One particular aspect of Palestinian resilience during Israel’s ongoing besiegement and genocide in the Gaza Strip concerns a prodigious amount of creative writing that, besides bearing witness to circumstance and personal experience, engages cultural resistance.

Due to the decades-long Israeli siege that has closed the territory off from the the world, Gaza has developed a considerable amount of shorter works of writing, such as diary entries, poems, short stories, and weblogs. This propensity for short forms of writing derives from an existential experience of time as stunted, forced into certain constraints by which loss and hope remain fragile, though treated with immense care in poetry and prose.

While loss and hope are directly referred to according to existential circumstance, the thematisation of these two terms serves to provide the passing, or else non-passing, of time (in the sense of an occupation that has no end in sight), some form of reference. This is due to the way in which the two terms, loss and hope, provide visceral experience with co-ordinates by which a circumstance in which time is experienced as stunted can be not only endured, but also worked on, represented, and resisted.

Shahd Abusalama’s employment of the term “permanent temporality” brilliantly captures this dilemma — both the experience of stunted time and its writerly articulation. She evokes a telling analogy of Europeans having to accommodate restrictions on free movement during the COVID crisis as a basic existential reality for Palestinians in Gaza living under the yoke of Israeli oppression. Palestinians, she writes, “live in refugee camps, where they are locked in limbo, as if suspended in space and time, as they hold on to the right of return that remains firmly denied by the Israeli state” (Shahd Abusalama, “Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Permanent Temporality.” In Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire. Edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Michael Merryman-Lotze. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2022, 33). This “state of permanent temporality”, Abusalama demonstrates, traps Palestinians in a “cycle of survival and dependency” (43). To follow her lead, the term permanent temporality, as I am suggesting, can be adapted to discuss the resilient character of Gazan writing.

While much of Gazan writing is in Arabic, there is a prodigious body of work produced in English, particularly among youth. To provide an awareness of this writing, I want to borrow from the site _We Are Not Numbers_ (WANN). Inspired by the late Palestinian English literary scholar and poet Refaat Alareer, the website was conceived in Gaza in 2014, supporting both established and emerging Palestinian writers, especially among youth.

In her story Between the Door and the Window (5 August 2024), Fatma Mohammed Yousef weaves together a temporal sense of hope and memory suspended by a perilous now whose moorings becoming intensively attached to her physical surroundings, between the door and the window, as her title says. Suffering through the Israeli siege, her physical presence serves to subdue her imaginary sense of freedom, the permanent temporality she is constrained to endure: “Now, we find freedom in our memories, which have become our sole refuge. Memories enable us to survive today.” And as she goes on to write: “Every morning since October 7, I have been wiping the dust off the rubble from my memories.”

Sahar Al-ijla, in her In search of myself, (27 July 2024) conveys a more acute sense of temporal suspension, through the term “coma”: “I’ve been counting days, not living them. Life has stopped for more than 260 days. Lost in the world, ignorant of the present and the future, unaware of what’s happening around me and how to act: this is how I have been feeling for a long while. The original version of myself is in a coma, and she won’t return until the war ends.” While providing insight into her existential circumstance, her writing serves to articulate a certain line of escape, transforming a temporal suspension of life into a literary trope of permanent temporality.

The last example I want to relay is a poem from the Gazan photographer, Alaa Mahdi Kudaih, titled I Never Chose (10 April 2025). Kudaih writes of the “endless checkpoints, in a land too small for its pain”. At “the borders, they strip me even of my name, not Palestinian, not a woman, not a person”. Lacking “wings to carry” her “home”, she is constrained to translate freedom into a time warp: “Our present teeters on piles of rubble, Our past sinks among those piles, Our future shimmers beyond walls I cannot cross.”

WANN provides a valuable resource for a wider audience wanting to better feel what Palestinians in Gaza not only endure while they resist the Israeli siege, but creatively engages their circumstances, transforming an existential predicament of temporal suspension into an articulate form of literary production.