As Israel launched into its calculated genocidal onslaught in Gaza following the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023, I searched through my old photographs, looking for one in particular that I recalled having taken in early 1999. Having found it, I placed it on our kitchen table. It is of Palestinian schoolgirls of around eight or nine years of age, dressed in their uniforms and just coming out of their school in Jabalya refugee camp, in the north of the Gaza Strip. There are eleven of them, squeezing themselves together so they could be included in the frame. I took the picture spontaneously, and was rewarded with their spontaneous reaction to being photographed, smiling and laughing into the camera lens.

At the time, from June 1998 until September 1999, I was an Australian Volunteer Abroad, a placement funded and coordinated by the Australian union movement’s global outreach organisation Australian People for Health, Education, and Development Abroad (APHEDA). I was placed with MA’AN, a Palestinian NGO whose main office is in Ramallah, some twenty kilometres, or a half hour car ride, north of Jerusalem. While providing skills workshops in its offices, MA’AN’s primary activities involved introducing permaculture to Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where they also had an office. My work involved writing reports, funding applications, and reviewing projects.

With Sami Khader at the helm as Director-General, MA’AN was initially established in 1989 in Jerusalem, though had relocated to Ramallah, in a building directly opposite the post office. The small town — at around 900 metres above sea level, it was a summer retreat for Palestinians seeking respite from the hot weather in Jerusalem — rapidly expanded in the 1990s and 2000s with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Some of MA’AN’s project managers working in the Ramallah office were from Gaza, though found it difficult to travel across the forty kilometres between the two Palestinian territories, due to Israel controlling land and border crossings. I remember one particular project officer, Miral, whose husband and infant daughter lived in Gaza and who couldn’t return home on her own will, but always had to wait for the Israeli’s to give a permit.

By contrast, although I was a foreigner, neither Palestinian nor Israeli, due to my Australian passport and three-month Israeli visa I could travel at will, and was routinely waved through at checkpoints and border crossings. I sometimes found this unsettling, especially when at a checkpoint a Palestinian with whom I shared a service car would be prevented from crossing. Or when I first visited Gaza, passing by a congested, dusty road of stalled Palestinian trucks waiting at the checkpoint to enter — a huddled group of disgruntled drivers mustering their patience, as I presented my passport to a bored Israeli soldier.

I took the photograph of the schoolgirls quickly, and didn’t record their names. They would now be in their mid-thirties, and I wonder what has become of them, during Israel’s constant blockade and bombing of Gaza since at least 2005 and up to the current genocide. In a space of just under one and a half square kilometres, Jabalya camp had a population of around 120,000 in October 2023. Carpet bombed, it now lies in total ruin. The UK-based Gazan playwright Ahmed Najjar has recently provided insights into the camp’s almost total destruction

At the time of my work there, in 1999, I accompanied a study tour from Australia, led by Sir Ronald Wilson, who had become publicly known for his 1997 Royal Commission report Bringing Them Home. Conducted with Mick Dodson, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, the inquiry documented the Australian state and federal governmental practice of forcibly taking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, with the intent that over time indigenous subjects would be “resocialized”, shed their indigeneity and be absorbed into White Australia.

The report does not shy away from employing the term genocide to describe the practice (all in the Orwellian name of governmental “protection” of indigenous subjects) of what amounted to the abduction of indigenous children, transforming them into wards of the state, fielded out to White guardians. Wilson’s low-profile visit to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza served to further connect the plight of indigenous subjects of Palestine and Australia.

As I look intently at my photograph of the Jabalya school children, I wonder at how they looked back at my rather intrusive camera lens. In the photo they appear in good spirits, some holding up their hands in an open gesture of friendliness. There is the third girl from the right, her hand on her friend’s shoulder, her face framed between another two girls. Then there is the taller girl at the back, fifth from the left, only half her face visible, though also smiling back at my lens. I am struck by all elven of them, by their playfulness, their confidence. I am struck by their spontaneous willingness to actively respond to the often awkward experience of being photographed. 

Having not being able to name any of the girls or tell their stories, I realise that I am contributing to their anonymity, to the way in which as victims of the decades-long Israeli program of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians tend to be treated as numbers, of one atrocity or another. I therefore refer to the site We Are Not Numbers, which I have taken to reading over the past year and a half. Based in Gaza, the site publishes stories from young Palestinians. Such as Nour Khalil Khattab’s, entitled “Celebration As Defiance” and published on March 29, 2025

Khattab narrates the way in which her friends manage to affirm their capacities for creativity, striving not only to maintain material well being — food, shelter, hygiene — but to engage their circumstances with an inventive spirit. Celebration becomes a practice of “defiance”, involves capacities to resist Israel’s strategy of reducing Palestinians to bare life, to the minimal satisfaction of basic needs. She recounts the creativity of her friends Saja Eldany and Hala Abu Qass, both around twenty years of age, students of media at Gaza University:

They decorate the space they occupy with the simplest of items, using whatever resources at hand to create an atmosphere of joy and celebration. And they amuse themselves by taking portrait photographs of each other, behind the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Palestinians are quite capable of photographing themselves, employing resources to represent and narrate not only their circumstances, but how they creatively engage their relationships to their circumstances. Neither numbers nor abject subjects of violence, they continue to disturb and challenge the Israeli onslaught by resisting their reduction to bare life.

Header image: Ron Lach