My Grandpa Lives in Gaza

By Laila Al-Arian, The Nation. Posted January 3, 2009.

On Sunday morning, I found out through a note my friend wrote on Facebook, that the Israeli Air Force was attacking my grandfather's neighborhood in Gaza. Safa, who lives near my grandfather in the densely-populated "Asqoola" in Gaza City, recounted the harrowing hours she spent terrorized by what she called "the constant, ominous, maddening, droning sound" of Apache helicopters flying above. "Outside my home, which is close to the two largest universities in Gaza, a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students," Safa wrote over the weekend. "They'd been warned not to stand in groups -- it makes them an easy target -- but they were waiting for buses to take them home. Seven were killed."

My family had been trying to speak with my grandfather since Saturday, after Israel began its onslaught on Gaza. But we haven't managed to reach him, perhaps not surprising since so many phone lines are down. "Hold one moment," is all we hear. A computerized directive from the phone company, one that sounds increasingly strident the more it's repeated. "Hold one moment." My mother hangs up in frustration, unable to ease her anxiety or clear her mind from worst-case scenario thoughts.

My grandfather moved to Gaza five years ago after living all over the Middle East for almost fifty years. As far as he was concerned, it was always a matter of time before he'd find his way back to his birthplace. He was born in Gaza City in 1933. Both of his parents died of cancer by his fifth birthday, so he was raised by four older sisters. The Gaza he knew during his childhood was transformed by the establishment of Israel in 1948. Following their forced expulsion from villages and cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians streamed into the tiny coastal strip. Most of the refugees relied on assistance from the newly-created United Nations Relief and Works Agency to survive, and jobs were hard to come by. My grandfather was thus forced to move to other Arab countries so he could provide for his young family. By 1958, he had married my grandmother, a refugee from Jaffa whose father, a policeman, had been killed by Zionist paramilitaries ten years earlier. My grandfather took her and their one-year-old son to Saudi Arabia, where he taught Arabic to schoolchildren.

Leaving his beloved Gaza was painful for my grandfather, but he was left with no other choice. Because he was never allowed to become a citizen of any of the four Arab countries in which he worked and lived, my grandfather never felt at home. In his mind, they were transitory stops, temporary resting places on the way to Return. He would save as much as he could from his meager salary so he'd have enough money to take his family to Gaza for summer visits. After years of living modestly, he was able to buy a quarter of an acre of land on Gaza's coast near the Mediterranean Sea.

My grandfather was sitting in a cafe with a group of friends in the coastal city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia when he heard that Israel captured Gaza in the June 1967 war. His face went pale and he fainted from the shock. The Israeli Army's occupation meant Gaza was lost. But in practical terms the news had another catastrophic effect: the Israeli military authorities decreed that any Palestinian who was not in Gaza before the war was not recognized as a resident of the strip.

My grandfather became a U.S. citizen in 1999. By the time he passed his citizenship exam, his knowledge of American history and governance rivaled my own. Three of his children had moved here years earlier, and started their own families. Though my mother begged him to live here with her, my grandfather's dream of returning to Gaza never left him -- and it was his American citizenship that helped him do just that.

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