You’ve said that the book took about 10 years to write. How did you piece together a history of which parts have been intentionally erased? How did you feel when the book was finally out in the world after all this work?

One of the greatest challenges was the research itself, and the realization of how deeply Western academia had participated in the erasure of Palestinian history and narrative.

Most striking was the absences within the dominant literature on trauma.  Although trauma studies expanded from its early focus on the Holocaust to encompass other histories of war and collective suffering, the Palestinian Nakba, literally, the “catastrophe” was rarely incorporated into this supposedly universal trauma genre, despite the scale and persistence of Palestinian dispossession. In that sense, erasure becomes a second injury. Palestinians experience displacement and dispossession, and then the language through which that suffering might be recognized as trauma is denied to them. This is where personal testimony became so important to me. My father’s interviews formed the foundation of the book, and they also became a form of decolonized research: when official histories and academic frameworks fail to register an experience, family stories and individual testimony become historical evidence. They restore texture, emotion, memory and human presence to what has been flattened or omitted.

The book took so long because I was working on several levels at once. There was the academic research, the historical documentation, the work of placing my father’s memories within the correct historical context, and then the enormous task of shaping the interviews into a coherent narrative. I read across histories of Palestine and Gaza, constantly checking and cross-checking dates, events and sources. There is remarkably little written about everyday life in Gaza City in certain periods, particularly the 1950s and 1960s, which are central to the book. So at times I felt I was searching for fragments, small historical gems, and trying to bring them into conversation with my father’s memory.

I felt a tremendous responsibility to be faithful both to the historical record and to the lives I was writing about. In that sense, writing the book became an act of preservation: carrying these stories forward in the face of erasure.

When the book was finally out in the world, the feeling was difficult to separate from everything that had happened during those ten years that ended with the first year of the genocide in Gaza. By the time the book appeared, the Gaza I had spent years reconstructing on the page was itself being erased. So, publication did not feel like an ending. If anything, it made the work feel more urgent. The book had become a record of a world I had tried to recover, and, in some small way, to keep alive.