Gaza! Archives - Nora Lester Murad - The View From My Window in Palestine

The convos jumbled in my heart and head

May 19, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad 3 Comments

There were too many feelings and ideas, too big to name or hold. They were jumbled in my heart and head and still are. I had to shake them off me, expel them, or at least release some of the pressure, so I could reclaim my body. I needed to look at my guilt, despair and fury outside my body, so I could understand how they collide inside me as I witness the slaughter of Palestinians. Month after month, ten feelings pop up in a conversation, and before I process or respond, ten different feelings take over preventing all connection. I can’t catch up with myself. Or breathe.

Watching a genocide in real time through WhatsApp messages from friends is heavy and isolating. I feel crazy most of the time. Am experiencing generational Holocaust trauma for real now, understanding how so many people let it happen to us, to others, because I see so many people let it happen again. I confessed my anxiety to a friend in exercise class and she said, “You can only do what you can do.” She let herself off the hook for doing more before she had done anything. Nobody gets it. I moved away.

So, to be able to climb out of my overwhelm and refocus on the political challenge, I sat down to write. I wrote a letter to a girl in Gaza, the daughter of a friend. I wrote a letter to a Jewish influencer I know who 18-months in still posts photos enjoying meals at cafes with smiling friends. And I wrote a letter to Anne Frank who, unlike me, had the maturity and wisdom to see the beauty amidst the ugly.

I printed each letter out on different colored paper and cut each letter into bites. I interspersed them on my dining table, letting them crash and converge, and while the whole thing makes no sense–not the conversations nor the genocide–I feel calmer having expelled these toxins from my body, slightly stronger to face more. There is so much more to face.

Is Fire Enough to Get Americans to Empathize with Palestinians?

January 20, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

I am heartbroken by the devastation from fires in Hollywood where I was born, Pasadena where I grew up, and Altadena where I attended high school. As I sit fearing the status of people I love, TV coverage gives me the emotional validation I seek. Newscasters seem to understand that a house is more than a structure. It is a home where people loved, cooked, grew, fought, studied, and sang in the shower. Some newscasters tear up as they scan the burning embers, perhaps imagining how they would feel if they fell victim to such a tragedy.

I have never heard that kind of empathy for my other loved ones, families who live in Gaza. Every day for over 15 months, and still, they live with the constant roar of drones and planes that can kill or maim without warning. Like the California fire victims, they will forever live with the sense of vulnerability that comes from learning that the world is not safe. Like the California fire victims, they will never be able to replace the family photos, legal papers, art, books, and valuables they worked for generations to accumulate.

Still, the situations are different.

My friends in Gaza can’t go find water, food, medical care or shelter with neighbors. They don’t have insurance policies or a government to provide help. They don’t even have their reality affirmed on mainstream TV because Israel has banned all foreign journalists and killed over 250. Only those Americans who intentionally look for the truth see the pictures: a father who frantically digs around a child’s finger sticking up from packed rubble after a bombing, little boys harvesting blades of grass so their families can eat, and the myriad of skin diseases that proliferate when people sleep on wet ground night after night, never getting dry or warm.

And the situation in Gaza is not a natural disaster but rather the result of an intentional policy by Israel to destroy Palestinian society using weapons paid for with over $20 billion in U.S. tax dollars since October 7, 2023 alone. I thought about this when an LA fire victim said on TV that their street looked like it was hit by a bomb. Israel has dropped an estimated 85,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, according to the United Nations.

People use words like “unfathomable” and “historic” to describe the scale of the destruction in Los Angeles County. With a population of 9.7 million residents, 12,000 unfortunate families have lost homes. But if the rate of loss was the same as in Gaza (1 housing unit lost per 15 residents according to the United Nations), Los Angeles County would have lost an unimaginable 640,000+ housing units .

This doesn’t even account for the 83,000 additional housing units in Gaza that are severely damaged but not totally destroyed. And it doesn’t account for damage to non-residential structures like hospitals, universities and schools, and so much other destruction. Significantly, 150,000 people have been displaced in Los Angeles county. But if 90% of the population of LA County were displaced as they are in Gaza, that would affect a staggering 8,730,000 people.

