EXCERPTS:
On the evening of October 7, 2023, I hugged my mother when she burst out crying as Israeli fighter jets indiscriminately pounded the whole of Gaza.
I fear there is no limit to how far Israel can go in its genocide on Gaza.
If I have to be honest, I did not survive by hanging on to life. No, I survived by dropping the “f” in life and holding on to “lie”.
The more I lied to myself, the more I sustained my fragile existence.
I still remember the first lie I told myself. It was long before the genocide.
I remember telling myself after the 2008-09 Israeli aggression against Gaza that I would never witness something like that war ever again. It was a naive little lie. I witnessed war again in 2012, and again in 2014, and again in 2021, and yet again in May 2023.
I chose to tell her and myself the truth: that this was going to be the final episode of our miserable lives. I felt we were going to die one way or another in what was to follow. She felt the same way; that’s why she was crying.
But how can one exist in total acceptance of imminent death? Human beings by nature want to live. So I started lying to myself again. READ MORE from Al Jazeera
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