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<\/h5>\n<\/h5>\n<\/p>\n
Back in the summer of 2021, we were working on a special issue devoted to Gaza. You\u2019ll remember that Gaza had already been subjected to withering military assaults by Israel in 2008-2009 and in 2014 (Operation Protective Edge), which wrought a great deal of destruction and death. Mosab Abu Toha was an aspiring writer, who, like most Gazan youth had lived through those crises. In 2014, he graduated from the now destroyed Islamic University of Gaza, and participated in We Are Not Numbers<\/a> (WANN), a youth-led Palestinian initiative that until today provides training in English to developing storyteller\u2013journalists, allowing them a better chance of reaching the world beyond Gaza\u2019s closed borders. Greatly inspired and partly led by the late scholar and poet Dr. Refaat Alareer, WANN has launched the careers of a number of \u00a0writers from Gaza who have gone on to make a name for themselves on the international stage, including Shahd Safi, who has written for the Los Angeles Times<\/a> and Mondoweiss, and Hind Khoudary<\/a>, one of the most prominent young journalists left in Gaza, who has been tirelessly documenting the genocide for Al-Jazeera, among other media outlets.<\/p>\n Mosab, a lover and collector of books, was committed to building his life in Gaza and contributing to its cultural scene. \u00a0He created the Edward Said Memorial Library, stocking it with English-language books and he wrote honest poems about his life in a second language. The work was so good that he caught the attention of poet-translator Ammiel Alcalay, who then strongly recommended him to TMR.<\/p>\n And so, in July 2021, in TMR 11 \u2022 GAZA<\/a>, we ran four poems by Mosab<\/a>, which later appeared in his first collection, Things You May Find in My Ear<\/em><\/a>, published by City Lights in 2022. Less than a year later came Hamas\u2019 surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the next day, a vengeful onslaught by Israel on the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Once again, the Palestinians of Gaza were forced into mobilizing to survive yet another Israeli assault. Like so many of his friends, colleagues and readers abroad, we found ourselves frantically following Mosab\u2019s social media dispatches as he chronicled, in both English and Arabic, the extraordinary terrors and daily indignities of Israel\u2019s genocidal war.<\/p>\n In the winter of 2023, Israeli bombs, likely manufactured in and supplied to Israel by the United States, destroyed the four-story flat where Mosab and his extended family had been living. Everyone dispersed, and Mosab and his wife Maram began considering the possibility of leaving Gaza. \u201cWhen Maram and I talk about leaving,\u201d \u00a0he wrote in his first New Yorker<\/a> essay published in December of 2023, \u201cwe understand that the decision is not only about us. It is about our three children. In Gaza, a child is not really a child. Our eight-year-old son, Yazzan, has been talking about fetching his toys from the ruins of our house. He should be learning how to draw, how to play soccer, how to take a family photo. Instead, he is learning how to hide when bombs fall.\u201d<\/p>\n The family decided to head to Cairo. On the way to the Rafah border crossing with his wife and children, Mosab was pulled out of the line at a checkpoint, detained and beaten by the Israeli army.\u00a0 He was already known enough by then that news of his kidnapping led to an avalanche of protests about his kidnapping, and it is this perhaps that earned his subsequent release. From Cairo, the family went on to the US, where Mosab continued writing about life in Gaza for the New Yorker and assembling his second collection of poems. Forest of Noise<\/em><\/a> was published to much acclaim by Knopf last October.<\/p>\n While Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists were already facing repression under the Biden administration, with student protesters on campuses across the country hounded by administrators and often rounded up and arrested by local authorities, the situation became exponentially more dire after the new American administration came to power in January 2025. Following the arrest of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil by ICE, Mosab found himself on a list among a number of other activists, compiled by the extremist Zionist group Betar to identify \u201cundesirables\u201d for ICE deportations. Fearing for his safety, Mosab made the heartrending decision to cancel his Forest of Noise<\/em> book tour, feeling it safer to stay close to home, with his family.