The shocking human suffering in both places where I have loved ones raises questions for me: might the compassion for suffering evoked by the LA fires somehow translate to compassion for Palestinians in Gaza? If so, might more Americans realize that while they can’t stop the fires in California, they actually can save lives in Gaza – by speaking out against U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel’s slaughter? Or is the dehumanization of Palestinians so profound that no loss of life, no destruction of property, and no amount of suffering can inspire more Americans to act?

I wrote three OpEds for The Forward. They published zero.

August 20, 2024 by Nora Lester Murad

On May 30, 2024, The Forward contacted me in response to a tweet of mine criticizing an article they published. They asked me to write an OpEd, and after checking with some friends in the Palestinian solidarity movement, I decided to accept the offer as long as they didn’t censor my ideas. Over the next several months, I wrote three OpEds, none of which were published. The first got stale when The Forward didn’t respond in a timely way. The second was completely rewritten and my politics misrepresented, so I refused to agree to their edits. I sent a third one with a new hook, but after agreeing to publish (and pay for it), The Forward stopped replying to my emails. They also didn’t respond to my invoice for payment. For what its worth, I’m sharing one of the OpEds here.

What are we keeping Jewish students safe from?

As the new school year approaches, I am being bombarded with emails and texts about the imperative to keep Jewish students safe in the new politicized atmosphere. But safe from what? One text message noted that the BDS movement has been training campus activists and that anti-genocide encampments will be back.

There are actual right-wing racists, including white supremacists and Christian nationalists, who are being emboldened by MAGA rhetoric, but the self-appointed antisemitism watchdogs don’t mention those real threats at all. They focus on students who believe in the humanity of Palestinans and support their right to be equal and free.

I wonder how Jewish outlooks might change if they understood their fate not as aligned only with one another against the world, but as inextricably linked with the people of color, including Palestinians, who constitute the global majority. What if Jews believed that that Jewish wellbeing depended on Palestinians also being safe?

I sought insight from one of my cousins, a liberal Zionist with whom I’ve had many respectful exchanges: “Why can’t everyone in Israel live together in equality? Isn’t that what we strive for here in the United States?”

When I pose this question to most liberal Zionists, I hear some version of “We would love to, if only they didn’t hate us.” I tell them how my own, albeit unusual, lived experience proves that Palestinians don’t hate Jews – they only hate being oppressed. But most liberal Zionists simply don’t believe me.

A Jew who married into a Palestinian Muslim family, who is loved as a daughter- and sister-in law, who is accepted as a neighbor and friend, and has had significant roles in Palestinian civil society does not fit into the story of Palestinian antisemitism and Jewish vulnerability they tell themselves. In fact, when Palestinians learn that I’m Jewish, they frequently recall stories from their elders about the good ole days when Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians lived peacefully as members of one united community, and they long for a country where once again everyone can live together in peace.

I learned these important truths serendipitously. When I was a 19-year-old college sophomore still lacking a plan for my life, the Sabra and Shatilla massacres shocked me into understanding that as a Jew I was implicated in a conflict “over there.” I assumed that understanding Palestinians would be difficult, so I sought them out with a genuine curiosity and concern I inherited from my Jewish ancestors. I studied in Cairo, then in Jerusalem. Taxi drivers taught me Arabic, and women I met in vegetable markets taught me to cook. I made friends on travels in Sudan, Jordan, and Syria.

Unexpectedly, I fell in love, got married, and after years in the U.S., we moved to the West Bank to raise three daughters under Israeli military occupation.

It hasn’t always been easy being part of the Palestinian community. It hurts to see how statelessness disperses families around the world. It hurts to break bread with families who live under constant threat of home demolition. It hurts to hear friends recount settler attacks on their children and not know how to help.

