From habit
I wrote this as a makeup assignment for a class that I almost entirely missed last semester due to my campus activism
"I loved Nadia from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation which had been so brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation."
Read Ghassan Kanafani’s Letter from Gaza here
I loved Nadia from habit. It's such a seemingly simple sentiment, yet one I can't get out of my head. I did not have to look further than Kanafani's Letter from Gaza to illuminate my experience of protest and advocacy this past year. Though written in 1956, Kanafani's letter reads like it could have been written today, evoking memories of the plight of Gaza that started decades before October 7, 2023. It illuminates how what people have just recently begun to learn from Israel's genocidal massacre in Gaza; we were learning deep within our mothers and grandmothers' wombs.
We Palestinians love Gaza, we love Palestine, and we love life out of habit. We protest as a means to show our love. We get brutalized by the police and lose jobs and scholarships because of this love, this love that was formed out of habit and captured millions of people around the world. And who better to depict this love than Kanafani?
In Letter from Gaza, a young man who has returned to his home in war-torn Gaza goes to the hospital to visit his niece, who was severely wounded by an Israeli bomb. He takes with him the red trousers that she had asked him to buy for her, only to be hit with the realization that his niece had to have one of her legs amputated because she lost it when she threw herself on the top of her little siblings to protect them from the bomb that had hit their home. She would never be able to run around in the red trousers that she was so excited about.
Israel's ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza has led to over 1000 children being amputated, according to UNICEF. Reading Letter from Gaza, I could only think about how many Nadias preceded the Nadia in this story, and how many Nadias have followed since October 7. Kanafani's story illustrates how the student intifada that we were a part of at UMass sits on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian martyrs, amputees, freedom fighters, refugees, and hostages who have been robbed of life since 1948. Letter from Gaza reminds us that our fight is not new, that the Nakba wasn't a one-time displacement in 1948, and that Palestinians have been enduring this struggle for 76 years.
As I read this story, I was actively inside of the encampment that hundreds of UMass students participated in to attempt to get UMass to divest from the companies profiting off the killing of over 40,000 people. As I read about Nadia in the encampment, I thought about Israel's killing of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car with her killed family members, as well as the paramedics who went to save her. As I write this today, I think about Ahmed al-Najjar, the 18-month-old Palestinian who was beheaded during Israel's massacre in Rafah. And I think about how I love all of them, not just because of the displacement and violence they are forced to endure on our tax dollars, but by habit. And as countless news outlets asked me during the encampment "why I was protesting," I wanted to scream that I was protesting out of habit! I wanted to scream that this cause biologically makes me; I have been protesting my whole life by habit!
In the letter written by the Palestinian man who refuses to return to Sacramento to be with his friend Mustafa, questions are posed by this man who cannot seem to make himself leave, such as: "Why don't we abandon this Gaza and flee?"(112) and "what is this ill-defined tie we had with Gaza that blunted our enthusiasm for flight? Why didn't we analyze the matter so as to give it a clear meaning? Why didn't we leave this defeat with its wounds behind us and move on to a brighter future that would give us deeper consolation! Why? We didn't exactly know." (113). These questions transported me to the video I saw early in this genocide of Palestinian doctors singing "sawfa nabka hona," translating to "we shall remain here" as a response to a military order warning them to evacuate the hospital before it is targeted, leaving their patients alone, sick, and vulnerable. There are countless more videos, too, of Palestinians in Gaza proudly stating that they will not leave, no matter what happens. The profound connection they have with their land, this indigenous connection that cannot entirely be scientifically explained, is the basis for the steadfastness held by Palestinians after 76 years of resistance. This is the same connection that compelled the Palestinian man in Letter from Gaza not to return to Sacramento to say, "No, I will stay here, and I will never leave" (111).
Concerning our encampment, it is this sumud, this steadfastness, that we see in Palestinians in Gaza, whether as depicted in this story or through the videos coming out of Gaza today, that inspired us to keep fighting, to remain vigilant even when surrounded by an upwards of 500 state police in riot gear, to continuously put our bodies on the line in the face of genocide and the most McCarthyist repression seen in this country for decades.
The letter written by the Palestinian man to his friend in Sacramento ends, "I won't come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you (115)." As I read and re-read Kanafani's words, I became all the more aware that there exists in me a biological yearning to return home. Our student activism today is nothing if not backed by our knowledge of the history of Gaza and Palestine, the understanding of the generational trauma endured by Palestinians, and our collective yearning to go home. Stories like Letter from Gaza are a reminder that the killing, the amputations, and the displacement that we are protesting on our campuses did not begin on October 7. They are a reminder that the 1000+ Palestinian children who have been amputated are not mere numbers, that they all have stories like Nadia's and uncles like the narrator. It humanizes the vast numbers that often feel impossible to humanize. And with every clip of amputated children playing football on the beach in Gaza, and widowed mothers raising kids that aren’t their own, and fathers carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags, Palestinians and their stories do just what Kanafani said. They remind us what life is and what existence is worth—
and that they love life, by habit.