The Price of Genocide

December 8, 2024

Written by Chana Basha Helfand / Edited by Tala Albanna

Photos by Tala Albanna; Illustrations by Chana Basha Helfand

Months ago, I read an article on We Are Not Numbers about a young woman named Tala who lost all her books because of the genocide in Gaza.

Different things touch us in different ways. The stories of parents, children, siblings, and friends murdered by the Israeli army and settlers drowned me in so much sorrow that I couldn’t function. I read a story about an 11-year-old, Ali Mushtaha, who lost his face — it is now gray, blistered, and he can no longer recognize himself in the mirror. He finds his reflection so hideous, so unbearable, that he weeps every time he sees himself. That story made me want to leave this world forever … this, this is the world we live in?

And then I read a story by a young woman named Tala, and one of the many horrors she wrote about was having to leave behind her beloved books. That story struck me differently than so many others. It was a different kind of loss. Not of life or limbs, but of some of the tender things that make life worth living and make us who we are. Her story was a demand to readers to take every single loss into account. To minimize nothing. To journey slowly, deeply, into the lives, souls, personalities, dreams and bookshelves of every single human being who was murdered, and every single human being who survives; to feel, in the marrow of our bones, the savagery, sadism and unbearable grief of unnecessary losses.

Books have been some of my best friends since childhood, and so I connected with Tala’s words on not only a human level, but also a deeply personal one. When I first planned to move to another country, my heart ached to say goodbye to my books, especially my most beloved book, a large illustrated volume of poetry by Jalaluddin Mohammad Rumi.

Though I was raised to be an observant Jew, dreamed of becoming a rabbi, and was indoctrinated in a zionist synagogue, it was the Islamic poet, scholar, and mystic Rumi who was the first person, ever, to express in words what I felt in my soul. The ache inside me for connection with someone who genuinely understood my most haunting questions and deepest longings and needs was first answered by a 13th century poet. The illustrations that accompanied that book were nothing short of holy. When I entered those pages, the suicidal thoughts and bottomless sorrow that had accompanied me since I was young, momentarily ceased.

Rumi wrote,

All day I think about it, then

at night I say it.

Where did I come from, and

what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere,

I’m sure of that,

and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began

in some other tavern.

When I get back around

to that place, I’ll be

completely sober. Meanwhile,

I’m like a bird from another

continent, sitting in this aviary.

The day is coming when I fly off,

but who is it now in my ear,

who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes?

What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip

of an answer, I could break out

of this prison for drunks.

I didn’t come here of my own accord,

And I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here

Will have to take me home.

Separation from this book felt like I was being severed from my soulmate. But with no concrete plans beyond a monthlong teaching course, I felt I had to take with me only the bare minimum when I moved. Thus, the brilliant brainstorm of a pocket poetry book with the most essential poems from the giant one.

My brother teased me as I devoted hours to cutting up flowers from a gardening catalog and taping them beside the poems, in an effort to replicate some of the magic of the illuminations in the original book.

“You are moving to another country. You don’t know where you’ll live. You don’t have a job. Do you really think this is the best use of your time?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I do.”

My goodbye to my books was temporary, however, as they’re still at my parents’ house, where they patiently waited for my nomadic life to become sedentary and for them to find a new home. I always thought that home would be in some communal living environment so that I could share my treasures with as many others as possible. But when I read Tala’s article, felt the grief of her loss, I wished I could share my books with her. I wondered if life would one day give me the chance.

Maktub in Arabic. Beshert in Yiddish. “It is written.” “It is destined.” We speak these words when things turn out well. When two people meet and fall in love. When you get the job you want. When something glorious happens.

But what do you say when things are abominable? Is apartheid also maktub? Is genocide beshert? And what of the holy meetings that come out of hell? Maktub? Beshert? Or something we will never understand?

I volunteered to work with young writers in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers, not knowing what to expect. I imagined editing a piece for a few weeks, then a tearful goodbye to the writer, with the hope that one day we’d work together again. I’d never worked with anyone in the midst of surviving such hell but, I imagined, people must form some kind of bond.