But being part of the Palestinian community has also been uplifting and fulfilling in countless ways. Palestinians have shown me how the world appears different depending on your relationship to power. They have inspired me to pay attention to life’s smallest gifts. They taught me that safety is found not individually, but within the collective.

Now, 11 months into a historically brutal slaughter in Gaza by Israel, I am struck by how divergent my perspective of the power to be found in connecting with Palestinians is from the deeply held beliefs of many Jews around me, including those who self-identify as liberal.

Lawn signs reading “I Stand with Israel” confound my Jewish and humanistic sensitibilites. Do we stand with Jews even when they are wrong? Labeling ceasefire demands as antisemitic infuriates me. If it is wrong to be killed, isn’t it also wrong to kill others?

At least right-wing Jewish Zionists are consistent. They weaponize antisemitism against everyone whose politics they don’t like, shamelessly using their Jewish identity as a shield against criticism of their unadulterated violent politics. These are the same people who oppose affirmative action, blame crime on immigrants, and deny health care to trans people. Like their white Christian nationalist pro-Israel political allies, they have no incentive to change the system to include others when the current system is working for them.

I called my cousin to say that I don’t understand why liberal Zionists think they are better than right-wing Zionists. I see liberals fighting passionately against discrimination in the United States, but when it comes to Israel, they uphold a political ideology that values Jews over non-Jews. He didn’t respond with some implicitly racist message that Jews can never be safe without being dominant.

He surprised me by saying, “Of course, every person and group should enjoy the same rights to land, safety, and dignity.”

“Then you’re like me!” I said, with great relief. “You’re not a Zionist!”

“Yes I am a Zionist. I care about Jews and want Jews to thrive.”

“I care about Jews and want Jews to thrive, too!” I countered. “But that’s not what Zionism is.”

People like to say that Zionism can mean different things to different people, but the Zionism explicitly espoused by many of Israel’s founders, and the Zionism that Palestinians experience in their everyday lives, is an ideology and practice of Israel as a nation-state for the benefit of Jews and only Jews. Under that ideology, non-Jews will always have an inferior status, because they do not share the right to collective self-determination It is the imperative to keep Jews dominant that drives Israel’s rejection of refugees’ legally-enshrined right to return, the military occupation of over 5 million Palestinians in a brutally repressive regime that controls all aspects of life, and also the reality that 20% of Israel’s population, the indigenous Palestinians who are legally citizens of Israel, are deemed by law to have lesser rights–not only than their fellow Jewish citizens, but also fewer rights than non-citizens anywhere in the world who are Jewish.

My cousin said I gave him a lot to think about.

I keep thinking, too. What if Jews did not work only to protect Jewish students, but instead dedicated themselves to protecting all students, including those who are Palestinian? What if Jews saw their prospects for thriving as tied to a world where bombs and starvation and dehydration and disease were not tolerated – no matter who the victim is, and regardless of the identity of the perpetrator?

I believe with all my heart that a just peace with Palestinians could not only save tens of thousands of Palestinian lives, but it would also save Jewish lives, and could spare Jews from the anxiety of living with a perpetual sense of existential threat. It could save Jews by re-focusing us on the ways that antisemitism works in concert with anti-Blackness, patriarchy, militarism, and other forms of bigotry, to uphold white supremacy. It would save Jews by reminding us that Palestinians are human beings.

But to achieve a just peace with Palestinians, it is not enough to trust in their humanity. We also need to do the sometimes painful work of living up to our own.

Fragmented Love in Alison Glick’s “The Other End of the Sea”

May 16, 2022 by Nora Lester Murad

This Palestinian book review originally appeared in The Markaz Review.

It would be easy to focus on the Jewish protagonist in Alison Glick’s debut novel The Other End of the Sea. After all, it was the search for her roots that first took Rebecca Klein to Israel. But like the author, whose visit to Israel “opened her eyes to the realities for Palestinians living under Israeli control,” the protagonist, too, was captivated not by Israel, but by Palestine.