<\/p>\n Just before the administrative chaos was unleashed in full, however, we had the good fortune to be able to include Mosab in a presentation of our book Sum\u016bd:\u00a0A New Palestinian Reader<\/em><\/a> at NYU on the 5th<\/sup> of February, in a panel that included me and my co-editor Malu Halasa, as well as fellow contributor and TMR senior editor Lina Mounzer, and NYU moderator Mohamad Bazzi. Mosab read his poems to a standing ovation, warmly thronged by readers and admirers in the aftermath of the panel.<\/p>\n While extremist pro-Israel groups continue to focus their attention on any and all pro-Palestinian voices, hoping to intimidate them into silence, Mosab insists on continuing to make his voice heard in US and international fora. His poetry, essays and activism compel us to face the horrors Gaza is being made to endure, including forced starvation and massacres by the IDF. He also insists on staying in the US \u2014 after having already made the heartbreaking decision to flee home once, he and his family are reluctant to tear out the roots they\u2019ve begun to grow in this new place. They are already en route to citizenship and despite an openly hostile administration, the enormous amount of solidarity and support for Gaza and for the Palestinian cause in general among so many in the US is further encouragement to remain and fight from within the empire that is funding, arming and providing political support and cover for the Zionist state.<\/p>\n Having known so much war over the course of his young lifetime, Mosab has in effect become one of the most cogent and moving voices for Gazans struggling to survive Israel\u2019s savage punishment of the Palestinian population. Israel has broken international law time and again by bombing into oblivion hospitals, schools, universities and houses of worship, killing men, women and children indiscriminately. The rules of war as described in the Geneva Conventions have been ignored by Israel and abused, with impunity. More than 50,000 people are dead, with over 100,000 wounded. In fact, according to the Lancet<\/a>, the numbers are probably much higher.<\/p>\n Mosab Abu Toha\u2019s 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary<\/a> was awarded for his series of essays on Gaza published over the course of 2023-2024 in the New Yorker. In celebrating his win on X, Mosab quoted Dr. Refaat Alareer: \u201cLet it bring hope \/ Let it be a tale.\u201d While Alareer was tragically murdered by Israel, his proteges from We Are Not Numbers continue his legacy, fulfilling the project\u2019s fundamental mission of allowing Gaza\u2019s writers to represent themselves and their homeland in their own words. On behalf of The Markaz Review and our valued members and readers, we congratulate Mosab Abu Toha on his Pulitzer win. The prize recognizes the supreme timeliness and urgency of Mosab\u2019s words, and reminds us that we are all implicated in this urgent, historical moment as a premeditated genocide unfolds before the eyes of the entire world. Nothing could be a starker illustration of the fact that none of us are free until Palestine and Palestinians are free.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n A<\/strong><\/p>\n An apple that fell from the table on a dark evening when manmade \u201cAm\u201d is the linking verb that follows \u201cI\u201d in the present tense when B<\/strong><\/p>\n A book that doesn\u2019t mention my language or my country, and Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn C<\/strong><\/p>\n Gaza is a city where tourists gather to take photos next to destroyed A country that exists only in my mind. Its flag has no room to fly D<\/strong><\/p>\n Dar means house. My grandparents left their house behind in Dreams of children and their parents, of listening to songs, or E<\/strong><\/p>\n An email account that I used when the power was on, the email How easy it becomes to recognize what kind of aircraft it is: an F<\/strong><\/p>\n Friends from school, from the neighborhood, from childhood. The Fish in our sea that the fishermen cannot catch because the Israeli G<\/strong><\/p>\n How are you, Mosab? I\u2019m good. I hate this word. It has no meaning When I was asked to fill out a form for my J-1 visa application, H<\/strong><\/p>\n If a helicopter stops in the sky over Gaza, we know it\u2019s going to My friend Elise told me hey is a slang