Today, Israel is succeeding in annihilating and displacing Gaza and its people, but small moments and spaces of daily popular resistance are growing and multiplying, starting from children’s play areas, to collective cooking, to entertainment activities for young and old, to the almost daily messages broadcast by children, women and youth about what is happening, to restoring life in every neighborhood from which the Israelis leave or the bombing stops, to videos of Gazan recipes that women and children teach people through online platforms, so that they may know what Gaza is. Daily attempts to stay alive, and to chew on life even in the heart of the desert, are the daily form of resistance by ordinary people, breathing life into what remains of the city, its camps and villages.
We see in these examples stories about the people of Gaza that we did not know. Here, we seek to draw a picture of the place that contains them, despite the Israeli annihilation of it. Gaza is still the physical form of the history of its people, and the current war has only added a new phase to this memory. In this text, in its first and second parts, we reflect on the genocide taking place in Gaza today at all levels, most notably the spatial genocide that seeks to replace the current map with one that proves the Zionist narrative of “a land without a people, for a people without a land.”