Published by Penguin Books, 2025
By Jim Aitken
‘They can’t break or occupy my words’ – Mahmoud Darwish
We Are Not Numbers by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey is not only a book of voices by Gaza’s youth from 2015 to the present, it is also the name of an organisation that was formed in Gaza in 2014. The genesis of this formation is an inspiring story in itself.
Pam Bailey, we are told, came from a family ‘committed to social justice’. She grew up in America and trained as a print journalist before becoming ‘a vice president for a large corporate conglomerate.’ This clearly conflicted with the social values her parents had engendered in her and she left to join an American anti-war organisation called CODEPINK. She was asked to be part of a women’s delegation to Gaza in 2009. This trip led to many more and Pam grew to love the people and the culture, and stayed with families rather than in guarded hotels. She would later be deported by Israel in 2016 and banned from ever coming back to Gaza.
This story is inspiring because if one vice president of a corporate conglomerate can resign as Pam did, then we can but hope that many others will follow her example. It is the corporate conglomerates, after all, in their drive for more and more profits that are creating war and driving climate change.
However, before her ban took place she met with Ahmed Alnaouq at a birthday party. Like many in Gaza, Ahmed was studying English literature at university in the hope of maybe finding work with one of the international NGOs and maybe even securing a place to study abroad. Pam and Ahmed kept in touch via Facebook and then came Operation Protective Edge in 2014.
Ahmed Alnaouq came from Deir al-Balah in the middle of Gaza, and he had three brothers and six sisters. Many of Gaza’s families are large. He was particularly close to his older brother Ayman whom he admired and hoped to emulate. With 60% unemployment in Gaza – it is now virtually 100% – Ayman was lucky to secure a job as an accountant with a non-governmental organisation. He was the hope of the entire family.
This hope was shattered on 19July 2014 when Ayman and four of his friends were killed by an Israeli air strike. Ahmed became silent, grieving for his lost brother. His photo on Facebook was replaced by Ayman’s. Pam got in touch and asked Ahmed to write a story about Ayman. This would not only enable Ahmed to practise his English, it would also help him psychologically.
The Birth of We Are Not Numbers
As the story developed passing back and forth to Pam, she could tell that there was something Ahmed was holding back. She probed and Ahmed confessed that his brother had joined the Palestinian liberation movement. He feared that Pam would simply consider his brother a terrorist but Pam had come to understand Ayman and to love him as his family did. She had also gained a considerable ‘insight into the human impact of historical events’ on the people of Gaza. Ahmed’s story would be completed and his English improved at the same time. This is how We Are Not Numbers (WANN) came into being.
Today it has an international profile with some 385 Palestinians who contribute stories, together with 162 mentors from across the world who work online with the contributors to help write their stories. The mentors are themselves teachers and authors with the contributors all young adults 29 years old and under.
Once the idea had been hatched with Ahmed’s story, a ‘guardian angel’ appeared called Ramy Abdu. It was Ramy, who had already been known to Pan, who offered them office space and found funds to create an initial salary for a project manager as well as funds to set up a website. His assistance was invaluable. So too was the mentoring supplied by the legendary teacher, poet, author, Refaat Alareer, who guided so many of Gaza’s students who would go on to become future leaders and writers. He was killed by an Israeli strike on 6 December 2023. The book is dedicated to him. And also honoured are four of WANN’s writers who all died in the Gazan genocide in 2023.
We Are Not Numbers is a collection of stories, testimonies, insights and poems. They range from the heartbreaking to the uplifting. The anthology is not an easy read, but it is an essential one nonetheless. A number of the writers talk about living in a prison and many commentators have described Gaza as the largest open-air prison in the world. Yet prisons are not usually bombed or have their electricity and water cut which makes Gaza the most awful prison in the world.
