Aviva Tuffield

This land, which should have been mother, has become executioner. It rejects us with a violence as relentless as the sea breaking upon rock. We wander across its scorched face like shadows dispossessed, and everywhere we go, the soil itself denies us rest. For two years we have not remained more than five months beneath the same roof. Each time we tried to raise a fragile dwelling from the debris, each time we whispered to walls riddled with bullet-holes, each time we caressed the stones with our weary breath, saying to them: “Remember us, we belong to you,” the tempest returned. The house was torn away, the nest scattered, the memory broken. What madness, to call anything home when the hand of destruction hovers above every threshold. Four houses gone, a fifth already trembling. How many ruins does it take before one understands he inhabits not a nation but an abyss? Look upon the road. Behold the children staggering under sacks heavier than their bones. Their hair tangled, their eyes extinguished before their youth. They are the image of mankind crucified, walking the Via Dolorosa once more. But no gospel will record them, no psalm will consecrate their agony, no Qur’an will inscribe their names on the tongues of believers. Their suffering will vanish in silence, like smoke carried off by the wind. The city flees before the decree is spoken. The people need no proclamation; the bombs are proclamations enough. The iron shells are louder, more sincere, than the hollow promises of politicians who conjure the word “shelters” while meaning only graves. Fear speaks truer than all the speeches of men. Blood writes in a language no minister dares to utter. And now, the procession: vehicles that are not vehicles but skeletons of iron, wheels without glass, doors torn from hinges, bodies devoured by rust. Upon them are heaped mattresses, barrels, broken chairs, fragments of tables, the remnants of lives dismantled a hundred times. Around them, multitudes on foot, dragging their poverty across the dust. Mothers, fathers, infants clinging to shoulders, the elderly limping behind. It is not a march; it is an exodus. Yes, it is the city itself that departs. Have you ever seen such a thing? A city gathering its belongings, folding its history, extinguishing its memory, and abandoning its very soil? That is Gaza today. Gaza, once a cradle of voices and prayers, is now a caravan of stones in motion, a city packing its own coffin. Grief has devoured her soul. Massacre upon massacre has wrung her dry, until even the name of Gaza is weary of itself. She flees herself. She walks, not toward a promised land, but toward nothingness. Toward the impossible, now made real. Toward an end so absolute that it no longer even resembles death, only silence, vast and unbroken, as if the world itself had forgotten it ever contained such a city. And thus will posterity know: Gaza was not destroyed; Gaza departed. A people, a city, a history, compelled to carry its own funeral through the desert of time. #GazaGenocide