two young women from Gaza — Samar in Cairo and Shatha in Istanbul — who died from heart attacks after losing touch with their families. I stopped turning up the sound on footage that came through my screen; I needed to see what they did to my people, but listening to the booms invited grief into my sleep. My aches, however, worsened. An ovarian cyst burst inside of me this summer, twisting and almost rendering my reproductive system dysfunctional. “Stress can do this,” the doctor told me. I had a doctor, a hospital, safety, privacy, medicine, water. How many women have that in Gaza?

“May this be the biggest catastrophe,” my mother told me, propping up pillows on the living room couch for my recovery after surgery. 

One of my writers in Gaza checks on me. She’s worried about me. Can you believe that? 

She says, “When we write, we intend for those who don’t see us to hear our voices. We don’t intend to inflict further pain on those who are already suffering with us. The opposite is happening: those who do not see, do not hear. And those who do are guilted.”

I felt like my life had transformed into a queue of loss. I watched my friend, a journalist, weep on air when he received news of a strike that killed his mother and eldest sister. I sent him my condolences. Only days earlier, we briefly shared a news segment on screen — him from Gaza, me in DC. I could hear the drone in the background when I received messages from the North. 

My health scare meant that the submissions and testimonies piled up. I wasn’t doing my job, and there were voices left unheard. I was also upset at my hair: once-curly strands lay flat on one side, twisted on the other. No matter what I did, the curls wouldn’t come back. And, one morning, as I sat down on a chair, my tooth fell out. I stared at it and began to cry. My body was at war, trying to kill me. 

“May this be the biggest catastrophe,” my mother told me, while one of her co-workers at the dental clinic fixed me up. 

What is a bigger catastrophe than genocide, Mama?

In the U.S., the obsessive urge to box yourself within one community is haunting, a pressure to deny a past because you’ve survived it. Many do not know I spent my first years of life in a refugee camp in Syria, or that, from kindergarten through high school, I attended a Lebanese school where I learned the Lebanese national anthem before the Palestinian one. Many do not know that my late grandfather fought the Zionists alongside the Egyptian army, that a great-uncle was executed for resisting occupation, or that my father treated the wounded at a field hospital inLebanon during the 2006 invasion, and that my grandmother organized with the women’s union. It is because I am a Palestinian that I am also Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian. 

My ancestors' footprints have marked the soil of these nations in our expulsion, in our refuge, in our homemaking. Our dialects are mixed, borrowing words and rhythms from each of the camps and neighborhoods we’ve inhabited. My grief is one and the same. Their colonization is one and the same. Our catastrophe is one and the same. I watch the footage of airstrikes on Lebanon and spiral. I text everybody. The queue of loss in my life expands; more friends, more relatives, more colleagues. 

I text my mother when they hit Qmatiye in Lebanon. She calls her cousins: they’ve dispersed, and only one stays home. When I see the images of bombarded graves at the Bachoura Cemetery in Beirut, I worry. My great-grandmother, Mutee’a Shaaban, is buried in the South of Lebanon. She became a refugee in 1948, torn away from her husband in Haifa and her son — my grandfather — who, at the time, was a 14-year-old student in Port Said. He lived like an orphan, ears glued to the radio for news about his family before he found his mother a decade-and-a-half later. 

Will they hit her grave? Are we the only people on Earth who die twice, in life and in death?