One good example of this comes from Ali Abusheikh in his story: ‘When the sea becomes a lake: the prison that is Gaza.’ Like so many from Gaza, a visit to the beach is a lifeline. The sea can take your mind off all your problems temporarily, and Ali would often go there. He would take his thermos flask with him and listen on his phone to Arabic or Turkish sufi songs which seemed to create for him ‘a spiritual world’ where he could ‘find peace and tranquillity.’ The sea he described as his ‘soulmate.’ Then he realises that ‘the sea ends where Israeli warships lurk.’ This makes him think of the sea more as a lake; as something with boundaries. He then sees a seagull and realises it is ‘still a sea at heart.’ Finally, Ali muses that he wants ‘to be free like seagulls are.’
In a very real sense, We Are Not Numbers can so easily fit into the genre of prison literature as much as it does memoir. When the lives of an entire population are constrained and limited by blockade and occupation, it could only be seen in terms of incarceration. And coincidentally, Pam Bailey, no doubt deeply influenced by her times in Gaza, has gone on to found another non-profit organisation, this time in the United States creating a similar storytelling initiative giving voice to people in prison, some of whom have languished there for decades.
Reaching for the stars
But what elevates the collection into a category all of its own is the insight into the characters of all the writers. Being young they all have dreams and, despite all the privations they have to endure, they refuse to give up on their dreams. They find ways to deal with their adversity. Roaa Missmeh began stargazing at five years old. She quotes Van Gogh, ’I don’t know anything for certain, but the sight of stars makes me dream.’
In a similar way to seagulls flying free, looking at the stars takes you beyond the confines of your immediate world. In ‘Reaching for the stars’ Abdallah Abusamra tells us about his friend Bahaa Elhabeel who took his interest in the stars even further by making his own telescopes. He sought to share his passion with students at educational institutions and when they showed little interest Bahaa went into a state of depression. He did seek psychiatric help and this helped Bahaa recover his passion again. He is now studying astronomy in Russia.
Many of the dreams the young people of Gaza share come with their desire to leave. The impression you can have from reading this book is that the thirst for knowledge is allied to educational opportunities abroad as the ones in Gaza become exhausted. Many do manage scholarships to study abroad. This is a dream shared by many young people in Gaza.
An ambulance operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, after it was heavily damaged by an Israeli military airstrike on 7 October 2023. According to the report, at the time of attack the ambulance was in front of Nasser Hospital, carrying three injured people.
The brother of Ahmed Alnaouq, Mahmoud, had been awarded a scholarship to study for his master’s degree at the University of Melbourne. He was denied this great opportunity when an Israeli strike killed him along with twenty members of his family on 22 October 2023. He is remembered with great fondness by Maram Faraj who had to flee bombing raids at her uncle’s house. She recalls Mahmoud saying to her that she should always write Israel in the lower case ‘I’ ‘because it is an illegal country’. She said that this ‘lower- case’ nation had killed ‘both him and his dreams.’ She becomes incensed at the indifference to their suffering from the rest of the world and says:
I don’t want to hear anyone preaching about humanity, values and peace any more. Humanity is being murdered… I am not a number. I am a person with dreams and feelings.
Nada Hammad in ‘Love letter to Gaza’ wants to see the world and would like to ‘spend winter in England and build a snowman’ and stay ‘at least a year in Scotland among all the green fields.’ She tells us she has lived through ‘three wars, a dozen invasions and nine years of siege.’ And this was in 2016. Yusuf El – Mbayed, writing in 2024, tells us Gaza has now been ‘transported back to the Stone Age.’
Yet despite all the immense difficulties involved in daily life under such abnormal conditions, people continue to flourish. Education is hugely important to everyone in Gaza. Nada Hammad again tells us that ‘without electricity nerds and bookworms are celebrated here.’ At her girls’ school they did not compete over fashion but over ‘who read the most books.’
Omnia Ghassan, in her poem ‘Gazapore’, imagines Gaza like Singapore with skyscrapers, a seaport and airport. The poem came about when her mother told her of the huge potential Gaza has with ‘so much talent’. She said, ‘If all our unemployed graduates could use their skills to revive Gaza, it could be more developed than Singapore.’ Omnia later changes mood in the poem when she realises that Gaza is ‘trapped on four sides!’ She goes on to say, ’I’ve no right to dream.’
