As a self-proclaimed secular, non-religious Gazan, I have always been rejected by my community and my country, the Strip. I was born in Gaza, but grew up in Cairo, raised by the “cultured and educated” circles that gathered in downtown’s Al Horreya (“Freedom”) Café to discuss social justice and communism. Abdel Nasser was like the Prophet Muhammad in my household, and our madhab was the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt party. There were no pictures hanging on the walls of my grandparents’ house in Gaza except for two: one of my late aunt, and the other of my grandfather shaking Yasser Arafat’s hand. One of my grandfathers was imprisoned for eleven years because of his affiliation with the Communist Party, while the other was exiled from Palestine, Libya and Egypt for decades because of his connections with the PLO and the PFLP.
The struggle with my nationalism began in 2013, when I was nine. I was stuck in Gaza with my mother after the 30 June coup in Cairo and the closure of the Rafah border. My mother, also a secular, non-religious Gazan, didn’t wear a hijab and was persecuted for it in her own hometown of Khan Yunis, where children would call her a Jew, a kafir, and sometimes even throw stones at her. She was denied an ID card unless she wore a scarf that completely covered her hair for the photograph. That was the year Gaza stopped being my hometown (my family lived all over the Strip), the place where I’d spend my summer vacations, and became a prison for me. It wasn’t a prison because of the lack of basic necessities or any of the reasons it is described by some diaspora leftist Palestinians as an “open-air prison”. It was a prison because of the absence of freedom of thought.
My mother, also a secular, non-religious Gazan, didn’t wear a hijab and was persecuted for it in her own hometown of Khan Yunis, where children would call her a Jew, a kafir, and sometimes even throw stones at her.
Cairo was no utopia either. I knew we didn’t have freedom of expression, but it never affected my day-to-day life. I would go to school, my parents would go to work, and on the weekends, they’d gather with their revolutionary, educated, white-collar friends, who found it entertaining to explain imperialism to a six-year-old. In their defense, I found it fascinating too. We had, in a way, a safe haven for our minds in Cairo.
After we escaped from Gaza in 2013, my nightmares became about being trapped there with no way out. I started detaching myself from the Palestinian cause as a Palestinian citizen, and approaching Palestine through an Arab nationalist lens. Instead of seeing the liberation of Palestine as a personal dream, it became another social justice cause I could discuss over dinner, alongside Tibet, after inflation had become old news. I had the privilege of mentally separating myself from the place to which my papers tied me.
Instead of seeing the liberation of Palestine as a personal dream, it became another social justice cause I could discuss over dinner, alongside Tibet.
Between 2013 and 2023, through our relationship with Cairo’s liberal circles, my family became involved with the Egyptian Jewish community and its efforts to preserve the physical remnants of its existence. As we became more directly involved with members of that community, my mom stopped saying “May God burn the Jews”—a common Gazan expression whenever something went wrong. Fighting Jew hate became a cause that—naively—genuinely interested me, and correcting my mandatory religion class teacher’s misrepresentation of Judaism became a personal battle. I was always defeated, but I kept trying.
As we became more directly involved with members of the Egyptian Jewish community, my mom stopped saying “May God burn the Jews”—a common Gazan expression whenever something went wrong.
In 2022, my grandfather was about to turn ninety, and we hadn’t been to Gaza in nine years. The journey from Cairo was still difficult and took much longer than it used to. We would have to spend thirty-six hours on the road, but it was safe, so my mom decided it was finally time to go back. I chose to go with her. I wanted to get my ID and explore the place where I was born. We went in the winter, just a few days before the Ukraine War began.
Gaza was very different that year. It was beautiful. It felt like just another Arab coastal city on the Mediterranean. The people were calmer and far less fanatical.
The way my mother and I presented ourselves was no longer much of an issue. Instead of calling us Jews and traitors, the kids on Al Remal Street would try to guess which one of us was a Ukrainian refugee and which one was Turkish.
After that month, I started loving Gaza again. It was no longer a taboo subject or the place I was threatened with being sent to if I got bad grades. It became my hometown again.
During Ramadan of 2023, Egyptian television aired a series about the military’s counterterrorism operations in Sinai. Hamas was portrayed as an enemy and a contributor to terrorism. The series fueled anti-Palestinian—and more specifically anti-Gazan— sentiment in Egypt, even among people in our educated, liberal circles. My battle then became one of defending both the reputation of Arab Jews and the integrity of Gazans. My politics became comically contradictory to anyone who didn’t know my past, and I found myself lost in the irony of it all.
My battle became one of defending both the reputation of Arab Jews and the integrity of Gazans … I found myself lost in the irony of it all.