word and shouldn\u2019t be used. I<\/strong><\/p>\n Images on the walls of buildings, a child who was shot by an I wake up ill when gloomy ideas about what might\u2019ve happened to J<\/strong><\/p>\n Once I sent a picture of my desk in Gaza to a friend in the United When I sent that photo, I was jobless. About 47 percent of people in K<\/strong><\/p>\n My grandfather kept the key to his house in Yaffa in 1948. He In Gaza you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re guilty of. It feels like living L<\/strong><\/p>\n I speak Arabic and English, but I don\u2019t know in what language my Light is the opposite of heavy or dark. In Gaza, when the electricity M<\/strong><\/p>\n Marhaba means hi or welcome. We say Marhaba to everyone we My dad used to prepare milk for us with some qirshalah before N<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2014, about 2,139 people were killed, 579 of them were A nail is used to join two pieces of wood or to hang things on O<\/strong><\/p>\n Yaffa is known around the world for its oranges. My grandmother, In Gaza, we had a clay oven that our neighbor Muneer built for us. P<\/strong><\/p>\n A poem is not just words placed on a line. It\u2019s a cloth. Mahmoud On July 23, 2014, a friend called and said, \u201cEzzat was killed.\u201d I What\u2019s your name? Mosab. Where are you from? Palestine. What\u2019s Q<\/strong><\/p>\n We were watching a soccer match. Comments and shouts filled the Al-Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem. I have never been to al-Quds. It\u2019s R<\/strong><\/p>\n I was born in November. My mother told me she was walking on the S<\/strong><\/p>\n I like to go to the beach and watch the sun as it sinks into the sea. My son\u2019s name is Yazzan. He was born in 2015, or a year after the T<\/strong><\/p>\n In summer, I drink tea with mint. In winter, I add dried sage. They once said Palestine will be free tomorrow. When is tomorrow? U<\/strong><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t raining that day, but I took my umbrella anyway. When In August 2014, Israel bombed my university\u2019s administration V<\/strong><\/p>\n When we moved from Cambridge to Syracuse, I looked out the In Gaza, you can find a man planting a rose in the hollow space of W<\/strong><\/p>\n One day, we were sleeping in our house. A bomb fell on a nearby In August 2014 after the fifty-one days of Israeli onslaught, the walls in X<\/strong><\/p>\n When I was wounded in January 2009, I was sixteen. I was taken to For Christmas, a friend gave the kids a xylophone. It had one wooden Y<\/strong><\/p>\n Yaffa is my daughter\u2019s name. I put my ears near her mouth when How did you leave Gaza? Do you plan to return? You should stay Z<\/strong><\/p>\n When I was in the fifth grade, our science teacher wanted us to visit We use a zero article with most proper nouns. My name and that Poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha who grew up in Gaza under the bombs has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":331,"featured_media":37000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2656,11,34,51],"tags":[4421,3922,718,3124,1288,1318,1436,3387],"coauthors":[2196],"class_list":["post-36995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-editorial","category-poetry","category-tmr-weekly","tag-beit-lahia","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-palestine","tag-palestinian-poet","tag-rafah","tag-starvation","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Mosab](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Mosab-Abu-Toha-and-books.jpg\")
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\n![\"SUMUD](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/SUMUD-Malu-Halasa-Mosab-Abu-Toha-Lina-Mounzer-Jordan-Elgrably-Feb-5-2025-NYU-photo-Shireen-Saad-1000.jpg\")
\nMosab Abu Toha<\/h4>\n
PALESTINE A\u2013Z*<\/h4>\n
\nlightning flashed through the kitchen, the streets, and the
\nsky, rattling the cupboards and breaking the dishes.<\/p>\n
\nI am no longer present, when I\u2019m shattered.<\/p>\n
\nhas maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an
\nillegitimate child on Mother Earth.<\/p>\n
\ninto the ground by bullets.<\/p>\n
\nbuildings or graveyards.<\/p>\n
\nfreely, but there is space on the coffins of my countrymen.<\/p>\n
\n1948 near Yaffa beach. A tree my father told me about stood in
\nthe front yard.<\/p>\n
\nwatching plays at Al-Mishal Cultural Center. Israel destroyed it in
\nAugust 2018. I hate August. But plays are still performed in Gaza.