An explosion of a different kind
While some contributors speak openly about their depression and the manifold challenges that each day brings, there is a defiance that seems to keep many of them in check. Ismail Abu-Aitab in ‘A flower grows from wreckage’ observes how the children in Gaza ‘have learned how to pretend that tanks and F-16s are not outside, flying low overhead.’ While Ismail recognises how ‘dysfunctional life in Gaza’ is he can also take his cue from the children by observing himself, ‘I am choosing to look at pain as wreckage from which a flower can still grow.’
Such defiance is actually resistance. To look for beauty in such horror is a testament to a deep reservoir of human dignity. Nada Hammad, in ‘An explosion of a different kind – Gaza in colour’ tells us that, ‘Gaza looked like a canvas of grey after Operation Protective Edge was over’ in 2014. With 96,000 homes destroyed, small modular homes soon replaced them. They were clinically white but artists soon got to work on them by painting them with parrots, eyes and leaves. And a grey wall was painted white and on to that came ‘resistance graffiti’ embodying a ‘declaration of survival.’ Ismail concludes, ‘the joy that colours can bring to one’s life is truly magical… colours make me happy.’
Several contributors write about the non-violent direct action many Gazans engaged in during 2018 in what was called the Great Return March. With 80% of Gaza’s population descended from refugees during the Nakba of 1948, there was a campaign to march to the border and look across at the towns and villages their grandparents and great-grandparents had once come from.
Kite-flying by Palestinians
Over a thousand kites in Palestinian colours, some with the place names of the towns and villages their families came from written on them, were flown across the border to remind the Israelis of the Arab names they changed into Hebrew ones. Other kites had the names of dead Gazans written on them. In ‘Gazans send kites over the border’ by Ahmed Alnaouq, he tells us that, ‘Since we can’t reach our stolen lands, we are going to fly our kites over them.’ And despite this non-violent action, it was reported by Israelis on tv that the Great Return March was ‘violent and manipulated by Hamas.’ What violence there was came from Israeli snipers shooting at unarmed protesters.
Something similar once happened much closer to home in Ireland. In Brian Friel’s play ‘Translations’ (1980), an Ordnance Survey team from England in 1828 come to the fictional village of Baile Beag in County Donegal to map out the area. The Irish named locations become anglicised and the whole issue of cultural and linguistic identity of the local population is turned on its head. Friel described his play as a play about language, and we can see exactly what the Gazan people meant by sending their Arab place- named kites across the border into Israel.
Acts of inspired resistance give everyone a lift. The simplest things can become acts of resistance and for Manar Alsheikh even ‘a smile is a gesture of defiance.’ For Eman Shawwa in ‘How Gaza inspired me to be a surgeon for historical buildings’ we are told how Eman enjoyed visiting ‘the vestiges of our history.’ Old buildings are not peculiar just to a local area for ‘buildings embody the world’s history and so we must care for them.’ Eman studied at the Islamic University of Gaza and in 2008 became an architectural engineer. In richer countries there would be conservators with funds to do their work but in Gaza, with the blockade, this is not possible. Eman, like the kite flyers, realises that:
If you want to erase a nation, start with its history. Gaza City’s history is a big part of the history of Palestine… and the Holy Land … all part of our human history.
This is true of all nations and their old and ancient buildings which belong to us all. Of course, right now Gaza has been obliterated and all her buildings of historical significance have been destroyed, erasing the Palestinian footprint of Gaza completely. Some contributors talk of their graveyards being bombed and Yousef Maher in ‘Who will pay for the twenty years we lost’ talks about the day his father heard his farmland had been bombed. This land had been handed down by his ancestors and he said, ‘our trees in the field have been turned to ash.’ Such acts of obliteration pose the question, ‘Who are we without a past or history?’ Such questions would seem to be posed by design of the blockade itself.