My last visit to Gaza was in July 2023, around the time of one of the Jenin camp incidents—I don’t remember which one. It was summer, humid, and the electricity came for only eight hours a day. The solar panels couldn’t power the air conditioning. This time, when we went to downtown Khan Yunis, the children asked us if we knew Allah and spat at us. It was an unpleasant trip, and the last time I ever saw Gaza.
When I returned to Egypt, I almost kissed the asphalt on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. I couldn’t wait never to hear a Gazan accent again.
My politics, however, were still the same. When the Kivunim kids came to Cairo that year, they asked me what I thought of “Egyptian antisemitism”. It struck me as a funny question—still does—and I found myself explaining Arab tribalism and the defeatist political demonization that has become almost scripture in Arab politics.
That was also how I understood Gazans’ approach to diplomacy with Israel. I could never blame ordinary people for their hatred of Jews or Israelis because they had been taught—and, in some cases, had lived through experiences that reinforced the belief—that Israel was responsible for all of their misery and therefore owed them something. Hamas reinforced that narrative as well, ensuring that the average Gazan could no longer distinguish between Hamas’s corruption and abuse of authority and Israel’s role in their suffering.
I could never blame ordinary people for their hatred of Jews or Israelis because they had been taught—and, in some cases, had lived through experiences that reinforced the belief—that Israel was responsible for all of their misery.
When the power went out, people would often start shouting, “May God burn the Jews”. It became a reflex, one that distracted from the fact that the outage was just as often the result of Hamas’s own mismanagement. The anger was always directed outward, never inward.
In October of 2023, my parents went to Gaza to visit my grandparents and were going to stay for two weeks. They booked the 14th for their return date, so as to take a small tour around the strip and spend enough time with the family.
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, I woke up to my dad sending me my allowance, along with a video taken from my grandparents’ roof of rockets being launched from what appeared to be the border. That was followed by a text that read, “This is your last allowance from me”. I turned on the news and couldn’t believe my eyes. The only thing I could think in that moment was that everyone I knew was going to die.
That same morning in Gaza, my mother and aunt—who also doesn’t wear the hijab—wanted to go into the city to buy groceries and other necessities before the inevitable Israeli retaliation and war began. My grandmother looked at them and told them they’d better take a man with them so no one would mistake them for escaped Israeli hostages. That story stayed with me. It highlighted the difference between my world and the Gazan one, where we will always be seen as outsiders.
My grandmother looked at my mother and my aunt and told them they’d better take a man with them so no one would mistake them for escaped Israeli hostages. That story stayed with me.
I couldn’t sleep that night and only felt some relief when I found out my parents would be returning to Cairo on the 8th.
At first, it was all a shock. A place that I had only just begun to reconcile myself with belonging to was being destroyed, and its fate seemed to be that of a geographical dustpan. Then there were the actions of my own people, which left me shocked and disappointed.
On the morning of October 7th, after news emerged that some Hamas fighters had been killed, Palestinian TV in Gaza and Al Jazeera began airing a segment titled “Interviews with the Parents of the Martyrs of October 7th”. The reporter or cameraman would enter homes filled with relatives and, sometimes, wailing women. They would eventually reach the parents, who, while fighting back tears, would smile into the camera and tell the world, “We’re happy and proud, thankful that our child will go to heaven as a martyr”.
As early as October 8th, everyone on that side of the political spectrum had already begun blaming Israel for everything—to the point that some even blamed Israel for the Israelis murdered on October 7th. I envied those people: to live inside such a complete bubble of certainty, where everything wrong in the world could be blamed without any critical thought on a single entity. Then the pictures and videos of dead, dying, and injured men, women, and children—sometimes even babies—began spreading across the internet like wildfire. Pages like Eye on Palestine reposted the images with calls for justice, and everyone else reposted them in turn. Opening your phone became like opening the gates of hell: Sherine posting her iced matcha, immediately followed by the mutilated body of a small child.
This was when the dehumanization of Gazans began. The Palestinian cause stopped being a conflict between people with a long, complicated history and an equally complicated present, and instead Palestinians started being used for virtue signaling in leftist circles. You could be demonized for criticizing a Palestinian or Hamas’s actions, yet be treated as a saint for sending scamming “Ahmed1488” five dollars on PayPal.
What I struggled to admit was that, as the world dehumanized Gazans, I found myself doing the same. By December 2023, we managed to get my grandparents out of Gaza. They settled into our house in Cairo. I became irritated—not because of them personally, but because Gaza was suddenly everywhere. The part of my life that I had spent years trying to keep compartmentalized had spilled into every corner of my world. Relatives constantly came to visit us. There were neighborhoods in Cairo I began avoiding simply because I didn’t want to hear a Gazan accent. Even the sympathy I received from my friends’ parents because of where I came from stopped feeling comforting and started seeming like a debt I owed the world.
