Overview

What if the place you called home could disappear overnight, and the world simply looked away? In Fearful in Gaza, Abdalhadi Alijla answers that question not with abstractions or ideology, but with the intimate, luminous prose of memory. Born into a family of ten in a Gaza neighborhood where concrete crumbles under airstrikes and childhood dreams blur with nightmares, Alijla tells the story of a life shaped by war, lifted by love, and driven by a hunger to survive and to speak. Told through intertwined voices, his own and those of his mother and sisters, Fearful in Gaza offers a vivid portrait of a family enduring the unendurable. We meet a mother who defies tradition to educate her daughters, who fights daily for dignity in the face of occupation, patriarchy, and grinding poverty. We meet a boy who works street corners and construction sites, sleeps amid gunfire, and ultimately claws his way across borders in search of freedom. But this is not simply a tale of escape. It is an act of witness. With lyrical, unflinching detail, Alijla brings to life the textures of Gaza: the scent of za'atar at breakfast, the sea that both haunts and heals, the aching bond between those who stay and those who go. It is a book about exile and memory, but above all, about the fierce love of a mother and her son, and the stubborn hope that persists when all else falls away. At once a personal memoir, a family chronicle, and a piercing social history, Fearful in Gaza is a profound meditation on resistance, belonging, and the enduring human spirit.

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9781943657223

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Abdalhadi Alijla is a Palestinian-Swedish political scientist, author, and advocate for social justice. He is the author of Trust in Divided Societies, co-editor of Rebel Governance in the Middle East, and a senior fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative. A scholar of governance and democracy, he has worked across Europe and the Middle East. In 2025, Alijla lost his mother and over fifty relatives during the genocide in Gaza. Fearful in Gaza is his reckoning, his tribute, and his call to remember.

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