There is a moment in Fearful in Gaza when Abdalhadi Alijla describes his mother reading stories by candlelight during a power outage, her voice steady, her children gathered close while the sounds of the city outside made clear that the darkness was not merely electrical. It is a small moment, domestic and quiet, and it is more devastating than any headline. That steadiness—the insistence on stories, on education, on the rituals of a dignified life conducted under conditions designed to make dignity feel impossible—is what the book is finally about. Not the politics, though the politics are present on every page. Not the violence, though the violence is never far away. But the question of what it means to protect one's humanity when the walls are literally closing in, and the answer one Palestinian family found in the person of a woman whose name most of the world will never know, and whose loss, in 2025, along with more than fifty of Alijla's relatives, the world has not yet fully reckoned with.
Gaza has been covered, documented, debated, and mourned with an intensity that has somehow, paradoxically, made it harder rather than easier to see. The accumulated weight of headlines, statistics, and political arguments has created a kind of perceptual numbness, a condition in which the sheer scale of what has happened produces distance rather than understanding. Memoir is the oldest remedy for that distance. It works not by providing context or analysis but by restoring particularity: the specific kitchen, the specific smell of za'atar, the specific voice reading stories in the dark, the specific face of a mother whose quiet strength gave her children a vision of a future beyond the walls surrounding them. Abdalhadi Alijla's Fearful in Gaza is an act of restoration in precisely this sense, returning to one family's experience the texture, weight, and irreplaceable individuality that abstraction strips away.
Alijla brings to this act of restoration a scholar's discipline and a son's grief in equal measure. As a Palestinian-Swedish political scientist, senior fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative, and the author of Trust in Divided Societies and co-editor of Rebel Governance in the Middle East, he has spent his professional life analyzing the structures of governance, conflict, and social cohesion in some of the most fractured societies on Earth. He knows, with a precision few memoirists possess, the political and historical forces that shaped the world his mother navigated. But Fearful in Gaza is not a scholar's book in any reductive sense. It is a reckoning, a tribute, and a refusal to allow the people he loved to be dissolved into the categories that make their deaths easier to process and easier to forget.
The memoir arrives in the wake of a loss almost impossible to hold in the mind: in 2025, Alijla lost his mother and more than fifty relatives in Gaza. That fact casts its shadow over every page, giving the book's insistence on memory and particularity an urgency that goes beyond the literary. To write Fearful in Gaza was to insist, against everything, that these lives were not statistics, that his mother's steadiness by candlelight was real and specific and worth recording, and that the act of telling one's story is itself a form of the dignity she modeled for her children. We sat down with Abdalhadi Alijla to talk about the making of that book, the mother at its center, and why, in the face of overwhelming loss, the most necessary thing a writer can do is remember out loud.
Charles Carlini: What was the moment when you knew you had to write Fearful in Gaza? Was there a specific memory or event that became the seed of the book?
Abdalhadi Alijla: I have long wanted to write an oral history of Gaza. After leaving in 2007, I often asked my nephews to sit with my father and record the stories he used to tell me as a child. My father was my greatest teacher, and many of the stories he shared have found their way into this book.
Those memories planted the seed, but I didn’t commit to writing until December 2019, when my father suddenly passed away. I couldn’t say goodbye to him, even though I had already been separated from him for over a decade because of the Israeli siege on Gaza. That moment changed everything. I knew then that I had to write something different about Gaza, something beyond the usual narratives.
Too often, I heard people speak of Gaza only in terms of conflict, war, and bloodshed. To me, that felt like a form of dehumanization, intentional or not. I wanted to tell a different kind of story: a deeply human one, but also a broader portrait of Gaza itself.
It took great courage to write this book. The process stretched over almost five years and became, in many ways, a form of therapy—a way to work through my grief and honor my father’s memory.
CC: Your mother’s courage runs like a thread through the memoir. How did writing about her change the way you think about her legacy, and about motherhood in Gaza more broadly?
AA: My mother, too, was one of my greatest teachers. She stayed close to me from childhood, even though she worked tirelessly and had little time for me or many of my siblings. With eleven children—ten siblings and me—she carried an enormous burden, yet she sacrificed so much of herself for us.
When I reflect on her legacy and write about her, I do so through her stories. It is her voice—the one I remember from my childhood—that speaks through these pages. Much of what I have written under her name is drawn from the way she told me those stories, in her own words. This book carries her narrative, her voice.
Seeing my mother’s life on the page doesn’t change how I have always seen her: with deep admiration. I have always wanted her name and her sacrifices to endure. Motherhood in Gaza has always been extraordinary. Mothers have given more than most can imagine. They have been both our hope and our home.
And that, I think, is the whole point.
CC: The book is filled with both moments of fear and moments of everyday intimacy. How did you strike that balance so the reader feels both the danger and the life that continued despite it?
AA: This is a very important question, one I often ask myself even outside the context of interviews or writing. I think this balance exists naturally, though we don’t always feel it in Gaza. It is a land of contradictions. Life there meant being born into fear—fear that became normalized. Bombardments, curfews, the constant uncertainty of when soldiers might storm a home or when someone might be killed—all of this became part of daily life.
And yet, alongside that fear, life went on. We still drank tea and coffee, went to the market, told stories, read books, went to school, played, and listened to the call to prayer. There was no conscious effort to “balance” fear with normalcy. We simply lived, because life insisted on being lived.
I feel a responsibility to tell Gaza’s story in my lifetime. I don’t want it to be remembered only through images of rubble and destruction. I want this book to stand as a testimony that Gaza was—and I hope will be again—a city of life. Gaza must not be dehumanized in the stories told about it, because even under siege, there was love, laughter, and dreams.