Palestinian Book Review: The Other End of the Sea - Alison Glick (Book Cover) — Available from Interlink

The premise — a US Jew who evolves to support Palestinian rights — is more than plausible. Increasingly, Jewish Americans are becoming informed about Israeli history, and they are more vocal in critiquing Israel’s policies — Peter Beinart being only one case among many who are speaking out and taking action based on the principle of liberation for all.

But The Other End of the Sea is not another pro-Palestinian screed, it is a bona fide love story, complete with the tenderness, pain, intimacy and miscommunication that define any romantic relationship.

In this narrative, Rebecca Klein meets Zayn Majdalawi in the early 1980s in a taxi cab as both try to find a way out of Gaza. Zayn is a refugee from Shati camp studying in the West Bank, where Rebecca works as a teacher in the Quaker school. Even this plot point — a US Jew falling in love with a Palestinian Muslim — is conceivable. In fact, I myself am an American Jewish woman who married a Palestinian Muslim, and in our nearly forty years together, we have met many other “mixed” couples.

The rest of the plot, however, is completely far-fetched. Despite already serving fifteen years as a political prisoner, Zayn gets exiled by Israel and over the next several years, the couple move between Egypt, Lebanon, Libya and Syria trying to find a safe and secure place to raise their daughter. On the way, Rebecca sees the inner workings of Palestinian families, refugee camps, the life of exiles, political strategizing, and so much more. The protagonist, Rebecca, takes the reader deep into places and situations that no non-Palestinian could ever see.

Except for one thing: The Other End of the Sea is a fictionalized memoir, based closely on the life of the author, Alison Glick. Those “far-fetched” events and forays into the depths of Palestinian experience really happened. It is a story that no one else could have told.

Glick takes readers through a unique and important experience — that of Palestinian exiles. Her masterful storytelling is gripping, pulling us fully into every scene. Over the course of the 30-year-long story, each historical event, place, situation and person erupts into Technicolor. Something as mundane as watching her husband eat melons is told in a way that makes the reader salivate:

In the late morning light, juice the color of a harvest moon ran in rivulets down his smooth arms as, one after the other, he sliced through the fruit’s flesh, scooped out the seeds, and quartered them, methodically eating each one down to the rind. The waiting garbage can registered each fruit with a clunk.

I related deeply to the charged moments at which Rebecca and Zayn just couldn’t understand one another. In one situation, Rebecca expresses her liberal values around gender relations, values that Zayn had always shared. But in a foreign country, and beaten down by his exile, Zayn is overwhelmed. He throws up his hands and says, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Neither is able to explain themselves across the cultural divide, widened by trauma and despair.

Like all good fiction — and effective memoir writing — Glick tells a story that is not only entertaining, but one that matters. Even though politics and culture pervade every aspect of the story, the book centers on one thing: The impact of Israel’s fragmentation of Palestine on a family.

Of course, the story of Palestinian fragmentation cannot be fully captured in a single novel, and it did not end on the last page of Glick’s book. With a population of around 13 million today, there are over 2 million Palestinians living as second-class citizens in Israel, 2.5 million under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and 2 million living under Israeli siege in the Gaza Strip. Another 3 million Palestinians live in Jordan, with the rest scattered across the Arab world, Europe, Latin America and North America, each group with a different, often precarious, legal status. Nearly every Palestinian is touched by this fragmentation: grandparents are strangers to their grandchildren, aunts miss their nieces’ weddings, and brothers are absent from their brothers’ death beds.

It’s not surprising, then, that love, no matter how strong, can choke from the toxicity of this fragmentation. This shows up poignantly, and tragically, in Glick’s life and her brilliant novel. At one point in the story, Rebecca returns to the house in Gaza she shared with Zayn, a house to which Zayn can no longer go. She says:

“Standing in that hushed house, I understood that it wasn’t the Palestine Street chickens or leftovers that shifted the course of our relationship. It was the realization that despite all we had lost — friends, family, our home, our work — there was still more left to lose.”

