We are moving, after nearly 30 years in our family home. We are sad to leave the old place but also joyful to have so many memories of good times spent together. And at least we have a new house to go to, which is not yet a home, but will become so.

And all this time we have been packing our belongings into large cardboard boxes for the removals company to pack away in their truck and deliver to the new place, we have been witness to the images of devastation and misery in Gaza, imposed by a ruthless policy of state terrorism on the part of Israel, of annihilation and the murder of innocents. 

We have a new house to go to, which will become a home, but for the 1.7 million displaced Palestinians, there is nowhere safe to go, and no homes to return to, because their homes have been blasted out of the ground, reduced to rubble; and often, beneath that rubble, lie the remains of those they loved, and of all the things that these people held precious and that gave their lives meaning. 

We can pack up our belongings in an orderly way, have them delivered safely to our new house, which will become a home, but for the 1.7 million displaced Palestinians, there is nowhere safe to go. There is no home to return to. Their homes have been destroyed by bombs. 

I reflect on the unbearable onrush of images on the television, those images that too easily become meaningless in their sameness: the wrecked block of flats, the traumatised children sitting wide-eyed, staring out at nothing, clutching a toy or a doll. These images will be the abiding memory of departure, along with our inability to do anything to stop it. They call it a war, but a war usually involves two factions (at least) fighting each other. On those terms, this is hardly a war, more like an all-out assault on a civilian population, a massacre of the unarmed innocents who have been ordered to evacuate to ‘safe’ places that are anything but safe. It is a wholesale destruction, an annihilation; yes, a genocide. Not a war, as such. Which is presumably why Al Jazeera refers to the conflict as the ‘War on Gaza’ rather than the ‘War in Gaza’.

So, as we prepare to leave one house and move to another, I must also reflect on our good fortune in having the freedom to move when and where we want, to be close to the ones we love without worrying whether we shall see them in the morning.  

But I am also troubled by guilt, survivor guilt, I suppose it is, even though I was not there, am not there, because in an endlessly recursive series of What Ifs, all of this could have been prevented, and all those people need not have died. And in this, perhaps, we are all responsible, all complicit, because at some level, just within the bounds of comprehension, what happens to one murdered child in Palestine happens not only to that child but to all children, everywhere.

I will end this post with a poem written by the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. By speaking simply of kindness, it evokes more than I could ever hope to say.

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.