After graduating from high school, Mona enrolled in an English literature program at the Islamic University of Gaza. In addition to her course syllabus of English novels, Mona started reading Mahmoud Darwish and the authors he published in Al-Karmel. She read great Arabic novels, too, like Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt trilogy. Instead of inspiring her, though, the high quality of the writing she read made her dismissive of her own work. “Sometimes I felt like my writing did not reflect the truth. Sometimes I felt there was no value to it. Sometimes I asked myself why I am writing if the work will not change my life. What is the benefit?”
Mona set fire to any of her work that didn’t satisfy her. She also burned stories her university professors particularly enjoyed; she trusted their judgment even less than her own talent. “I felt like I could give more. Something better.” She incinerated her diaries, too. “I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t like my life at that time. I don’t know.” One day, Mona’s neighbor spotted flames in her backyard and called to make sure her building wasn’t burning down. These days, Mona is more forgiving of her own limitations as a writer. There are no more backyard bonfires. “Now I just delete it like everyone else,” she said.
After completing her English literature degree, Mona earned a master’s in business administration and worked as a project manager for various NGOs. This is one of the only reliable sources of employment in Gaza, where development and charitable organizations from around the world run programs and maintain offices. She eventually landed a position at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. The United Nations founded UNRWA in 1949 to provide the residents of the refugee camps with education, health care, relief services, and camp infrastructure, among other services. UNRWA maintains camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine—including eight camps in Gaza.
Raja Shehadeh wrote about UNRWA in Language of War, Language of Peace, a book that examines the politics of words in the conflict. For Raja, UNRWA represents “the first twist in terminology.” Israel refused to identify Palestinians displaced by the Nakba as “refugees,” as the word implies a homeland to which they should be allowed to return. The United Nations, then, did not place these Palestinians under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Instead, the UN granted them a “special status” and their own agency, UNRWA—whose title does not include the word refugee. This status excludes Palestinians from international refugee laws and all but eliminates the five million Palestinian refugees UNRWA serves from global refugee statistics. The only Palestinians who appear on official UNHCR counts are the approximately ninety-five thousand who live in places where UNRWA doesn’t operate.
The eight UNRWA camps in Gaza employ almost 12,500 staff to tend to the Strip’s 1.3 million registered refugees with schools, health centers, and social services offices. The agency also distributes food to the camps four times a year. Criteria for receiving food rations are strict. I told Mona I’d seen UNRWA-labeled sunflower oil for sale at the grocery store near my flat, in direct defiance of labels reading NOT FOR SALE and FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION TO PALESTINE REFUGEES. Mona shrugged. “Sometimes families need money more than food.”
Working with UNRWA gave Mona an opportunity to meet people with experiences far different from her own. For a writer, this is a great gift. “I heard many stories from very poor families. Violated families. Families under great pressure of violence, poverty, and illness.” She learned that the pressures of everyday life supersede the slogans of nationalist politics, especially with women. Mona recalled a mother she’d met after the 2014 war. Many UNRWA-run schools sheltered internally displaced families whose homes were destroyed during the bombing. The populations of the shelters steadily decreased once the war ended as people repaired their homes or found other places to live, so UNRWA started shutting down the shelters. A distraught mother told Mona that if UNRWA forced her to leave the shelter, Mona had better give her three bullets: She planned on shooting her two daughters, and then herself.
“Then she told me a horrible story about her life,” Mona said. The woman’s husband had sexually abused her and her daughters many times. When they finally divorced, the woman’s family threw her into the street. The woman wanted to kill her own daughters to save them from this misery. “How can you think about politics while this woman is living like this here in Gaza?” Mona asked me. “These are the stories I am used to hearing. Don’t talk to me about going back to Asqalan while there are hungry people here.”
When we passed through the camp’s market, Mona pointed out the unemployed young men sitting idle in front of shops. I asked her if she ever grows numb to the poverty she sees every day. “No,” she said. “I always see it. I am inspired by it.” These people fuel both her UNRWA work and her fiction. Mona often walks alone through the camp to quietly observe how life is lived there. “I become more sensitive,” she said. “Sometimes it is more important to watch and read than it is to write. You don’t want to write down everything in your head.”
Mona believes a writer must be able to embrace Gaza and its strange contradictions. “You need to love Gaza before you are able to write about it,” she said. “Here you can find the most beautiful places at the same time as the most ugly places.” Cleanliness rubs up against filth. Wealth occupies the same streets as great poverty. “Gaza has never been at peace,” Mona said. “I need to understand this place. I need to know the feeling of what it means to be destroyed and rebuilt. Over and over. You cannot find yourself here. You are underneath layers and layers of experiences. You cannot find your original self.”
“Do you love Gaza, then?”
She answered without hesitation. “No. I hate Gaza. Life is difficult here. There is no electricity. And there is no future. And in 2020, Gaza will no longer be fit for humans.” Mona was referring to a 2012 UNRWA report that declared Gaza would soon be uninhabitable. By 2020, pollution will irreversibly damage the aquifer Gazans rely on, and Gazans will have nowhere to access safe drinking water. Standards of education and health care will continue to fall as the population climbs, and more Gazans than ever will depend on food assistance. According to the report, Gazans need hundreds more schools and hospital beds, thousands more doctors and nurses, and tens of thousands more places to live. They need to more than double their electricity capacity. The report concluded that only “herculean efforts” by Palestinians and their partners could ensure that Gaza is still a livable place by 2020.