Aiding Liberation, a book chapter

May 3, 2022 by Nora Lester Murad

“Do non-Palestinians only stand in solidarity with the struggle against Israeli settler colonialism? Or do we recognize that the struggle for actual liberation is bigger than statehood? Does our understanding of Palestinian liberation include a critique of racial capitalism and neoliberal globalization and the ways they too perpetuate exploitation, inequality and injustice? If so, how should liberation-minded activists interact with Palestinians whose interests diverge, like those who aspire to build a Palestine that is allied with US and European corporate interests or those who want to establish another Islamic state?”

Our Vision for Palestinian Liberation book cover

This is an excerpt from my chapter, “Aiding Liberation” in Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappe’s edited volume, Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out.”

Get your copy from your favorite independent bookstore or from bookshop.org.

It’s 2020. Does the United Nations care about Gaza?

September 6, 2020 by Nora Lester Murad

UN’s warning that Gaza will not be a “liveable place” by 2020 has been realised. Stephen McCloskey. (15 January 2020). Open Democracy.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/uns-warning-that-gaza-will-not-be-a-liveable-place-by-2020-has-been-realised/

The crisis in the Gaza Strip shames the world as ‘unliveable’ 2020 arrives. Yvonne Ridley. (December 31, 2019). Middle East Monitor. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191231-the-crisis-in-the-gaza-strip-shames-the-world-as-unliveable-2020-arrives/

By 2020, the UN said Gaza would be unliveable. Did it turn out that way? Donald Macintyre. (December 28, 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/28/gaza-strip-202-unliveable-un-report-did-it-turn-out-that-way

Gaza 2020: Has the Palestinian territory reached the point of no return? Megan O’Toole (December 9, 2019). Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/what-is-gaza-2020-un-report-uninhabitable-unliveable-blockade

How Gaza was made into an unlivable place. Michael Lynk. (July 24, 2017). Aljazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/07/gaza-unlivable-place-170723091946355.html

Gaza in 2020: A Livable Place? A report by the United Nations Country Team in the occupied Palestinian territory. (August 28, 2012).
https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/gaza-2020-liveable-place

What do I say to Abu Fathi?

May 25, 2017 by Nora Lester Murad

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article about Marwan Abu Jammous (Abu Fathi) and his family in the Khuzaa area of the Gaza Strip. At that time, they had been living in a temporary caravan provided by a donor for almost one year, and no permanent housing was on the horizon. Despite the billions of dollars donated after the 2014 Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of people (or hundreds of thousands, depending on how you calculate) still lack adequate housing. It has been 1003 days since the 2014 ceasefire after which there was supposed to be massive reconstruction.

I visited the Abu Jammous family last year and they were in a new caravan, a wooden one, which was touted as an upgrade from the aluminum type.

But it floods in the winter and is unbearably hot in the summer. There is still no prospect of permanent housing. Some other families have gotten assigned to donors and are re-constructing around them, but when I asked, no one could tell me the criteria or process by which some families were chosen before others. It might not matter so much if everyone quickly got what they needed, but they don’t. Reconstruction now seems virtually at a standstill.

Abu Fathi calls me every couple of weeks. I call him back because he has no credit on his phone. His children talk to me one by one, each of them calling me “auntie,” breaking my heart by begging me to visit. Of course I can’t visit without a permit from Israel. The Gaza Strip is under an illegal blockade and very few people can get the special permission needed to enter or exit.

Rumors are there will be another attack soon. Escalations often happen during Ramadan. Ramadan starts tomorrow. What do I say to Abu Fathi when he calls?

Meanwhile, a relative of the family sent me a short video of their dinner time this week. With no electricity and no cooking gas, Abu Fathi sat in the dark and cooked over coals with his five kids. There is nothing romantic about not being able to give your family a safe, warm, dry place to live and enough nutritious food, not to mention the pervasive fear of more bombing, with no place to escape.

Please, contact your representatives and the media. Tell them you want them to put pressure on Israel to end the blockade on Gaza. It’s just wrong. It’s just so very wrong.