What we all take for granted in our daily lives can be rather humiliating for people in Gaza when it comes to ordering online. In ‘The nightmare that is online shopping’ by Akram Abunhala, the writer orders some English language books and the works of Shakespeare online. His friends had told him to add Israel as the shipping country with Palestine after it so that the books would arrive. After 40 days he is given an email that his books have arrived. He collects them holding them ‘close to his chest.’ Yet he realises, ‘Israel is eroding us, even when we order online.’ For Akram there is the recognition that the ‘Israeli occupation deprived me of a basic human right: to read a book I can hold in my hand.’
Books are precious, much valued commodities. This is partly because they are so few and much reading is done on phones. Wejdan Wajdy in ‘Where is our home?’ tells a tale of having to leave her home with her family at quick notice because of an impending bombing. She wanted back to her room and books; to the ‘titles that had guided me through both personal and academic challenges.’ She tells us that her ‘desk was a space where ambition met reality’ and any writer, academic or bibliophile will understand such sentiments. She does return to the bombed-out house later to discover that ‘the occupying soldiers had written on the walls of my home, filled with mockery for Palestinians.’
Israeli soldiers inscribed hate graffiti on buildings before their pullout from Gaza City
There are passages in this collection that make you realise how racist hate seeks to dehumanise the other but actually dehumanises the perpetrators of that hatred. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that, ‘The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.’ This statement would apply to many in relation to Gaza and the rest of Palestine but many western governments are not so much indifferent as complicit to the suffering endured.
Yara Jouda in ‘I am a girl’ says, ‘They took our childhood and happiness from us, and then tell us we are terrorists.’ She is only too acutely aware how her experience of childhood has been deliberately diminished when she reflects, ‘I am a girl who is forced to be an old woman at the age of fifteen.’
Survivors’ guilt
Growing up in such a constrained way with family life reduced and dreams too often curtailed is inhuman. People have to buy food each day because the electricity is sometimes cut for 18 hours of each day and refrigeration is therefore pointless. At night families have to light candles and cooking is done with wood. The water they have for washing themselves is polluted and salty. And families will often sleep in the same room at night so that if their home is hit by a missile they can all die together. And if a family member or close friend dies there is also what Dana Besaiso calls ‘survivors’ guilt’ to contend with. This enforced backwardness and cruelty are imposed on an entire population.
But what about 7 October? Yes, it was undeniably horrific in the same way as it was when Native Americans often broke out of their reservations, or when Irish freedom fighters organised themselves over and over again during a span of seven hundred years. According to Alnaouq and Bailey we simply have to see October 7 ‘in the context of the years leading up to that day.’ People from Gaza and the West Bank have sent in countless petitions to the United Nations and similar numbers of filings to the International Criminal Court but Alnaouq and Bailey remind us that all ‘these steps have all been tried and ignored or quickly forgotten.’
This state of affairs was similar to what once went on in South Africa. Nelson Mandela said in 1997:
The United Nations took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system… but we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
And so, Gaza’s young people are encouraged to write. This collection is testimony to that. And just as Pam and Ahmed said that they regretted not being able to publish more tales from their cohort of writers, it is a similar response that any reviewer of this collection also has. It is simply impossible to mention everyone.
Asmaa Tayeh said she doesn’t ‘know what normal is any more.’ That is naturally understandable, but seeing Netanyahu offering Trump a letter proposing that he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was abnormally macabre. As Israel’s principal supporter and arms supplier, enabling a genocide in Gaza is in reality complicity in war crimes.
All the contributors to We Are Not Numbers would surely agree with this. Palestine, along with climate change, are the great issues of our times. This book confirms that the cause of justice for Palestine simply cannot be ignored. The final word should go to Eman Alhaj Ali who confesses to us all, ’Writing is the act through which I share part of my soul with the world.’ Eman and all the other contributors to this collection have done this. They deserve our support and our admiration. And the book to which all these young people have contributed should be seen as the most important book of the year, and certainly the most urgent publication for some time.
We Are Not Numbers by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey is published by Penguin Random House, 2025.
