Sojod's Story

Do you know about loss? Let me tell you a story.

Sojod grew up in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. When she was a child, in 2005, Israel dismantled its settlements there, and hope seemed possible. However, the next year, Hamas won a majority in the government in open elections. This caused a split between the Palestinian Authority and the government in the Gaza Strip. Around the time she was in high school, the tiny, occupied territory she grew up in descended into civil war.

The border wall in Rafah City

The US, Israel, and Egypt organized a blockade, so that no goods could be imported or exported from Gaza. Telecommunications, sanitation, water, electricity, and even the airspace overhead are all tightly controlled by Israel. When Saudi-lead peace talks collapsed in the face of the blockade, her government and militant groups in Gaza began firing rockets into Israel.

Despite all of this, Sojod finished school and got married. She gave birth to a daughter, and their new family had a little home in Rafah. Things were never easy for Palestinian families in the Gaza strip. Because Rafah was right beside the border of Egypt and Israel, many homes near the wall were demolished by Israeli forces, to prevent the smuggling of weapons. Moreover, Israeli rocket attacks laid waste to many more homes, schools, hospitals, and other kinds of infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip.

Rafah City circa 2011

Imagine what it is like, living under a blockade with constant rocket bombardments. Picture your life, if the buildings that you see, work in, and visit every day could explode without notice. Imagine the fear and trepidation of sending your child to school everyday, and not knowing whether or not she will ever come home again. Eventually, the misfortune of the Gaza Strip became the misfortune of Sojod's family, and in 2011 her home was totally destroyed. Despite having to pick through the rubble for all of her earthly possessions, Sojod is among the lucky, because her family lived.

Sojod in front of the ruins of her home

Since this photo was taken, the situation in Rafah got much worse before it got better. Israeli retaliation to Hamas' rocket strikes intensified in the summer of 2014. In Rafah, everything was shelled, and so many lost their lives that the morgues literally could not cope with the number of bodies. In spite of all of this adversity, some of Rafah is still standing, and many are beginning to rebuild, including Sojod and her family. They need a small loan, to cover the cost of rent and other expenses while their home is rebuilt. She is so close to her goal, and you have the power to give her family a new start. Please consider lending to Sojod via kiva.org: https://www.kiva.org/lend/1059994

I offer this story of loss and hope in the knowledge that the facts as I have presented them are biased. The situation in Israel-Palestine is politically and emotionally charged. Often, one can’t advocate empathy for the people involved without being labeled either an anti-semitic terrorist sympathizer, or a simpering defender of militarism and colonialism. I do not offer Sojod's story because I hate Israel or Jewish people, but because I want you to see Palestinian humanity.

On the news, the agony of loss on both sides of this conflict is reduced to statistics: how many dead, how many injured. Numbers can't tell us about loss. Numbers can't tell us about hope. Numbers reduce the horror of death into something abstract and mundane. So instead of numbers, I want you to see Sojod. I want you to know that every time you hear a statistic about the number of buildings destroyed in some conflict, behind them is a story like hers.

I'd like to close with another story, from an interview with famous American writer Alice Walker:

"It’s like 11 days after 9/11, I gave a talk to midwives in Albuquerque. And I think people were wondering about whether we should bomb Afghanistan, and what to do, and so forth. But I was saying to them, these are all women who are there at the moment of birth. They are the ones who know what it feels like when a woman is in labor, when you don’t want any kind of disturbance around you. So I was talking about how not a woman in that room, or there were a few male midwives, too — or men — would want to be in the middle of a war trying to give birth. And so I was trying to help us all see, just to see with feeling. To see with feeling, not just to gaze. But when you see something, when you think of a pregnant woman pacing the floor, wondering if the roof is going to stay over her head, or whether something is going to drop through the roof onto her and her unborn baby. When you can help people to feel what that’s like, then there’s a possibility of changing them."