by Muhammad Jihad Ismael, Palestinian historian
These nights of Palestinian refuge in Rafah are full of noise and dread, as we hear the roars of Israeli Merkava tanks and Achzarit armored personnel carriers approaching, as artillery shells and bombs pummel and shake the sandy earth. Pillars of black smoke climb the sky all around us. At night the sky becomes a crimson hell.Until this year, Rafah was a modest city of 300,000 people on a spread of wild land between Egypt and the Levant, Africa and Asia. Like ancient Canaan, Palestinian Rafah was always a frontier gateway for conquerors from the Pharaohs to Persians, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans. This year, Rafah may again decide people’s lives for generations.If I dig deep under my family’s plastic rain-leaky tent of refuge here, I might find a dagger or spearhead from ancient battle. In 217 BCE, the armies of Ptolemaic Egypt and of Greek Seleucides after Alexander collided on these sands, and shook the whole Near East. Both deployed mighty human waves, and used elephants as a weapon to break lines like modern tanks. Appalling slaughter ended in Ptolemaic victory.Now, as Israeli forces struggle to control the ruins of Gaza City and Khan Younis, Prime Minister Netanyahu declares Rafah will be next, and decisive. Since last October, 1.4 million civilians have come here for a promise of safety. Rafah is our family’s third forcible relocation: I was born in Gaza to a family of exiles here since the Nakba of 1948. Now all at once we endure wet winter, overcrowding, hunger, disease, bombardment and terror of what may come. The bone-crushing elephants have returned, bellowing night and day and not far off.To this moment no worldwide warning has dissuaded Netanyahu. Our watchwords are fear, perplexity and anxiousness: we don’t know where to run or how to survive direct attack. Our weary minds blur in dazed wonder that we may find ourselves in Sinai desert, out of our ancient land completely---perhaps, if the world gives apartheid Israel its way, forever.My wife and little son put their hopes in their prayers, that we will live together or die together, but never be separated. We know people already struggling back northward, to die if need be among thousands of relatives killed on their scorched home earth. The lips of my exile-elders say aloud that death is better than more of this life. Sometimes in cautious secrecy I meet my best friend, whose entire family were killed: we meet and he says nothing. Every night, in the plastic tent beside our own, a widow sings her prayer---“Please, rain food not water, my children are starving.”There is nowhere to go. Humane evacuation is impossible. Hence, one question: whether the world stops apartheid Israel, or their attack brings a staggering Palestinian massacre.Evidence before the International Court of Justice shows Israel and the United States driving all of this, as they have driven us first---into an impossible corner. At last, and for his own reasons, President Biden brings a United Nations motion that could save us. For a future we can scarce conceive right now.What world will come? Off in the rainy Rafah darkness, the elephants stomp their iron feet and bellow flame. Next door the widow wails.Rafah
February 20, 2024