Come with me to Gaza (photo essay)

April 23, 2016 by Nora Lester Murad

When Israel gave me permission to enter Gaza, a little strip of land integral to Palestine but completely cut off, I jumped for joy and called my friends to gloat as if I’d won a lottery. A few minutes later, I heard myself sigh involuntarily as I admitted that I really didn’t want to go. Who would want to go to a place that oozes hopelessness, that embodies the failure of the world to deliver on even their most basic humanitarian obligations? Last year after a visit to Gaza, also for work, I spent two weeks in bed trying to recover.

But my recent visit was fantastic thanks in great part to the brilliance of Aid Watch Palestine’s Haneen Rizik Elsammak, one of the most energetic, decent, generous and inspirational people I have the privilege to know. From north to south and east to west, she introduced me to people who opened their homes and shared their very, very difficult stories. In between I reconnected with true friends (you know who you are) who continually amaze me with how much they offer to the world and how many obstacles they are forced to traverse in order to do so.

I left Gaza sad but refocused. I still believe Gaza exemplifies #HumanitarianBetrayal, but it is also bursting with #TransformationalOpportunity.

* * * *

Latefa and Nezam Alaqaad in Khan Younis lost their home in the 2014 Israeli attack and now, nearly two years later, they still live in a makeshift aluminum room on the site of the four-story building they used to live in.

Inside, the temperature was comfortable in the early spring, but it becomes desperately cold and wet in winter and unbearably hot in the summer.

The tiny kitchen is outside as is the tiny bathroom.

Much of the basic infrastructure is damaged, so utilities are rigged, unreliable and dangerous. There is no privacy, no security, no community, and no hope for any solution in the near-term.

Not far away in Khuzaa, I visited a family of seven that I wrote about in Huffington Post 8 months ago. Before the 2014 Israeli attack, Marwan Abu Jammous lived with his brothers in a 4-story building that used to stand in the place where laundry now dries. After his house was destroyed, Marwan’s family was given temporary shelter.

The aluminum caravan was so hot last summer, they slept outside. When the municipality wanted the land, Marwan moved his caravan near to his demolished home; that made the caravan even more unlivable. A donor provided a new, wooden caravan, but as the photo shows, it floods. There is no clarity if, when or how this family will ever get a new house.

But despite the glum situation, the family welcomed me, fed me, and showed me a great time.

To me, the caravans exemplify the catastrophic failure of the humanitarian system, not just in Gaza, but in the world. Humanitarian actors are supposed to respond to emergencies, and therefore they provide short-term relief, not long-term solutions. But in Gaza, which is locked in a long-term, man-made disaster, short-term relief (like caravans that are intended for habitation only up to six months) are ridiculous — unless paired with intensive, serious and effective political advocacy to end the root causes of the humanitarian crisis. While the international community whines “we’re doing the best we can,” kids in caravans in Gaza are dealing with the physical, emotional, economic, academic and spiritual effects of three major Israeli attacks in 8 short years.

One little girl in Beit Hanoun showed me her skin condition, which her mom said is rampant in the caravans. Can we not prevent this kind of needless human suffering?

There was some weird stuff along the way:

Water made in Turkey, by a company in the United Arab Emirates, imported to Gaza, with taxes paid to Israel. Wow, a lot of people are making money from Israel’s preventing Palestinians from accessing their own water.

And this towering billboard advertising Bank of Palestine’s daily prize of $5,000. It’s normal in cosmopolitan Ramallah, but to see this in Gaza where the prize might well feed a poor family for something like 8 years, it was, well, weird.

Also, all along the highways are notices that donors are building new housing, but many of these signs have been up for a long time, in front of empty lots where there is no visible beginnings of any work, and no one in the community has heard about the project or believes that it will ever come to fruition. It’s like Gaza exists in two “realities,” the deteriorating and frustrating real one and the fantasy one that is “advertised” by international organizations as being in the process of development.

