The Death Camp

Latest war news: Israeli airstrike killed 200 at Jabalia refugee camp. In case you didn't know, there were eight refugee camps in Gaza, some tent cities, some cement-blocks, some housing third generation refugees; can't imagine a better synonym than internment camp, or the death camp. Each camp gives a voice to the existential odor of displacement, the fragility of a stateless people on the brink of extinction. Where would they run from the bombs? The trauma that propelled them to those camps is the trauma that sustains them in their hope of eventual return, of the end of their tormented existence, never assimilated to the status quo. If only we could all walk in their shoes for a day and live their tales of horror, interrogated at every checkpoint: How did you get here? It was dark, I was sleep with my wife and two little children; an explosion tore through the house and threw me to the wall, where I lay unconscious for a while, and I thought I had reached heaven and was facing Allah, then I saw the lifeless body of my wife surrounded by my grieving children. My parents had come from Jaffa, refugees from the first Nakba, never lost hope that one day the road back home will be open, a hope they kept until they died; our home was poorly designed for the bitingly cold winter weather of Jabalia, and now without food, water, and electricity, we are refugees again from our refugee camp, praying for a miracle, in the ever more fragmented and shrinking Gaza Strip.