The Electronic Intifada 25 November 2024
Staying alive is the reflex of the oppressed. (Hadi Daoud / APA Images)
The air was heavy, filled with ash and smoke that burned my throat with every breath.
I crouched behind a broken wall, holding onto a bottle of dirty water that I couldn’t afford to waste.
Overhead, the sound of shrapnel tearing through the sky was deafening. Somewhere behind me, a tank came closer.
I didn’t think; I just moved. My legs carried me to another corner, another fleeting sense of safety.
I wasn’t brave and I wasn’t a hero. I was just trying to survive.
During the genocide, I stayed in northern Gaza for seven months.
People call this refusal to be displaced a heroic act. They talk about me like I’m some kind of legend, immortalized in songs and videos.
But what they don’t see – what they can’t see – is that all I was doing was following the raw instinct to live.
The world loves to mythologize Gazans, to turn our survival into stories of bravery and resilience. But does anyone stop to ask what it really means to live through this?
Has anyone ever wondered how we manage to survive the endless cycle of death, destruction and loss? I don’t think so.
Instead, we’re reduced to symbols, stripped of our humanity. It’s easier to call us heroes than to confront the unbearable reality of our lives.
Enduring the unendurable
In Gaza, survival isn’t about courage. It’s about enduring the unendurable.
It’s about drinking polluted water, knowing it will make you sick, because there’s no clean water left. It’s about eating scraps of food meant for animals because hunger doesn’t care about dignity.
It’s about running barefoot through rubble-strewn streets, hiding from shrapnel and tanks and all the different types of weapons, and hoping you make it to the next moment. It’s about watching friends and family die, over and over again, and somehow still getting up the next day.
But survival in Gaza is more than just the physical act of staying alive. It’s the nothingness, the emptiness that creeps in when you face death.
It’s the sound of tanks rolling through neighborhoods and the ability to recognize the distinct tones of different weapons as they fire. It’s the flour and food massacres, the smell of blood and gunpowder mixed with the acrid burn of white phosphorus.
It’s the way your body starts to react before your brain can process what’s happening because you’ve been through it so many times before.
These are the details no one talks about. They’re too raw, too painful, too human.
The world doesn’t want to know about the children who scream in their sleep, the parents who cry silently in the corners of destroyed buildings, or the people who walk through the rubble searching not just for what remains of their belongings but for the rest of the body parts or bones of their loved ones.
These stories don’t fit the narrative of heroism. They are the quiet, unspoken truths of survival that the world prefers to ignore.
Surviving by instinct
During those seven months, I survived by instinct. I followed birds to find scraps of food, slept in corners where shrapnel might not reach, and prayed that the walls around me would hold.
Books and philosophy became my escape – not because they made things better, but because they gave me something else to focus on.
Through it all, one phrase stayed with me, echoing in my mind: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.” These words from Refaat Alareer, my professor and mentor, became a lifeline.
They reminded me that survival wasn’t just for myself but for those who couldn’t speak any more. His words anchored me to a purpose I didn’t know I had, even as everything around me fell apart.
But even that wasn’t strength. It was a survival mechanism, a way to endure the endless mad cycle of fear and loss.
When people call me a hero for surviving, they don’t see the reality of what that survival entails. They don’t see the sickness, the hunger, the terror or the numbness that sets in when you’ve seen too much death.
To call us heroes is to misunderstand what it means to survive in Gaza. Heroism implies choice, agency and a sense of purpose.
But survival in Gaza isn’t a choice – it’s an instinct, a compulsion. It’s not about bravery; it’s about necessity.
The world doesn’t want to see us as human.
It’s easier to celebrate our supposed resilience than to grapple with the fact that we are ordinary people enduring extraordinary pain. By mythologizing us, the world distances itself from our suffering.
It turns us into symbols, stripping away our complexity and reducing our lives to a single narrative.
But we are not symbols. We are not legends.
We are people, clinging to life in a place where life is constantly under threat. We feel the hollowness and the despair.
We know the smell of blood, burnt flesh and white phosphorus. We hear the sounds of tanks and bombs and recognize the distinct cracks of different weapons.
These are not the experiences of heroes. They are the experiences of humans forced to survive unimaginable horrors.
I am not a hero. I am not a symbol.
I am a person who survived by following the most basic human instinct: to live.
And yet, the world continues to celebrate survival in Gaza as something extraordinary, as if enduring genocide is something to be proud of.
If the world truly cared about us, it wouldn’t need to mythologize our suffering.
It wouldn’t turn our pain into songs and videos while ignoring the reality of what we endure. Instead, it would see us for what we are: human beings, living through unimaginable pain and trying to hold on to the smallest fragments of dignity.
Reflex of the oppressed
Survival in Gaza isn’t a triumph. It’s a necessity.
It’s not something to be celebrated, but something to be understood.
And until the world stops looking for heroes in our suffering, it will never truly understand what it means to survive this mad pain and genocide.
Sometimes I want to scream and ask: Do we, the people of Gaza, not dream as you dream?
Do we not feel despair when hope is stripped away?
Are we not wounded when bombs tear through our streets, our homes, our hearts? If you cut us, do we not bleed the same crimson blood as anyone else?
If you see us standing, does that make us unbreakable? If we endure, does that make us invincible?
No. We survive because we must, not because we are made of something more.
We cry as you cry. We grieve as you grieve.
And though we are called heroes, legends and symbols of resistance, we are still flesh and bone, still hearts that falter under the weight of sorrow.
Do we not fear?
Do we not ache with the emptiness of all we have lost?
Do we not crumble when the weight becomes too much?
Yet you watch us, from afar, and speak of resilience as if it is armor.
But our resilience is not born of choice. It is the reflex of the oppressed, the instinct to hold on when there is nothing left.
If you see us, do not call us invincible. Do not call us mythical.
Call us what we are: human. Humans who bleed, who mourn, who hope and who sometimes fall under the burden of simply existing.
This is the reality of survival in Gaza. It is not heroism; it is humanity stripped bare.
It is the basic, raw instinct to live.
Roaa Shamallakh is a writer and translator from Gaza.