In Beit Hanoun, we drove towards Israel, but it’s hard to see where the buffer zone starts (an Israeli demarcated no-go zone in which soldiers routinely fire from watchtowers at farmers or livestock), so we felt a bit nervous. Haneen, ever efficient, leaned out of the driver’s side window and invited this exceptionally nice woman and her shy granddaughter to ride with us so that we wouldn’t stray too far.

On the short drive, she showed us the rubble of her house, and her brother’s, and then, casually, she pointed out this donkey. “This donkey ran across the buffer zone to Israel and escaped the bombing that killed its owner. After the ceasefire, she came back, but the family who owned her never will.”

We relieved the stress of the day, which happened to be Palestinian Land Day, by taking pictures of ourselves and one another among the beautiful wild daisies. We must have taken hundreds of pictures. We were a raucous group of women! This picture of Haneen shows what a good time we had.

Back in Gaza city, Haneen took me to an inspiring voluntary initiative where, tucked away in a nondescript location, a group of women collect used clothes and furniture and make them available for free to other women in difficult circumstances.

While I visited, various items were donated and various women came to shop for things they needed. The whole operation oozes with respect and gratitude and mutual help.

No sense of desperation or hopelessness there — Gazan society is doing what they can to help themselves. It was a good way to end my visit. But then, driving towards Erez Checkpoint on my way home, I began to feel a bit desperate. Had I used my precious time in Gaza fully? I started to snap photos indiscriminately to try to hold on to Gaza, to my gratitude for getting to visit this special place.

Reviewing my pictures at home, I laughed out loud to see I had taken a short video of a generator, an almost identical clip to one I shared in a 4-minute video I made about my April 2013 visit to Gaza — three years ago! Generators run Gaza, which has electricity for only 4 or 6 hours at a time. Like caravans, generators are tangible evidence of the way we are dealing with the #InhumanIllegalIsraeliBlockade — with expensive, environmentally damaging, inadequate, short-term responses to pacify 1.8 million Palestinians who are locked in the Gaza Strip.

Shame on everyone who doesn’t speak out for accountability.

One Year After Ceasefire, ‘Temporary’ Housing for Gazans Seems to be Permanent

August 28, 2015 by Nora Lester Murad

This article first appeared in Huffington Post.

One year after the August 26, 2014 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Abu Fathi Abu Jammous, his 8-month pregnant wife, and four children are living in a sweltering prefabricated caravan.

Abu Fathi’s house was totally destroyed in the brutal attack on Khuzaa in the southern Gaza Strip, and he was forced to move his family into an UNRWA school. “When Human Appeal UK offered the caravan, I felt lucky. Winter was coming. They said it would be temporary.” But one year later, Abu Fathi is still waiting for his home to be fixed.

The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated areas in the world and the 1.8 million Palestinian residents suffer from economy-crippling mobility restrictions. They survived an exceptionally cold winter, in which at least four babies died of exposure in temporary shelters, and are now enduring a summer of record-breaking heat.

During the day, Abu Fathi’s wife takes the children to her mother’s house; there is no money for air conditioning, and, in any case, electricity in most parts of the Gaza Strip is only supplied on an intermittent basis for 6-8 hours per day.

An estimated 28% of the population of the Gaza Strip was displaced at the height of the 50-day attack. Ten months later, the last UNRWA collective shelters were emptied, but displacement is still widespread. No one knows exactly how many people still live in the ruined remains of their homes, but according to the Shelter Cluster, a UN coordination body, well over 100,000 families (over half a million people) are still without adequate housing—including the 500 families residing in caravans.

Abu Fathi says his house reaches 55 degrees Celsius during the day. “My three-year old isn’t moving. I took her to the hospital and they said she’s sick from the heat. They gave her oxygen and provided pills and told me to keep her next to the refrigerator. She’s going to die,” he says frantically. “My six-year old is sick too. He suffers from an enlarged liver and soft bones. We’re all going to die and nobody cares.”

An aid worker who didn’t want to be quoted said that caravans in Khuzaa had been built hastily and poorly “as a public relations measure.” He added most caravan dwellers in Khuzaa had since abandoned them and moved in with relatives or any place they could. “Anyone still living in a caravan in Khuzaa today is truly in crisis.”