These intimate moments show not just resilience but the essence of our humanity. Gaza was full of life, and at the same time, full of courage and the struggle for freedom and dignity. Fear and intimacy in Gaza were inseparable—you could not have one without the other. If I had to choose a single word for Gaza, it would be this: the coexistence of fear and courage, side by side, every single day.
CC: You’ve lost so many relatives since leaving Gaza. Did that deepen the urgency or change the tone of the memoir as you wrote it?
AA: Not really, because about 95% of the book was written before the genocide in Gaza—around December 2023, if I recall correctly. So, those events did not shape the book. And that is precisely the point: this book predates them. It offers an honest account, an unfiltered depiction, a truthful image of Gaza and the brutality of the Israeli occupation as I saw it then.
When the genocide began, I did ask myself whether I should revisit the text and change its tone. In the end, I chose not to. What I had written was honest, rooted in its own moment, and shaped by my reflections before these latest atrocities. If I were to write it now, it would inevitably be a different book.
CC: Living far from Gaza, how do you keep the place alive in your memory? Has distance helped you see your childhood more clearly, or does it make the memories harder to bear?
AA: When I first left Gaza, I think I created a certain distance from it. Over time, though, especially as I faced the challenges of exile, the struggles of identity, of acceptance and rejection, what I call the life of a pseudo-citizen in diaspora—that distance transformed into something else. Gaza has always remained alive in my memory, because I am a Gazan. The name itself, the city, is part of me, part of my identity, part of my very DNA.
When it comes to writing, I wouldn’t call it distancing but rather zooming in and out. My studies in psychology, childhood development, PTSD, political science, and history have taught me to see both my childhood and Gaza in new ways, to reflect on how memory is shaped and reshaped. At times, those memories feel unbearably heavy, almost too painful to believe; at other times, they are luminous and cherished.
What remains constant is my need to keep them alive—despite the fear, despite the suffering, despite everything. Gaza lives in my memory because I am part of Gaza, and Gaza is part of me.
CC: Were there moments when you worried that telling these stories might expose too much of yourself, your family, or your community?
AA: There have certainly been moments of worry, and this question is always on my mind. There are things I probably shouldn’t say, but ultimately this is the story of my family. To this day, none of them know about the book, even though we are now only a few weeks, perhaps two or three months, from publication.
Most of what I have written is true, but I don’t see it as exposing myself. It is simply an honest story. It reflects not only my family’s experience but something deeply rooted in Palestinian and Gazan culture. In many ways, it is the story of every family in Gaza. That’s why I don’t feel it reveals too much: it is about our lives, about Gaza, and above all, about our shared humanity. For me, this book is a way to bring to light a part of Gaza’s history that is too often left in the dark.
CC: Your writing is rich with sensory imagery—smells, sounds, textures. Why was it important to you to include those details, and how do they shape the reader’s emotional experience?
AA: For me, writing with sensory detail was essential because Gaza is not only a place of war and politics; it is also a place of life, full of smells, sounds, colors, and textures. Memory itself is sensory. When I recall my childhood, I don’t just remember events; I remember the smell of the sea, the sound of bombardments blending with the call to prayer, the taste of food, the feel of sand under my feet. These details ground the story in lived reality.
Including them was my way of resisting the reduction of Gaza to a headline or a single image of destruction. I wanted readers to feel the place, to breathe its air, to be immersed in its atmosphere. Even under fear and suffering, daily life went on—ordinary, beautiful moments that carried deep meaning. Sensory imagery helps shape the reader’s emotional experience, making the story intimate and tangible rather than distant or abstract. It allows Gaza to be seen not just as a site of tragedy, but as a home—full of life, full of humanity.
Abdalhadi Alijla
CC: Beyond survival, the memoir shows a spirit of defiance, a refusal to be broken. What forms of resilience do you most want readers to recognize and carry with them?
AA: What I hope readers carry with them is the understanding that resilience in Gaza is not merely survival; it is the insistence on living fully. It shows up in the smallest acts: sharing a meal, laughing with friends, telling stories, going to school, even under bombardment. Each act is a quiet form of defiance, a way of saying: we will not let oppression erase our humanity.
Resilience also lives in memory and culture. Holding on to songs, smells, family traditions, even humor in the darkest times, is a way of protecting identity. For me, this refusal to be broken is not an abstract idea of strength. It is the daily courage to live, to dream, and to hand hope to the next generation, even when everything around you tries to strip it away.
That is what I want readers to feel and to carry with them.
CC: For readers far removed from Gaza, what is the single most important truth you hope they carry after closing the book?
AA: The most important truth I want readers to take from this book is that Gaza is not only a place of genocide, it is also, above all, a place of humanity, the very essence of it. Behind every image of destruction are people who laughed, studied, dreamed, and created meaning in their lives. They loved and were loved, just like anyone else in the world.
I want readers to remember that Gazans are not numbers. Behind every picture of someone screaming on a screen is an entire life, a whole story, and an unshakable dignity. And perhaps most of all, I want them to understand that the death of Gaza would be more than the loss of a place; it would be the death of a part of our shared humanity.
CC: Now that this story is out in the world, what stories or projects do you hope to pursue next?
AA: My focus will remain on Gaza and the region—Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria. I will dedicate my life to the people there, especially children and women, with a particular emphasis on education. My father always told me that education is the only way to survive, to endure, and to protect our identity. I carry that belief with me, and it is my ultimate goal.
I do have other projects in the pipeline and hope to bring some of them to life in the coming years. But for now, my advocacy is firmly rooted in Gaza—supporting children and advancing education across the region.
Fearful in Gaza is available for pre-order now and will be released later this year. For readers who want to understand Gaza beyond the headlines, this memoir offers an intimate, unflinching portrait of life, loss, and survival. Keep an eye out for upcoming events with Abdalhadi Alijla, where he will discuss the book’s themes and the urgent need to remember.
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