When we were children, my brothers and sisters and I regularly spend our pocket money for new books. Our mother had instilled us a passionate love for books. Reading was not only a hobby; It was a way of living.
I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a large and wide piece of furniture with many shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was only five years old, but I recognized the sacred character of his corner from the first moment.
My father was determined to fill the shelves with a variety of books – on philosophy, religion, politics, languages, science, literature, etc. He wanted to have a wealth of books that could compete with the local library.
My parents often took us to the bookstore attached to the Samir Mansour library, one of the most emblematic bookstores in Gaza. We would be allowed to pick up up to seven pounds each.
Our schools have also fed this love for reading, by organizing visits to reserve fairs, reading clubs and discussion panels.
Our home library has become our friend, our comfort in both war and peace, and our lifeline on these dark and haunting nights lit by bombs. Gathered around households, we will discuss the works of Ghassan Kanafani and reject the poems of Mahmoud Darwish that we had memorized from books from our library.
When the genocide started in October 2023, the blocking on Gaza was tightened at an unbearable level. Water, fuel, drugs and nutrients have been cut.
When the gas exhausted, people started to burn everything they could find: the wood of the rubble of houses, trees of trees, waste … then books.
Among our loved ones, this happened to my brother’s family. My nepheal, in the heart, sacrificed their academic future: they burned their freshly printed school books – whose ink had not even dried – so that their family could prepare a meal. The very books that were in the past have now fed the flames, all for survival.
I was dismayed by the Burning book, but my 11 -year -old nephew Ahmed confronted me with reality. “Either we will die of hunger, or we fall into illiteracy. I choose to live. Education will resume later,” he said. His answer shook me at the heart.
When we lacked gas, I insisted that we buy wood, even if its price soar. My father tried to convince me: “Once the war is over, I will buy you all the books you want. But let us use them for the moment.” I have always refused.
These books had witnessed our ups and downs, our tears and our laughs, our successes and our setbacks. How could we burn them? I started rereading some of our books – once, twice, three times – memorizing their covers, their titles, even the exact number of pages, burning my fear that our library would be the next sacrifice.
In January, after the conclusion of a temporary truce, the cooking gas was finally authorized to enter Gaza. I pushed a sigh of relief, thinking that my books and I had survived this holocaust.
Then early March, the genocide resumed. Any humanitarian aid was blocked: no food, no medical supplies and no fuel could enter. We lacked gas in less than three weeks. The complete blockade and the massive bombardment made it impossible to find another source of fuel for cooking.
I had no choice but to concede. Standing in front of our library, I looked for international volumes of human rights law. I decided that they had to go first. We were taught these legal standards at school, we made believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our release.
And yet these international laws have never protected us. We were abandoned in genocide. Gaza has been teleported in another moral dimension – where there is no international law, no ethics, no value for human life.
I torn these pages in pieces, recalling how countless families had been torn by bombs, just like that. I nourished the torn pages with flames, watching them turn to dust-an anxious offer in memory of those who had been burned alive: Shaban al-Louh, who burned alive during the Al-Aqsa hospital, journalist Ahmed Mansour, who burned alive when a press tent was attacked, and countless other people whose names we never know.
Then we burned all the books and summaries of pharmacology belonging to my brother, a graduate in pharmacology. We have cooked our food preserves on the ashes of his hard work years. However, it was not enough. The seat became more suffocating and the fires devoured the shelf after the pound shelf. My brother insisted to burn his favorite books before touching one of mine.
But there was no hiding place of the inevitable. We were soon in my books. I had to burn my precious collections of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry; The novels of Gibran Khalil Gibran; The poems of Samih al-Qasim, the voice of the resistance; The novels of Abdelrahman Munif that I kept dear; And the Harry Potter novels that I had passed my teenager to read. Then came my medical books and my summaries.
While I was standing there, looking at the flames consuming them, my heart has also burned. We tried to make the sacrifice feel worthy – cook a more delicious meal: pasta with a Béchamel sauce.
I thought it was the top of my sacrifice, but my father went further. He dismantled the shelves of the library to burn in the form of wood.
I managed to save 15 pounds. These are history books on the Palestinian cause, the stories of our ancestors and the books belonging to my grandmother, which was mercilessly killed during this genocide.
Existence is resistance; These books are my proof that my family has always existed here, in Palestine, that we have always been the owners of this land.
The genocide pushed us to do things that we have never imagined in our darkest nightmares. It forced us to mutilate our memories and break the unbreakable, all for survival.
But if we survive – if we survive – we will rebuild. We will have a new home library and will fill it again with the books we love.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.