Then I received the name of my “mentee,” looked her up, and saw it was the same Tala whose words had made me weep so many months ago. I already knew she would in fact be my mentor, not mentee. Would you believe that I was nervous the first time we spoke? I already felt so small beside her. When I was 21, I was just trying to survive the mental torture in my own head. At 21 this woman is trying to survive annihilation. At 21 I was ashamed of everything about me, and speaking up for myself or anyone else was an impossibility. I sought the shadows. At 21 this woman is speaking up for a nation while the state of Israel and the United States of America attempt to exterminate her and all Palestinians in Palestine. She is writing articles in the midst of mass murder. She is a giant.

When we started to exchange messages, she told me, “I’m really small. Just five feet tall.”

I couldn’t believe it. Just like me. (Though now, more than twice Tala’s age, I’ve started to shrink and am four feet eleven inches.)

However, that barely scratched the surface of what I couldn’t believe. And as we got to know each other better, trading audios, videos, and photos, learning about her family, friends and her dreams before this atrocity, reciting poetry to her and reading her own descriptions of Gaza — both before and after the genocide began, I found myself perpetually in awe of her humanity, humility, compassion, strength, sensitivity, sense of humor, care. In the midst of a genocide, she tells me to cheer up when I sound sad. While I ask myself if it would have been better if Hitler had killed all the Jews — Would that have prevented the Holocaust in Gaza? Would that have stopped so many Jews’ own loss of morality and humanity? — she asks herself, “Did Palestinians do something horrible to Jews in a past life so that we deserve this genocide now?”

She breaks my heart into a thousand pieces and then puts it back together again with the sound of her voice, which in one audio message is full of life and love and excitement about writing an article, or learning something new, or helping someone else, or how we both love cats and nature and garlic so much. Then in the next audio she shares with me another detail of savagery, the details that won’t make it into the news or onto TikTok because they are not about the monsters outside of us, but the monsters within, the scars that inhumanity carves into our psyches, the wounds we are afraid to speak of because we think they speak volumes of our weakness … when in reality, they serenade the heartache and hope in the act of survival.

When Tala talks about the demons in her head, I feel my heart flood with grief again. They say grief is the price you pay for love. What is the price of genocide?

Some of Tala’s beloved books, bugs, and flowers:

Tala’s favorite novel: A Thousand Splendid Suns, because “it addresses a full picture of Afghan’s people. It shows many internal conflicts besides the external ones caused by Taliban forces. It reminded me that there are many people who are suffering on a daily basis. Who are prevented from their basic rights of work, education, etc. My heart aches whenever I read it because I’m a woman and I understand how it sucks to be an object. Transferring your strengths into stigmas. This book has been left in the North.”

From a list of writing exercise ideas, something to try to take Tala out of the hell she’s in, if only momentarily, she chooses her favorite: I [Chana] will write a piece about Tala and my experience working with her, and she will be the editor. She instructs me, “Write about my flaws, not just my humanity.” She thinks I praise her too much, that I don’t see her well. When I asked her to describe how she sees herself, this is the image her words created:

Tala doesn’t understand that when I tell her she’s the sun, it’s not that I think she’s perfect, or that I’m missing some enormous, monstrous characteristics or some shameful secrets that I don’t yet know or refuse to hear. It’s that the sun, being the sun, can’t see his own light. He must pine for the moon and the stars and beg them to illuminate the sky. The sun has no vantage point to see his own self. Mirrors don’t exist in the sky — or in genocides.

Fine, Tala, I will tell you a hideous flaw, but it’s not your fault or your flaw: It was born of human beings’ savagery and silence. The genocide has stolen your ability to see the light you are.

Chana Basha Helfand is a writer, illustrator, teacher, learner, and traveler. She was born on Turtle Island and is currently living in Spain. Her website is chanabasha.com.

Tala Albanna is a Palestinian young woman who was born in Gaza city. She’s a law student, a Child Protection Facilitator at Save the Children International, and a writer. She’s passionate about reading books, especially about philosophy, physiology, and nature. Tala’s fundraising campaign (under the name of one of her sisters):

gofundme.com/f/safe-future-for-demas-siblings-postwar