A Cat Named Abu al-Leil

"Are You Filming The Cats In Gaza?"

Link here.

I looked up how to say grandmother in Arabic.

“Abuela” in Spanish.

In Swedish there are two words, strictly literal: Farmor (father’s mother) and mormor (mother’s mother.)

“Jaddati.”

And cat sounds like our “cat” but pronounced more like “cut” with most of the vowel disappeared.

This cat’s name!

I can hear my father say: “Celia, do you know that Abu means “son of” in Arabic.”

“No, I didn’t.”

This is the kind of thing one ought to know—at the very least.

Son of al-Leil. (I wonder who al-Leil was.)

To imagine cats in Gaza, the role they played, what they meant to each family, and what happened to them, in their cat bodies, is something we will never contemplate.

“As long as this turtle is here, we will be as well.”

Link here.

Children in Gaza play with rubble.

A father.

What is this their sin?

She lost 7 members of her family.

“I swear to God we found a duck!”

You realize: This has only just begun.

It’s beginning now, meaning, the space for the losses to be truthfully and agonizingly understood. It was a common experience for the people of Gaza not only to lose several family members, but to wind up holding one of their limbs—a hand or an arm. I’m sorry to do this, but I think we all have to register these things and never forget or soften them.

The devastation is literally unimaginable, and there for all to see, on countless accounts like these. We should not look away. We should donate, (check for donation links) and we should challenge those in our lives who somehow permitted themselves to say either that none of this really happened (yes, there are such people even in the “truther community”) or that it was by some deranged measure necessary or, even, deserved.

“Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Remember the trope about how “…they don’t love their children like we do?”

Was anything ever more perfectly vicious, that that?

I was unable to access Instagram for months, but am now able to again. It’s all there for anybody to see, and again, anybody who argues that dolls or fake blood is the real story—I suggest you give up on this particular Substack. I’ll withhold my brimming contempt, at this necrophilic insult.

What people in Gaza are coming home to is yet another peak on the mountain of unimaginable suffering.

It may be that some of you wish I would back off, but no “story” in our lifetime, except maybe “Covid shots” will ever be this important to not look away from. I will be posting story after story, even if I drive people away. I’m sorry if it is depressing, heartbreaking—it’s also our own downfall if we brush it under the rug.

As with Covid, they tried to snap humanity like a twig. I think they wanted us to become collectively trans-human, or post-human, but humanity resisted. That’s the main story—that humanity, overall, refused to be post-humanized, including countless Jews, Israelis, and even IDF and Shin Bet members, who blew the whistle from the inside. Even Charlie Kirk faltered from the burdens placed on him, to defend this. I even saw that Jared Kushner recently said Gazans had suffered enough, “…through no fault of their own.” I wondered if this earned him a wrist-slap, this small step away from the Likud party line, that there are no innocents in Gaza. Now that the bombing has stopped, will the denial and apologia begin to crumble?

The same sickness that made people allow grandmothers to die behind plastic, given no last rites, in the name of public health, or inject healthy children with bio-weapons—this same spirit made ordinary people “support” this incomprehensible destruction.

They escaped to their political conditioning, as a way to deny what was actually being done to fellow humans. And we we all cowed into walking on eggshells in the vicinity of their sensitivities.

The stories about the animals, of the children’s joy, of the resilient spirits, are sparks of light in an abyss.

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Postscript:

Singun—Animal Mascot of 9/11.

After Sept 11, I wrote about firefighters who spent weeks luring a surviving squirrel with half his fur burned off, out of the “pile.” They went to great lengths to rescue the squirrel, and my friend Kevin McCrary, who worked as a volunteer at Ground Zero, explained that they were simply that desperate to find anything alive. Kevin even called me to say if I could make it downtown fast, I could see the squirrel, who Kevin had named “Singun” in a tree.

Until then, I’d not thought about the trees, animals, squirrels, birds, who lived down there. My son wrote a story about Singun, called “Singun In The Rubble,” in which Singun met a wife, and had babies. And his fur grew back.

This all, in turn, reminds me of a book I once wrote for Scholastic that never got published, called “Animals in War.” It ranged from bio-luminescent crustaceans that lit of cockpits of fighter jets to pigeons carrying code in both world wars to a bear that fought alongside the Polish army, and even drank beer. Poles come out in droves to this day to listen to the aged veteran who knew this bear, whose name was Wojtek

The theme of the book, aimed at boys 8-12, was that animals, through history, served sacred roles in war, as mascots and symbols of life.

My editor said I somehow didn’t get the tone right. I couldn’t write it in whatever voice one is supposed to affect in narrating to children, I just wrote it straight.

I’ll find the manuscript.

And for the record, I don’t consider this to have been a “war.” It was something that lacks description.

Here’s a story about the return of apples.

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