The Crossing

I.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I was due to travel the next day and found myself riddled with anxiety, relentless questions. What if I’m not allowed to leave? What if I don’t get along with the people from Cairo, who I’d be meeting for the first time and who, like me, had been invited to participate in this event? Would the complexes of Gaza obscure my wonder and enjoyment, plunge me into silence, hesitation, fear? What does the world look like? What is the world? And what is Gaza? I had been trapped in it for all thirty-one years of my life, and had not left once.

At six a.m., the car set off toward the Rafah border crossing. Gaza was asleep, the streets completely deserted. In my memory of this pale, drowsy scene, what stands out most clearly is the Rafah crossing: not just the place itself, but also the innumerable stories about it that people have always shared. That day, for me, it was a portal of questions: a gateway to all the emotions I was about to experience, to an “other” who had always been far away, obscured—and who would, in just a few hours, become accessible, available, and so close that we would be able to interact, to converse.

We were all gathered at the border now: Gazans who’d been living under siege, sealed away from the rest of the world. We were still unsure whether we’d really be allowed through the Egyptian border terminal on the other side—to cross over into the world. We were anxious, pessimistic, apprehensive for no clear reason, and bored, anticipating long hours of waiting. I was looking into people’s faces, furtively listening to all their stories and experiences, all their advice. “Keep an eye on the bag that has your passport and money.” “Take care of your phone.” “No, they don’t let power banks in.” “Be patient—there’s still a lot of waiting to come.”

Everyone was talking at once, but all the voices faded away when it was time to cross. Suddenly everything felt possible and real and enjoyable and close and fast, all at the same time.

We were in the Egyptian terminal now. Egypt was coming closer, as was the world. As for Gaza, it was starting to recede, to grow smaller and smaller, like a finch in a huge cypress tree, like a tiny fish disappearing between the crevices of rocks.

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II.

The car made its way to Cairo through the night, piercing a desert so vast that my eyes could not see the end of it. The desert seemed limitless, just as the sea in Gaza had always appeared limitless, unfathomable. They both evoked the same sense of reverence in me: a sensation of being bare, off-balance, disoriented. The car kept moving; the road was as long as it looked. The longer we drove through the Sinai desert, the vaster the world appeared.

The world is vast, the distances immense—that’s how we picture it in Gaza, like a prisoner imagining the world outside their cell. But when I first experienced this sense of scale, something inside me was refusing to believe that the car could keep driving for so long. This road must end; a road cannot go on and on like this. In Gaza, my eyes could always see the end of things: the end of the house, the end of the street, the end of the buildings, lined up one after the other. And my first experience of distance would be an extreme one: our journey would take us through the Sinai Desert and the Western Desert, towards the oasis of Siwa in the far west of Egypt, near the border with Libya. A trip that would last over seventeen hours, interrupted only by short breaks.

It was only on that drive that I realized the true size of Gaza: Gaza which is as small as a closed fist, Gaza which can be crossed from north to south in a single hour. Gaza, where I feel like I know every one of its two million inhabitants, where every face feels familiar. Gaza has thrown us together in a very particular context, so it seems as though we know one another, as though we’re family. But now I was experiencing the kinds of distances that make the chances of running into someone slim. Here was the world: a world where people can wander around aimlessly, where people can choose to go down different paths, where someone could get lost.

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III.

Exhaustion had overcome my fellow travelers. One after another, they began to succumb to sleep. But I was awake, fully awake, my eyes as wide and alert as those of a stalked animal. I was taking everything in. My eyes were keeping track, relishing every detail, filing everything away: the desert, the trees, the small hermitages embedded deep in the Sinai desert, utterly isolated. After we crossed the Suez Canal, everything sped up. The film that was unfolding slowly in the desert suddenly became loud and overwhelming, with colors everywhere and scenes too quick to follow. My eyes were insatiable, devouring it all and trying not to miss a thing. Those same eyes had spent three decades observing the same places and the same scenes repeating themselves with great monotony and predictability in Gaza.

Arriving in Cairo by night was very different from arriving during the day. The night there was unlike any other: lights everywhere, bridges, gates, buildings, people, the Nile, the Cairo Tower, Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Museum, Kasr el-Nil Bridge. Cairo was an astonishing place, and my mind was refusing to believe that I was finally here—a place that was not just a place but also an idea, an idea that for so many years had been unreachable. For years, despair had been seeping ever-deeper into our beings, making every possibility impossible. And now the world, which had seemed so impossible and so far away, was suddenly here. Seven hours in the car, which I could have spent just waiting for something in Gaza, were enough to take us to Cairo, this old, seasoned city that had experienced everything, this city of unbelievable noise, great expanses, masses of people, and extraordinary energy.

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IV.

Siwa was a mirage: every time we thought we were about to arrive, it moved farther away. I remember the laughter of the driver who took us through the Western Desert from Cairo to Siwa. Every time I asked him how long we had left, he would laugh and say: “We’re almost there, my Gazan friend, just 300 kilometers left to go.” I would ask him for a time, and he would respond with a distance. An immense sense of awe and disorientation was unfurling inside me: I, the son of a small, shut-off place. I didn’t know anything about distances; I had no way of estimating them. All I knew was time, and time in Gaza was always short, fast, in constant motion, perhaps because of how small and hemmed-in the place itself is.