\nGaza is the stage.<\/p>\n
\nthrough which I smelled overseas air. I used it first to send photos
\nto my aunt in Jordan, who we last saw in 2000.<\/p>\n
\nF-16, helicopter, or a drone? What kind of a bullet it was: from a
\ngunboat, an M-16, a tank, or an Apache? It\u2019s all about the sound.<\/p>\n
\nbooks in my living room in Gaza, the poems in my notebooks, still
\nlonely. The three friends I lost to the 2014 onslaught: Ezzat, Ammar,
\nand Ismael. Ezzat was born in Algeria, Ammar in Jordan, Ismael on
\na farm. We buried them all under the cold ground.<\/p>\n
\ngunboats care about sea life in the Mediterranean. They once fished
\nat the Gaza beach with a barrage of shells, and Huda Ghalia lost
\nher father, stepmother, and five siblings in June 2006. I walked
\nin their funeral procession to the cemetery. Blood was still fresh
\non their clothes. They had poured out some perfume to cover the
\nstench. Over time my hate for perfume grew intense.<\/p>\n
\nto me. Your English is good, Mosab! Thanks.<\/p>\n
\nmy country, Palestine, was not on the list. But lucky for me, my
\ngender was.<\/p>\n
\nshoot a rocket. It doesn\u2019t see if a target is close to children playing
\nmarbles or soccer in the street.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cEnglish teachers would faint at what goes on today in written
\nEnglish,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\nIsraeli sniper, or killed during an air raid en route to school. Her
\npicture was placed on her desk at school. Her picture stares at the
\nblackboard, while the air sits in her chair.<\/p>\n
\nme come in my dreams, what if I had stopped for a few seconds at
\nthe window when a bullet from nowhere ripped through the glass.<\/p>\n
\nStates. I wanted to show that I was fine. On the desk were some
\nbooks, my laptop, and a glass of strawberry juice.<\/p>\n
\nGaza have no work. But while writing these lines, I\u2019m trying to
\nstart a literary magazine. I still don\u2019t know what to name it.<\/p>\n
\nthought they would return in a few days. His name was Hasan.
\nThe house was destroyed. Others built a new one in its place.
\nHasan died in Gaza in 1986. The key has rusted but still exists
\nsomewhere, longing for the old wooden door.<\/p>\n
\nin a Kafka novel.<\/p>\n
\nfate is written. I\u2019m not sure if that would change anything.<\/p>\n
\nis cut off, we turn on the lights, even in broad daylight. That way,
\nwe know when the power\u2019s back.<\/p>\n
\nsee. It\u2019s like a warm hug. We don\u2019t use it, however, when soldiers
\nor their bullets or bombs visit us. Such guests not only leave their
\nshit, but also take everything we have.<\/p>\n
\nschool. I was in third grade, and my mother was at hospital taking
\ncare of my brother. My brother died in 2016.<\/p>\n
\nchildren, around 11,100 were children, around 13,000 buildings.