The report is remarkable in its pessimism. How could a territory that has hosted human life since the Bronze Age be so abruptly and irrevocably poisoned? Even the most dire climate-change predictions are measured in generations. I couldn’t imagine being literally days away from the abyss. I asked Mona if Gazans take the UN report seriously. “No. My father, mother, and brother don’t even know about it. We will live. We will continue. This is what we, as Palestinians, are used to saying.”
Mona admits she would also disregard the report if she wasn’t a parent. “Before becoming a mother, I said, ‘I will live alone and I will die alone. And it is okay.’ Now I say, ‘What will happen to this kid?’” Mona fears for all the children in Gaza, not just her own. “I lived a little bit of a good life. I know I didn’t have the chance to play and run, because it was dangerous when I was a kid. And during the Second Intifada, it was horrible. But I always had good water to drink. Good places to go. Many good things. In the end, I got good work with NGOs and with UNRWA.” But today’s children of Gaza will not have the same opportunities. The universities here are some of the lowest ranked in the region in terms of the quality of education. Students graduate with useless degrees. They cannot find work in Gaza.
And they cannot leave. Gazans must apply to Israeli authorities for permission to exit through the Erez Crossing. Such permits are usually granted only to traders or medical patients seeking treatment in Israel. According to Gisha, an Israeli NGO that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement, I
srael approves an “exceedingly low” percentage of exit permit applications. In the first half of 2000—before the Second Intifada, the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and the resulting blockade—more than eighty thousand Gazans exited through Erez every month. By 2016, that number had dwindled to fourteen thousand. Only sixty-three hundred Gazans passed through the checkpoint each month in the first half of 2017. The border with Egypt at Rafah is hardly an alternate escape route. Since the fall of the Morsi regime in Egypt in 2013, and the new Egyptian government’s animosity toward Hamas, Egypt keeps the Rafah crossing shut tight. More Gazans passed through Rafah every month under Morsi—around twelve thousand—than left during the entire first six months of 2017, a period in which the crossing was open for only eleven days.
As a result, most Gazans are trapped. They cannot pursue employment opportunities outside the territory. They can rarely accept scholarships to foreign universities. They cannot travel. Few are as fortunate as Khaled Juma to attend family weddings in the West Bank, or to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Instead, they sit and wait for change or the next war. For most of Gaza’s two million residents, the Strip is a prison without a roof.
Mona published her first book, a collection of short stories called What the Madman Said, in 2008. The stories center on life in Gaza after the Second Intifada. “I was psychologically destroyed at the time,” Mona said. In 2004 and 2005, in the midst of the ongoing conflict with Israel, fighting between Fatah and Hamas peaked. “I used to see people shooting and killing each other on the street,” she said. “It was like a civil war.” One gunfight broke out in front of her apartment and kept her trapped at home. Another started just outside the UNRWA walls. “I felt like I was destroyed internally,” she said. “We are an occupied people. We have our land occupied. We have to be more civilized. The parties—Fatah and Hamas—are no longer working for the rights of the Palestinians, they are interested only in their own advantage. Their main purpose is not fighting the occupation. Their purpose is fighting each other.”
The stories in What the Madman Said paint intimate portraits of the struggle. In the title story, a mentally disturbed man reflects on the condition of Gaza City. In another, a mother worries for her sons—one of whom was injured in the conflict and had his legs amputated. Another story revolves around a young man who has to give up his room to a cousin whose house was destroyed. All he wants is the conflict to end so he can get his room back. In Mona’s favorite story, the stench of garbage in the streets of Gaza wakes the dead in a city cemetery. The corpses scold the living for the mess they’ve made.
Another story focuses on the life of a divorced woman. “I wasn’t divorced at the time,” Mona said. “Maybe I was anticipating it.” A year after Mona married, her husband, also a published author, admitted he’d fallen in love with another woman. He told Mona they could remain married and go on living together if that’s what she wanted, or they could divorce, but he refused to end the affair. “He said he would respect my choice if I wanted to leave him and start another life. He said he would give me anything I wanted.” Mona opted for a divorce and insisted she keep custody of their infant son. Her husband agreed. “He respected my feelings as a mother,” Mona said.
In spite of his infidelities, Mona still considers him a good man. “It is bad to fall in love with someone else while you are married,” she said, “but you have to respect it.” Mona laughed at the incredulous look on my face. “Divorce is not an ugly thing,” she said. “It gave me a chance to be independent. To be stronger. To live the stories of my own life.” Through her divorce, Mona earned a new affection for the women she had worked with at the NGOs whose husbands had left their families for one reason or another. “I knew what it meant to be abandoned. To have a husband who loves another woman. To have a child you want to protect. If you recover from this experience, nothing can break you again.”
“What about war?” I asked.
“War is not more dangerous than divorce,” Mona said.
