Do Palestinian lives matter?

As the carnage in Gaza unfolds before our eyes, it is incumbent on all of us to defy the devaluation of Palestinian lives.

Siavash SaffariThe author is an associate professor of West Asian studies at Seoul National University. Like so many Palestinians I know, Ghada Ageel is always eager to talk about her homeland. A native of Gaza, she now lives in Canada with her husband Nasser, their daughter Ghaida, and their son Tarek. Though I haven’t seen her for some years, whenever conflict erupts in Gaza, I think about Ghada, whose relatives are among the 2.3 million residents of that narrow and besieged strip of land.

Last week, news came that 36 of her relatives were killed by bombs dropped on a refugee camp in southern Gaza, an area which Israel had declared to be a “safe zone.” In an article in The Guardian, Ghada gives a harrowing account of the tragedy that unfolded the morning of Oct. 26. Among those killed were the 2-year-old Julia Abu Hussein, the granddaughter of Ghada’s sister, and the 92-year old Um Said, Ghada’s great-aunt.

Ghada is a third-generation Palestinian refugee. Her parents and grandparents were born in Beit Daras, a Palestinian village that was depopulated and incorporated into Israel in 1948. They were among the approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs driven out from their homes during the mass expulsion that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Forced to flee, Ghada’s parents and grandparents made their way to a refugee camp in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. It was in this camp that Ghada was born and raised, and where her children were also born. And it was in the same camp where bombs from Israeli fighter jets wiped out Ghada’s family home and killed many of her relatives.

In 1967, the Gaza Strip, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, came under Israel’s military occupation. In the decades that followed, Israeli settlements spread throughout these territories. In 2005, under the “Disengagement Plan,” Israel evacuated its settlers and troops from Gaza, but kept the territory fenced in by barbed wire and concrete walls. Following the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, which resulted in a Hamas victory, Israel placed Gaza under a stifling land, aerial and naval blockade, turning the territory into the world’s largest and most densely populated open-air prison.

When the blockade began, Ghada was studying at the University of Exeter in England. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2008, she tried to return to Gaza, but was stranded on the border for months. She returned to England, and in 2010 moved with her family to the Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta, where my wife and I lived at the time.

It was from my wife, Mariam, that I heard the news about Ghada’s family. Mariam herself is Palestinian, with family in the West Bank. While Gaza has been cut off from the outside world for the past seventeen years, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have seen the exponential growth of Israeli settlements — and the endless construction of walls and barriers that cut off Palestinian communities from each other and from their farmlands. Today, over 750,000 Israeli settlers, nearly 8 percent of Israel’s population, live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the total length of the walls and barriers Israel has built on and around Palestinian lands exceed 700 kilometers (435 miles).

In July, when Mariam visited the West Bank for the first time in 20 years, she was shocked to see how the settlement expansion had changed the landscape, erasing entire Palestinian communities. Since her return, she has been compelled to speak out about what she witnessed during her visit. She writes articles, speaks at events, and uses social media to give people a glimpse into how far the occupation reaches into the daily Palestinian life.

By sharing their stories, Palestinians like Mariam and Ghada remind us of the humanity of a people whose faces are often unseen, their voices unheard, and their lives considered dispensable. By telling us about the experiences of their people under occupation and relentless bombardment, Mariam and Ghada — and many other Palestinians like them — push back against what the renowned Jewish-American philosopher, Judith Butler, calls Israel’s “systematic devaluation of Palestinian lives.”

As the carnage in Gaza unfolds before our eyes, it is incumbent on all of us to defy the devaluation of Palestinian lives. This begins with seeing the humanity of the Palestinian people, hearing their stories, recognizing their suffering, and learning about their hopes and dreams for a future free from occupation, blockade and forced exile.