Marte Heian-Engdal: “A Gaza life” – A must for understanding Gaza

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The day before the massacres

The author’s special move is that she places the Al-Rantisi family, which she follows through four generations, in a timely manner, in the great narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Heian-Engdal begins the book on the evening of October 6, just a few hours before the extremist group Hamas launches a horrific terrorist attack on Israeli soil, killing over 1,100 people and taking around 250 hostages.

This evening she goes to bed in her apartment in Oslo with a green notebook full of plans for the trip. In Gaza, eleven-year-old schoolboy Osama is preparing for tomorrow’s test in technology.

Already from the start of the war, several of the Al-Rantisi family get to feel Israeli missiles, rockets, bombs and grenades at close range. Their house is not hit, but they, along with thousands of others, have to flee to the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Weasel Iyas brings his pet, the budgie Kookie, who broke his beak during a collision with a door frame the year before.

Heian-Engdal retraces the entire family’s life course, from when, during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, they had to flee to Gaza, an area of ​​360 square kilometers, together with 200,000 other Palestinians. The father of the house, Abdul-Malik, and his son Saleh eventually manage to acquire some land, because they are farmers.

Through the war that is now going on, the small plots of land have become useless.

Like reading a novel

It gives the book an extra plus that the author places local events in a more global perspective, such as when she tells in detail about the wedding preparations that are going on in the Al-Rantisi family at the same time that Israelis and Palestinians start secret conversations at Borregaard Hovedgård in Østfold about it which will eventually become the Oslo Agreement.

Shortly after, when the agreement is celebrated across parts of the world, the bride and groom must marry under curfew. Because there is no peace in Gaza.

This is the story of Israeli abuse, of happiness and sorrow, of ups and downs in one of the world’s poorest areas. It is the story of ordinary people who have no other goal in life than to live as well as possible under the prevailing circumstances. And they all have the hope of one day returning to the village or town their ancestors had to leave in 1948.

Heian-Engdal takes us through no less than four wars before real hell breaks loose on October 7 and the Gaza Strip is eventually shot to shreds.

Many of the stories in the book are so detailed that you sometimes get the feeling of reading a novel.

Marte Heian-Engdal has worked with the Middle East for two decades. It is easy to understand when reading. As an academic, she should also have the praise that she writes easily, with a good narrative voice and with clear, comprehensible analyses. She has written a book that anyone interested in the Middle East should read. Did you know, for example, that Hamas started building tunnels in Gaza already in the 1980s? And that Gaza and the West Bank drifted apart long before Hamas took power in 2007?

Burning news

The research for the book must have been formidable. Heian-Engdal became close to the Al-Rantisi family when she visited Gaza last autumn and spent most of her time with them. She even describes the Palestinian food in detail – after also trying out recipes in the kitchen at home in Oslo.

It’s almost as if you can smell and taste the Middle East.

The book gives an excellent depiction of life in Gaza, but sometimes I think there is a lot of glossing over the relationships between the people who live there. The author touches on political and familial conflicts, but she does not mention the clan and tribal system that exists. In a society as marked by chaos as Gaza, it is often the local clan leaders who exercise power.

And even though the book’s title is “A Gaza Life”, I miss a little more about how Hamas has governed and behaved in the years she tells about. We learn that one of the Al-Rantisi sons, in addition to the regular school, attends a Hamas-run Koranic school six days a week, where three days are devoted to religious education and three days to football. But we get, for example, no explanation as to why football gets such a big place. Does Hamas use sport for recruitment and indoctrination?

Kudos to the publisher who can offer its readers a topical book, where the action goes all the way up to January this year.