Still, the wars have taken a toll. “I’ve lived through the 2008 war, the 2012 war, and the 2014 war. I am too young to have lived through three wars,” she said. “You can never imagine what it is like here during the war times, especially the last one.” Mona spent the fifty days of Operation Protective Edge feeling she could be killed at any time. Even some of the UNRWA-run schools and hospitals were bombed. Mona remembers wondering what her last thought would be before she died. She debated with herself if she’d rather die in her sleep, say, or while watching a movie or listening to music. “I decided that I’d prefer to die while listening to Beethoven,” Mona said. “His Ninth Symphony.”
Her first priority, of course, was to protect her son. Little Mohammed is only six years old and has already lived both the 2012 and 2014 wars. He remembers little from 2012, Mona said. He was only a year old and “slept most of the time.” In 2014, Mohammed was old enough to realize he was in danger, but too young to understand why. “He thought that the danger came from the windows,” Mona said. “So he told me to please close the windows. He was crying all day long.” Mohammed hasn’t forgotten that burning summer. “He is afraid now,” Mona said. “Every day he asks me, ‘Mommy, is there another war coming?’”
Mona currently works as a donor visibility officer in the UNWRA’s communication department. She writes impact statements about the beneficiaries of UNRWA programming to raise the visibility of the organization’s successes. “Our donors always want to hear that a project positively affects the life of Palestinians,” Mona said. She has qualms about the work. She knows UNRWA improves life for refugee families in Gaza, but to emphasize only their accomplishments rarely reveals the whole story. People still struggle. Mona met with a family a month earlier to write about how UNRWA’s food assistance program improved their lives. She learned that the father and two of his children suffered from kidney disease. The father underwent dialysis treatment three times a day and could not work. The mother was also unemployed. A fifteen-year-old son was the family’s sole breadwinner. They felt grateful for the food donations from UNRWA, but writing about this family as a success story felt dishonest and propagandistic to Mona.
The job also leaves Mona with little time for her own writing. She works slowly, mostly on Saturdays while she is off work and Mohammed is in kindergarten. “I lock myself in my apartment. If I don’t write, I brainstorm. Or I read. I do the things I like. It is good to be alone sometimes.” Mona has spent her recent Saturdays working on a novel about a foundling—a child born to an unwed mother and abandoned. Before Mona became a mother herself, she worked for an NGO that ministered to such children. Mona comes from a large and prestigious Gaza family—one of her uncles, for example, was appointed the first sheriff of Gaza by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser—and she could not relate to these abandoned children. “What does it mean that you don’t have a family? Who will protect you when you can’t tell stories about your grandfather?”
After Mohammed was born, Mona began to think even more about Gaza’s foundlings. She could not imagine a child who, in his first moments of life, is discarded rather than embraced. Then Mona met a woman who discovered late in her life that she had been a foundling. Her husband divorced her, and she had to fight for custody of her children. Mona decided to write a fictionalized account of this woman who struggles to protect her children and her rights as a woman “in a city that can’t even protect itself.”
The father character in the story goes missing, so Mona set the novel in the 1980s and had the father shot by the IDF for throwing stones. “The perfect solution for him to be killed or disappear was to put him into the Intifada.” Mona laughed at how the conflict granted her such a convenient narrative device. Characters are easily eliminated in fictionalized Palestine.
Mona resists writing about politics. “It is not attractive for me,” she said, and she rejects any reader expectations that she take up the cause in her writing. “It is ugly that someone can tell you what to write
about, especially in fiction, because a writer already has something in her mind. Maybe a character knocking around her head.” The politics that occasionally appears in her work emerges organically. “I will include politics smoothly, and only as the story requires. But I will not sit to write about the man throwing stones.” Mona believes that fiction should not preach or advocate for one set of values over another. “Fiction is for fiction,” she said. “I want to produce a beautiful piece of fiction. That is all.”
She concedes, though, that politics is unavoidable for Palestinian writers, especially in Gaza. Mona cannot escape the fact that her grandfather was killed in 1948 while escaping Asqalan with his family. She cannot escape the truth that, in 2009, an Israeli missile killed one of her cousins, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless. And, especially, she cannot forget that her thirteen-year-old brother, Amer, was killed for throwing a stone. Their mother had sent Amer to fetch falafel one morning in 1992. Amer joined the boys throwing rocks at soldiers in the market. “He was shot by a soldier in the heart.” Mona was eleven years old and had to confront death for the first time. “Do you know what it means to be a child and cry because someone beloved, someone who used to sleep next to you in the same bed and crawl all over you every morning, dies? It is awful. We cannot escape these experiences.”
After only a few days in Gaza’s landscape of hijab and niqab, Asmaa al-Ghul’s loose hair and blue jeans startled me. Asmaa is well known for rebellion. Her stories about such sensitive topics as “honor killings,” domestic abuse, and government corruption have earned her scorn from Gaza’s authorities and an enduring notoriety from readers. Each time I mentioned Asmaa’s name to my friends in Gaza, their eyes widened. Her bravery, though universally admired, made people uncomfortable. People considered her dangerous. She was fierce, and I felt intimidated meeting her.
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