Laila El-Haddad - Gaza Mom

Laila El-Haddad helps us navigate and experience a world far beyond our own and unknown to us, of what it means to own a passport that allows no passage. Perhaps most critically, this book does what few do: It allows us to understand Palestinians as we understand ourselves and in so doing affirms our common humanity. An extraordinary, eloquent work.

Dr. SARA ROY

Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

Gaza Mom is humanly moving and politically explosive, vividly illuminating the cruelties of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation for decades. Laila El-Haddad writes with disciplined passion and conveys a powerful sense of authenticity. This book should become required reading for Americans who have yet to comprehend the prison-camp conditions that prevail in Gaza.

Prof. RICHARD FALK

Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

Special Rapporteur for the OPTs, UN Human Rights Council

El-Haddads assessment of the personal and collective impacts of Israels occupation policyfrom trudging through the endless bureaucratic labyrinths of identification papers and travel restrictions, to her everyday conversations with people picking up the pieces of their lives after a bombingand the piercing analysis of her own personal journey has created a text not often found in current literature on Palestine. It is exactly the kind of documentation that is needed in these times of dehumanization of the Palestinian people.

NORA BARROWS-FRIEDMAN

Writer, Electronic Intifada and Al Jazeera

A BOUT

J UST W ORLD B OOKS

T IMELY B OOKS FOR C HANGING T IMES

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Our recent titles include:

• The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey , by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt
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• The Generals Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine , by Miko Peled

To Yousuf and Noor. Thank you for always
helping me to put things in perspective.
I hope one day this will all make sense.

All text, 2013 Laila El-Haddad

All photographs (unless otherwise noted), including cover images, 20042013 Laila El-Haddad

Maps and all design elements (interior and cover), 2010-2013 Just World Publishing, LLC

Cover design by Lewis Rector for Just World Publishing, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. Visit our website, www.justworldbooks.com.

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

El-Haddad, Laila M.
Gaza mom / Laila El-Haddad. -- Abridged ed. / with a
new introduction from the author.
p. cm.
Includes index.
LCCN 2013942721
ISBN 978-1-935-982-29-6

1. El-Haddad, Laila M.--Blogs. 2. Palestinian Arabs--Biography. 3. Palestine--Social conditions. 4. Palestine--Social life and customs. 5. Gaza Strip--Social conditions. 6. Palestine--Foreign relations--21st century. 7. United States--Foreign relations--21st century. 8. Israel--Foreign relations--21st century.
I. Title.

DS126.6.E39A3 2013 956.94054092

QBI13-600091

Contents

Maps

Introduction

The blog that was the source of much of the material in this book came about largely by happenstance. It was originally named Raising Yousuf which later became Gaza Mom. I started it during Fall 2004, at a time when blogging was a new medium, universally, and almost unheard of in the Middle East.

That year was a testing time for my husband and me: We were recently married and raising our first born, Yousuf, in Boston, while in graduate school. Just one year earlier, in August 2003, I had landed my first job as a journalist with the newly launched Al Jazeera English website. That position would take me back to Gaza, my familys beloved home city. But my husband Yassine could not come with me.

As a Palestinian with refugee status and despite the fact that Palestine is Yassines parents birthplace, his ancestral homeland and that of his wife and child, Yassine was (and still is) denied the right to enter or even visit Gaza or any other part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) or historic Palestine.

Yassine is denied any version of the Right of Return. This, while Israel gives Jewish people from anywhere in the worldor anyone who can trace his Jewish ancestry back to several generations earlier or is a spouse, a grandchild, or child of such a personthe immediate right to reside in any of the areas it controls, even if their immediate ancestors have never lived in the area.

Yassine was born in Beirut and raised in the UN-administered refugee camp of Baalbek in Lebanon. Until shortly before his birth, his family had been living in the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar (Hill of Thyme) that was a flashpoint in the internecine fighting of the Lebanese civil war (Yassines uncle was killed in the anti-Palestinian massacre perpetrated in Tel al-Zaatar in 1976.)

Yassine grew up amid the civil war that continued to rage throughout Lebanon in the 1980s. Thirty-five years earlier, his grandparents had been driven out of their homes in historic Palestine by Jewish militias in 1948, shortly before the state of Israel was founded on that same land. The villages from which his grandparents fled were both destroyed in their entirety by the Israeli authorities soon after. Part of his extended family managed to escape to a neighboring town, where they remain to this day, though the two parts of the family still cannot meet.

In 1993, Yassine was awarded a scholarship to attend high school in the United States. From there he made his way to college and eventually to medical school in Massachusetts, where we met.