After October 7th, the part of my life that I had spent years trying to keep compartmentalized had spilled into every corner of my world.
I’d never been one to use my background for sympathy points. I might use it as an intellectual flex, a show of status and sophistication. But now, all of a sudden, everyone wanted to tell me how sorry they were for something I wasn’t even sure how to feel about myself. It felt as though I owed them grief and anxiety in return.
Critical thinking and trying to achieve an objective point of view only made me feel more alienated from my people. It made me feel like a traitor—even though I haven’t done anything except theorize and try to untangle a moral dilemma, to save whatever grace we had left as a people.
I wasn’t—and I’m not—a heartless being. What happened to Gazans is definitely a crime. The question is whether there could ever be only one perpetrator.
After the world dehumanized Gazans by putting every part of their lives on display online, Gazans themselves began to lose their claim to dignity and privacy and, in turn, started dehumanizing themselves. People posted videos begging for money and humiliating themselves on TikTok for “roses” and “ice cream”.
My frustration with what became known as “e-begging” stems from something outsiders rarely understand about Gaza’s tribal structure. Everyone belongs to a tribe, and every tribe has its own resources. During times of war, tribes forget your past mistakes; if you’re one of their own, they will help you. To add insult to injury, despite the widespread belief that much of the aid entering Gaza never reached ordinary people, very few had the courage to publicly question those who were stealing it. Instead of taking matters into their own hands and deciding their fate, they resorted to begging for help again.
All the while, Hamas leaders living in the Gulf continued repeating narratives of victory and strength that many people in Gaza had simply stopped believing. The population grew so tired of them that public criticism slowly began to emerge. By early 2025, many Gazans had come to realize that they had become little more than a card to be played—by leftist social justice activists abroad and by their own political class, from Hamas leaders to politicians in the West Bank. It didn’t immediately change people’s behavior, but it did create a growing sense that continuing down the same path offered little hope.
All the while, Hamas leaders living in the Gulf continued repeating narratives of victory and strength that many people in Gaza had simply stopped believing.
Rumors began circulating about the formation of a technocratic government for Gaza, and one by one, familiar West Bank politicians whose fortunes had long been associated with corruption were rumored to be taking positions on the committee. That was my personal breaking point.
Gaza had become a politically sedated hellhole because no one was willing to fight for it politically. After the coup in Gaza by Hamas in 2007, the Palestinian Authority didn’t succeed in reunifying the West Bank and the Strip despite every new government’s promise of doing so. After a decade and two wars, it became clear that the PA wasn’t interested in the Gaza strip: they were too comfortable governing the West Bank and benefiting from the system that sustained it. Gaza simply wasn’t attractive—or lucrative—enough to command the same attention.
Seeing how readily people accepted this new proposed government forced me to confront something I had resisted admitting: I no longer believed that occupation alone explained our political condition. For years, Gazans had lived in an autonomous territory with the opportunity, however limited, to build political institutions distinct from those of the Palestinian Authority in the settlement-filled West Bank. Instead, we regressed. We accepted the inevitable as long as the person leading us was one of our own. If Hamas had been led by anyone who wasn’t Palestinian, very few people would have accepted its ideology. As it was, we remained trapped in a submissive tribal mentality in which questioning one’s own leaders was treated as treason.
One example is our civil documentation. Our birth certificates and national identity cards are still issued through Israel. Rather than finding a way to issue our own documents while coordinating with Israeli authorities where necessary, we accepted the status quo. The result is that every child born to Gazan parents—whether inside Gaza or abroad—risks existing in bureaucratic limbo. Our tendency to blame the enemy, sit back, and wait for someone else to solve our problems has created conditions that make exploitation —including human trafficking— far easier.
Our tendency to blame the enemy, sit back, and wait for someone else to solve our problems has created conditions that make exploitation far easier.
After three years of war, the place that once had a literacy rate of 97 per cent-9 per cent now has an entire generation of children robbed of a normal childhood—and, in many cases, of a normal life. Whatever Gaza becomes after the war, it will have to be rebuilt by a generation that grew up thinking the constant buzz of the MK drone is what silence sounds like and that fighting or dying for a piece of bread is the norm.
I have spent much of my life struggling with my Gazan identity, because of rejection and constantly feeling like an outsider. Yet, despite everything, being born in Gaza is a part of me that I can neither escape nor erase.
There is now talk of new legislative elections. They may be my last attempt to engage in Palestinian political life, to try to make a difference. I am giving my people one last chance to prove that we are capable of saving ourselves, that we deserve the world’s sympathy, and that we believe we deserve a life of dignity.
An earlier version of this article appeared on the author’s Substack, Dyalaverse.
