A Letter to Ali

Dear Ali,

What did you awaken to as you heard the call to Fajr adhan in the first moments of the last day of your life? The full moon had set. The sun had not yet risen. Could you make out the curves of the white colonnade above the courtyard where you lay with your Baba? In this place in Gaza that was now your home after you left what remained of your real home, a place where you and the thousands who now slept along with you were told they would be safe? Were there babies crying in answer to the muezzin? The call of a sunbird? Or do you not remember—were you thinking only of the mosque in that moment, walking there as quickly as the dark would allow once you told your Baba where you were going and that you would be back soon to fetch water?

The muezzin was chanting. “Prayer is better than sleep.” Not that you could sleep on the hard ground in that strange place that smelled of dust, smoke, sweat, fear. I like to think that you promised yourself one day you would memorize the Quran and make your Baba proud. Today you would pray. Pray for an end to your family’s suffering. Pray that your Baba would be able to build a home to replace the one that had been destroyed, with a bed for you to sleep in and perhaps a soccer ball and a set of colored pencils.

As you stood on the cool floor of the prayer room, you would not have seen or heard the fighter jets carrying the three American-made, 250-pound GBU-39 bombs until it was too late. Your killers said there were armed men among those there, but no armed men were ever found and the way the school had been configured meant it could not be used as a command center. The truth, as inescapable as those bombs, is that the attack was intended to kill you and everyone else in the school that day, and if any fighters were killed too, all the better.

A wise and well-respected man, a warrior from across the sea, says those bombs were not made to be used like this. They were made to shred concrete, not flesh, whether a fighter’s or a child’s. But they shredded you that day.

I want you to know that your father tried to find you. He ran through the clot of smoldering corpses and screaming survivors to dig through the rubble with his hands until they bled. I imagine that he couldn’t feel the pain—not that pain. He no doubt thought it was the blood of all the dead on his hands, not his own. Everywhere was blood and chunks of bodies and the smell of melted skin. More than 100 people were martyred that day. I say martyred. They were slaughtered. Was the head lodged between the feet of that dead man yours? No. Not yours. Your Baba saw a tiny hand, a doll covered in blood, but where were you? Ali, who fetched water each day in a plastic jug.

And where was Allah, where was God the father, maker of all things visible and invisible, on that day? What was visible that day will never be forgotten by those who were there. “As I walked through the carnage, I felt I was in a dream,” said a rescuer named Noah al-Sharnouby. “There were tens of bodies piled up and body parts strewn everywhere.” And the invisible? So many invisible.

Your Baba tried so hard to find you. He went to the hospital, thinking perhaps someone had seen your wounded body and taken you there. He asked for you, his son Ali, whom he loved with the strength of a clenched fist, but no one could help him. Too many others needed help. The doctors had not seen the boy your Baba described.

Outside the hospital he was given a bag of flesh scooped from a pile of unidentified remains, a bag weighing 18 kilograms, what those who filled it estimated to be the weight of a child your age. Your Baba said, “I don’t know if this is my son or not, I don’t know what I’m carrying in this bag. They said he’s my son, and I don’t know anything of my son in this bag.” Still, the bag held something for him to bury while reciting the Salat al-Janaza, when asking Allah to forgive you, though you are not who needs forgiveness.

Some people don’t think you were a child. They call you a human shield. A human-shield. What is a human-shield? A riddle? A fantasy? A lie, surely. But is it half person, half object? No matter. Now you are neither. Now you are fully dead.

My son, when he was your age, prayed every night, too, not to Allah but to God the father and to Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. But not anymore. Did he lose his way or did his prayers? I don’t know. The last time I saw his head bowed was in a photo taken at a protest on his college campus last spring. He is wearing his winter coat, his hands clasped, standing with a line of fellow students before a phalanx of state troopers armed with night sticks. Beside him is a hand-drawn sign that reads: Northeastern Supports Genocide.

You probably don’t know what that word means. It’s when one group of people kills another group of people because they don’t like them or because they want their land. My son opposed the genocide happening to you and your family. He was not hanging his head in reverence or shame, rather he was signaling to authority that while he would stand his ground, he was not a threat.

No doubt your Baba understands this way of communicating to police, to stay quiet at the checkpoints unless spoken to, to appear obedient, to appear ready to ask for mercy when there’s no reason to ask, no sin to be expiated, just danger to be avoided.

I used to visit a butcher, an old man in a white apron, who would weigh the meat before wrapping it in paper and dropping it in a plastic bag, which he spun once with a flick of his wrist, then knotted.  “What else, dear?” he would ask.

What else, habibi?

There is nothing else.

There is nothing.

Nothing.

Once you were a human being and now you are nothing. Once we, who looked on, were human beings and now we are nothing.

How will Allah, who is the greatest, how will our Lord God, maker of all things visible and invisible, ever forgive us for what we’ve done to you, Ali? May God make spacious the grave that I hope holds at least a tiny speck of what was once you, a boy who wanted only to pray. And may He fill it with light.

Hilary