For years, Palestinians have suffered from not being able to tell their own stories, say Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller. Their new book, Daybreak in Gaza, hopes to change that, and to reveal a ‘normal society’ with a rich, multicultural history

Daybreak in Gaza draws together a remarkable range of experiences gathered from emails, voice notes, and phone calls made as drones were crossing overhead. Is this a response to our lack of real understanding about Gaza as a place and a people?

Mahmoud Muna: Sure. This book was born in early 2024, when everyone’s talking about Gaza except the people of Gaza. Everyone who’s been to Dubai over two days becomes a Middle East expert. And the people who are actually experiencing this war are left alone to experience the destruction and the killing, and their voice is being silenced. Or, at least, we are turning our ears not to listen to them.

Matthew Teller: Both of us had the same thought: when in the future somebody, children, family or a stranger or ourselves looking in the mirror, asks, ‘During this time of genocide in 2023 and early on 2024, at that point, what did you do?’, I needed to have an answer for myself, regardless of anybody else. And this project emerged from that.

MM: It is an attempt, first, to give the people of Gaza the possibility to send their story via us. And second, it’s an attempt also to encourage the Palestinians themselves – not just Gazans, but Palestinians who’ve been experiencing this conflict for 77 years. It is not unique to Gaza. The Palestinians for years have been suffering the inability to tell their own stories. There was always a mediator, a filter, a translator, an interpreter, a journalist who needs to take the story, package it, slice it up and whatever, and then deliver it to the international media. We need to regain the power to tell our stories by our ourselves, whether it’s in Gaza or in Jerusalem or the West Bank or wherever we are…

Image: ©Laurence Wareing

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This is an extract from an article published in the December 2024/January 2025 edition of Reform

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