\nwere destroyed. I lost three friends. But it\u2019s not about numbers. Even
\nyears, they are not numbers.<\/p>\n
\nthe wall. In 2009, the Israelis targeted an ambulance with a nail
\nbomb near my house. Some were killed. I saw many nails on our
\nneighbor\u2019s newly painted wall.<\/p>\n
\nKhadra, tried to take some oranges with her in 1948, but the
\nshelling was heavy. The oranges fell on the ground, the earth drank
\ntheir juice. It was sweet, I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n
\nWhen my mother wanted to bake, I fed it wood stems or cardboard
\nto heat it for the bread. The woody stems were made from dried
\nplants: pepper, eggplant, and cornstalks.<\/p>\n
\nDarwish wanted to build his home, his exile, from all the words
\nin the world. I weave my poems with my veins. I want to build a
\npoem like a solid home, but hopefully not with my bones.<\/p>\n
\nasked which Ezzat. \u201cEzzat, your friend.\u201d My phone slipped from
\nmy hand, and I began to run, not knowing where.<\/p>\n
\nyour mother tongue? Arabic, but she\u2019s sick. What\u2019s the color of
\nyour skin? There is not enough light to help me see.<\/p>\n
\nroom. The power was cut off, and everything became quiet. We
\ncould hear our breathing in the dark.<\/p>\n
\naround sixty miles from Gaza. People who live 5,000 miles away can
\nmove there, while I cannot even visit.<\/p>\n
\nbeach with my father. It turned stormy and began to rain. My mother
\nfelt pain, and an hour later, she gave birth to me. I love the rain and the
\nsea, the last two things I heard before I came into this horrible world.<\/p>\n
\nShe\u2019s going to shine on nicer places, I think to myself.<\/p>\n
\n2014 war. This is how we date things. Once he saw a swarm of
\nclouds. He shouted, \u201cDad, some bombs. Watch out!\u201d He thought
\nthe clouds were bomb smoke. Even nature confuses us.<\/p>\n
\nAnyone who visits, even if it\u2019s a neighbor knocking at the door to
\nask about what day or date it is, I offer them tea. Offering tea is
\nlike saying Marhaba.<\/p>\n
\nWhat is freedom? How long does it last?<\/p>\n
\nan F-16 flew over the town, I opened my umbrella to hide. Kids
\nthought I was a clown.<\/p>\n
\nbuilding. The English department was turned into a ruin. My
\ngraduation ceremony got postponed. Families of the dead attended,
\nto receive not a degree, but a portrait of their child.<\/p>\n
\nwindow of the U-Haul van. What a huge country America is,
\nI thought. Why did Zionists occupy Palestine and still build
\nsettlements and kill us in Gaza and the West Bank? Why don\u2019t
\nthey live here in America? Why can\u2019t we come here to live and
\nwork? My friend heard me. He was from Ireland. We both loved
\nthe Liverpool football club.<\/p>\n
\nan unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.<\/p>\n
\nfarm at 6 a.m., like an alarm clock waking us up early for school.<\/p>\n
\nmy room had more windows than when I left, windows that would
\nno longer close. Winter was harsh on us.<\/p>\n
\nhospital and x-rayed for the first time. There were two pieces of
\nshrapnel in my body. One in my neck, another in my forehead. Seven
\nmonths later, I had my first surgery to remove them. I was still a child.<\/p>\n
\nrow. The bars were of different lengths and colors, red, yellow, green,
\nblue, purple, and white. The kids showed it to their grandparents back
\nin Gaza, whose eyes danced while the kids smiled.<\/p>\n
\nshe speaks, and I hear Yaffa\u2019s sea, waves lapping against the
\nshore. I look in her eyes, and I see my grandparents\u2019 footsteps still
\nimprinted on the sand.<\/p>\n
\nin the U.S. You mustn\u2019t think of going back to Gaza. Things people
\nsay to me.<\/p>\n
\na zoo, to see the animals, listen to their sounds, watch how they
\nwalk and sleep. When I went there, they were bored, gave me their
\nback. They lived in cages in a caged place.<\/p>\n
\nof my country have an extra zero in front, like when you call
\noverseas. But we have been pulled down beneath the seas, do you
\nsee what I mean?<\/p>\n
\n* “Palestine A-Z” is republished here from Sum\u016bd:\u00a0A New Palestinian Reader<\/i><\/a>, co-edited by Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably, published by Seven Stories Press 2025. The poem first appeared in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find in My Ear: Poems From Gaza<\/em><\/a> (City Lights 2022). Copyright \u00a9 2022 Mosab Abu Toha.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRecommended Reading<\/h4>\n
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