Grieving Gaza on Google Maps
Snapshots of a people, vibrantly alive.
Sometimes, I pull up the Gaza strip on Google Maps, just to look at the digital record what was there not long ago. The smallness of the land strikes me every single time.
I look at the reviews of random hotels, museums, public beaches, and restaurants — places where Palestinian people spent their mundane moments — the words “Temporarily closed” now hanging under all of them with infuriating banality.
Every park is closed, every beach is closed, every university, closed -- but Google retains details about whether these spaces were wheelchair accessible when they still existed, and what time of day they'd be opening if they still did.
I'm trying to understand the lives of the Palestinian people better, but I'm still looking at it through such a myopically American lens. What shops did you go to? Did it have good reviews? Is this where you spent money in order to pass time? Have you called to see if it's still open? But I know the reality's completely alien to me.
In the reviews for the Al-Qarara Cultural Museum, Palestinian people who may now be dead speak about how important it is to preserve & remember Palestinian history.
Displayed in the museum were over 3,500 historical artifacts, including mosaics from the Byzantine period, Canaanite pottery, Crusader swords, an olive press that was over 3,000 years old, and jewelry worn by Palestinian women before the Nakba.
Created in 2016 by Najla Abu Nahla and Muhammad Abu Lahia and housed in a former grain silo, the museum hosted regular visits from local schools and university researchers. For seven years the couple received, examined, and catalogued historic items and ancient relics, all of it now gone.
There’s an entire human universe of stories everywhere you click. Here’s a water park with mixed reviews, loved by some, loathed and described as “scary” by others.
A Palestinian Schlitterbahn, perhaps. But there I am again, searching for American analogues to a life I’ve never known.
Google Street View isn't available in most of the strip, aside from a small stretch of the beach. This is in sharp contrast to Israel, which has been thoroughly documented by Google’s cheery camera-mounted vehicles.
But the satellite view and the local user-uploaded street photographs of the strip are plenty tough to look at. Here are the supermarkets and schools, the houses, some with pools in the back yard, the mosques and churches, the farmland, pretty much all of it gone now, so many of the people who lived here now dead.
As a person living in the imperial core, under the rule of the government responsible for this genocide, most of my knowledge of what is happening has been shaped by digital records of the carnage. The Palestinian people have had no choice but to broadcast every moment of destruction and death that they can, in hopes of stirring the world to action. And it has changed the collective consciousness on the Palestinian cause, even if we remain too powerless to do much about it beyond buying e-sims, rallying in the streets, preparing for the future collapse of the empire, and donating to GoFundMe's.
It's been necessary for the Palestinian people to record their darkest moments and share them with us, but when the steady stream of death is explained away by an Israeli government claiming human shields and an American government still repeating myths of mass rapes, all the details drop into one long, horrifying din of dehumanization. To a large degree, the United States and Israel want us to see the Palestinian people as bloodied bodies choking out their last breaths on the pavement of a collapsed hospital, nameless, innumerable, and supposedly defeated.
That is why, for me, looking at the digital records Palestinians kept of themselves for their own purposes is such a necessary corrective.
These are the places where Palestinian people go. Here’s what they care about. Here’s the local shop owner who gets on their nerves. Here are their friends and bicycles, their homes, the nearest clothing shop, the independent study courses they carefully grew into a burgeoning field of research.
Here they are alive, in defiance of seventy-five years of violent repression, breathing life into public markets, halls of knowledge, places of worship, and stores of food.
So much of the physical evidence of this living has been destroyed by Israel. But the living itself is not gone. Palestinians will keep breathing life back into the place, as they always defiantly have. In time that breath will spread from the sea to the river, repopulating the entire region with new Palestinian routines and histories.
The Gaza I can see on Google Maps was built by a Palestinian people who had already lost everything. In the rubble that’s still so poorly documented by the press and big tech company cameras, life stays springing forth.
We should not look only to the bodies of the dead, much as they deserve honoring for their martyrdom. We must see the Palestinians alive.
Though I keep trying to “let this radicalize [me] rather than lead to despair,” so much of the news and horrors I am unable to digest, too heartbroken to comprehend. This got through.
Thank you, Devon; this was beautiful. Grateful for your voice.