A big cause of the problem is that most of the funding for the Gaza Strip is restricted to humanitarian emergencies and cannot be used for permanent solutions. The same pattern happens after earthquakes and tsunamis – donors quickly move on to other emergencies, leaving long-term development needs unaddressed. The situation in the Gaza Strip is even more complex because the causes are political and chronic. One aid worker in Gaza confessed, “As far as I know, no one is planning what to do for these people when winter comes. It is a failure of the system. ”

The shortcomings of these forms of shelter are widely acknowledged globally: caravans are expensive, inadequate and often culturally unacceptable. Prefabricated shelters are therefore only intended to bridge the gap between emergency relief and durable solutions after natural disasters or conflict, but if durable solutions never arrive, then it’s not so much of a “gap” as it is a precipice. In disaster after disaster, “temporary solutions” end up lasting much longer than anticipated. Beneficiaries and aid organizations spend additional funds to fix or modify temporary structures, thereby depleting resources that could be allocated to durable solutions. Abu Fathi, an unemployed laborer, has invested over $1,000 in his caravan and it is still unlivable. Experience shows that extended reliance on temporary solutions can make aid beneficiaries vulnerable to new humanitarian crises.

Abu Fathi’s caravan is one of 50 provided by Human Appeal UK. Their spokesperson explained, “Due to pressures of time, volume, and availability of materials, we needed to provide shelter for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible and caravans were thought to provide better shelter than canvas. We have made some adjustments to make the caravans more comfortable, but they were only ever intended to be temporary structures so do have their limitations.”

Many parties share responsibility for the near-total absence of permanent reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Whether the cause is donors who have not fulfilled their financial pledges (perhaps fearing their projects will be demolished by future assaults); the Israeli blockade and restrictions on imports of construction materials; or the internal Palestinian conflict between Fatah and Hamas, caravan dwellers do not know where to turn. Abu Fathi said, “The caravan seemed like a blessing at the time, but if I had known how hard life would be, I would have refused it. I don’t know what I would have done instead. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Beneficiaries in the Gaza Strip are in a conundrum and so are aid actors. The Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) was among several Arab donors who provided caravans conforming to the standards established by the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing Asked if QRCS planned to work further with the beneficiaries who received caravans, a QRCS staff person replied: “It doesn’t make any sense to throw more money at temporary solutions.” So, would QRCS help those in caravans to find permanent solutions? “Sadly, as long as Israel maintains its blockade on the Gaza Strip, there are no permanent solutions.”

For its part, Human Appeal UK said they were “exploring further options for improving the caravans to make them more comfortable,” but Abu Fathi fears it will not come in time.

Happy birthday to me, again

May 5, 2015 by Nora Lester Murad

One year ago I celebrated my 50^th birthday with the launch of a new Gaza Fund at Dalia Association. At the time I wrote that we should strengthen local leaders and local organizations before bad things happen. I suggested that we not only give money, time and raise our voices during wars, but that we take advantage of the periods of calm to invest, work preventively, focus on the long-term.

Of course I didn’t know that just a few months later Gaza would succumb to a terrible war, nor did I know that 8 months later things would be even worse. I didn’t know then that I would be compelled to put aside my novel to work on a new initiative – Aid Watch Palestine – to bring people together to re-envision aid so that it’s accountable to Palestinians and actually helps people.

Now, on the cusp of turning 51, my “profound” words are spoken out and my energy has dispersed. I work day and night to try to make a difference, but without much hope that I can. All around me are friends who are severely depressed, and with good reason.

So what do I want for my 51^st birthday? I’m not going to say “peace on earth” or even “an end to the blockade on Gaza.” I’m going to ask for something every personal: I want to learn to find beauty in this ugly world and to find hope against all the evidence that there is none. But lest you say my wish is selfish, I wish this for us all. I wish for humanity to rise to our best selves. That would be a truly happy birthday.