“I feel I am 7 wars old,” said Eman Alhaj Ali, facing a sea of Palestinian flags and a crowd of thousands at Dublin’s National Demonstration for Palestine in May. The march commemorated the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (or “catastrophe” in English), the Zionist movement of Palestinian displacement that led to the creation of the state of Israel. When asked her age, this is often her response, a way of using dark humor to create laughter during times of struggle, she says.
Alhaj Ali is a Palestinian journalist, translator, and storyteller from Gaza whose work has been published in The Nation, The Irish Examiner, Al Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and more. She is a contributor and member of We Are Not Numbers, a platform that mentors and shares Palestinian voices and stories. In April, Alhaj Ali was able to evacuate Gaza and relocate to Dublin, where she is pursuing her postgraduate studies in Applied Linguistics at Trinity.
After graduating in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and translation from the Islamic University of Gaza, Alhaj Ali, a lifelong lover of writing and reading, was eager to begin her career. Two months later, however, the war began. Soon, she, her parents, and four siblings were “squeezing our lives in backpacks” that became lighter with each evacuation. For her and the people of Gaza — often described as the world’s “largest open-air prison” — conflict had become the norm, and violence was something she had witnessed since childhood.
“Like many children in Gaza, my life has been shaped by trauma.”
Amid Israel’s bombing campaign — deemed by various notable genocide and human rights experts as genocidal — her siblings’ childhoods have been “stolen”, she says, by bombs and displacement, and sleeping under the sounds of missiles and drones.
“It’s like living through another Nakba.”
After evacuating her family home, Alhaj Ali would later learn that it had been destroyed.
“All of our memories had been turned into ashes.”
Storytelling, writing, and reading had always been her passions; however, they soon became something she practiced “out of necessity” during a time of what she describes as “cultural vandalism” in Palestine — the erasure of cultural identity and history. More than half of Gaza’s religious and cultural sites and more than 90% of schools — including Alhaj Ali’s alma mater, the Islamic University of Gaza — have been destroyed by Israel, according to the United Nations.
“Words hold an incredible power”, she says, and are her way of “bearing witness to the atrocities”.
Storytelling in Gaza, however, is a field marked by danger. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Cost of War project has deemed Israel’s war the “deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded”, and the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded last year as the deadliest to date for reporters since 1992, when they began keeping records. The United Nations reports that at least 247 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. Consequently, Alhaj Ali says, this fosters a censorship of Palestinian voices and stories, disconnecting the rest of the world from the reality on the ground in Gaza.
Alhaj Ali’s mentor and professor at IUG, Dr. Refaat Alareer, is one of many storytellers whom Israeli forces have killed during the war. A co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, Alareer committed his life to mentoring and uplifting the voices of Palestinians. Often referred to as “The Voice of Gaza”, Alareer encouraged Alhaj Ali to use her pen as a form of resistance. Sharing stories from the collective memory of Palestinians, Ahaj Ali says, is a form of resistance, creating a narrative that emphasizes their humanity, rather than statistics.
Though she was able to find refuge in Ireland, Alhaj Ali’s family remains in Gaza. When there is no internet connection, she says that days and even weeks can go by without hearing from them. She feels a sense of sadness that, although she is living in safety, her family and those in Gaza are still suffering under siege. “ I didn’t expect that this would be my journey or my story in my twenties”, she says. Before leaving, she promised her siblings that when the time came, they “[would] come back” and “gather again, under the ceiling of our home”.
In the foreword of We Were Seeds, an anthology of articles and poems published to “benefit the victims of the genocide in Palestine”, Alhaj Ali writes that “[Palestinian’s] fundamental desire is to live peacefully in their homeland, free from fear and violence, and to raise their children in an environment conducive to education and normalcy—just like any other child around the globe. Ultimately, they seek the most basic right of all: the ability to coexist in peace within their own land.”