After we sailed through the Western Desert for hours on end, Siwa suddenly appeared—a miracle in that arid expanse. My first glimpse was of an enormous mass of palm trees clustered thickly together. Then, gradually, patches of water began to appear—lakes—their water blue, glittering, still. There were old, primitive houses, with roofs made of palm fronds; others were built with cement. As the car wound its way through the streets of Siwa, I gazed at all the life that had risen abruptly from that expanse of barren desert. How could life possibly thrive here?

When we arrived, we set up a large tent along the edge of the desert encircling Siwa. People from all over the world eventually gathered in it: activists, organizers, writers. As the others moved around in pairs and groups, I observed the diversity. It seemed to me like a microcosm of the world, and I, the prisoner, was suddenly surrounded by these faces and languages in the depths of a desert I did not know. I shrank as though an immense light had been shone into my eyes after long years of isolation in a dark room. I felt a strong urge to leave, for a miracle to return me to Gaza, to that small, cozy, familiar, cursed place.

I was also disappointed. This was my first experience of travel—and I suddenly wished I were experiencing large urban centers, full of life, the kind of life I’d glimpsed as we passed through Cairo. But in Siwa I was to have a different kind of experience: an experience of oneness unlike any other, an encounter that has remained with me for all the years since.

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V.

“Everyone who comes to Siwa has been invited to come here,” an Egyptian participant, Sarah, announced in the opening circle of our forum. My mind held onto her phrase, kept turning it over. Siwa is a place of revelations, and I felt it almost as soon as I arrived: I had been summoned. Here I was, at an oasis at the edge of eternity, that had been isolated for much of its history and was untouched by the trappings of modern life.

How strange it was, to have left Gaza for the first time, to have traveled this enormous distance, only to arrive at another isolated place with its own unexpected particularities. It too was relatively unchanged by Western-style urbanism, a place where olives and olive oil are an integral part of life, culture, and storytelling, just like in Gaza and in Palestine as a whole. Both places were rich in Indigenous knowledge and ways of being, there of the Amazigh, a set of learned and proud tribes.

We’d gathered in Siwa—activists, organizers, and groups from seventy different countries—for a forum on ecology, emancipatory education, and Indigenous communities. Every day that week, we attended meetings, seminars, panel discussions, research circles, and small lectures, all in that tent in the middle of the desert. There were also excursions to different parts of Siwa. We visited the fortress of Shali and Cleopatra’s Baths, the springs and the salt lakes.

The salt flats were like nothing my mind could fathom. The ground was white, made of salt, and in certain spots it cracked open, like ice, into clear pools of water: turquoise, sulphurous red, brilliant blue. In Gaza, we have a belief that salt can help alleviate sadness and heaviness. We sprinkle salt in the corners of homes where sorrow has nested and problems have taken hold. Every time I was overcome by worries, I would dip my head and body into the salty sea of Gaza, but this was not a sea.

I took off my shoes and slipped my feet into a pool of glittering blue water. Time dissipated; the salt melted away my burdens. I lay down slowly on a small mound of solid salt and thought to myself: Maybe this salt can absorb all the torments of Gaza. And in fact everything receded, began to appear smaller than it was. Gaza was my own exhausted body, contorted with fear and war and isolation, and on that mound I felt it releasing, my spirit awakening as though from a thirty-year-long sleep. It felt like I was returning, but to where? To the deepest sense of stillness. To safety and rest. Something akin to coming home.

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VI.

On our last day in Siwa, the participants formed a circle for me to share my experiences. As they sat around me in a large ring in the middle of the tent, I spoke about leaving Gaza. About all the complications of the crossing, about a young man traveling for the first time after three decades of his life had passed. I spoke about all the fear, joy, awe, wonder, all the moments in which I felt the urge to recoil, to fold back into myself. And as I spoke, I felt something in the tent shift. Gaza, for me, was the center of the universe—and I discovered that most people knew little about it, knew nothing of the suffering there.

I saw the faces around me change, one by one. I saw surprise, disbelief, tears in some people’s eyes. For the first time I felt what it was like to be with people who didn’t know me, who’d met me by chance in a moment out of time, and who chose to unite themselves with my story and my experience. I knew, in a way I had never known before, the meaning of the word solidarity.

We closed the circle with a ritual. After I spoke, I stood in the middle, and the participants stood around me, hands raised, making humming, murmuring sounds, like the buzzing of bees, warm and comforting. With my eyes closed, I let the sounds seep into me, into my mind and heart and nerve cells. I was overcome with a sensation I can’t describe. Something luminous, strange, and clear was pouring into me, settling into me, at once subtle and strong.

Now, in Gaza, we’re experiencing a war uglier than anything, conditions of brutality and horror among the most hideous inflicted on human beings in the modern era. But whenever I recall those days, I feel a moment of reprieve from my desolation. I was lucky to have that experience, and I knew then, as I have to know now, that no matter how brutal, cruel, and indifferent the world appears, there are always many hearts that can touch mine.