Philadelphia Novelist Alison Glick Speaks About the Family She Still Has in Gaza
Lauren Abunassar
For Philadelphia-based novelist, Alison Glick, 61, the past six months of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has been filled with fear and loss. Like many Palestinian Americans, Glick has been monitoring the news out of Gaza — where Israel has killed 33,970 Palestinians and wounded 76,770 others — with bated breath. But Glick is not Palestinian. She’s an American Jew. Her ex-husband, a Palestinian, is currently trapped in Gaza under Israeli bombardment, along with extended family and close friends.
Although the couple divorced years ago, Glick remains close with her ex-husband, the father of their daughter. Just this past weekend, she got word that her ex-husband’s elderly sister was forced out of the home where she was staying and was shot by an Israeli sniper as she was walking, aided by a walker, down the street. In December, Glick’s ex-husband’s brother, his daughter, and her two children were also killed in an airstrike on an apartment building in Gaza City. “It is all so unfathomable,” Glick said.
In 2021, Glick, who has lived in the West Bank, Gaza, and Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria, published The Other End of the Sea, a novel that began as a memoir of her time living, working, and starting a family in the region.
In it, she describes traveling to Israel in the early ‘80s, as a 17-year-old foreign exchange student. A year later, she returned to participate in an intensive Hebrew study program, which she said was meant to “entice foreign Jews to move to Israel and to help colonize it.” But while she was exploring what she thought was her Jewish roots, she began meeting Palestinians. The reality of apartheid became quickly and undeniably clear to her.
Philadelphia-based Alison Glick is the author of The Other End of the Sea. Photo credit: Wess Connolly.
This catalyzed a journey of understanding that unfolded over the next few decades. She returned to the United States, studied Middle Eastern history at Temple University, and became a staunch anti-Zionist. During the First Intifada, Glick moved to Gaza to do human rights work. There, she met and married a Palestinian man whom she identifies only by his first initial “H” in an essay recently published in Mondoweiss.
When Glick met H, he’d already spent 14 years in Israeli prison for his role in resisting Israeli occupation. After marrying, H was once again arrested by Israeli authorities and held without charge or trial. Upon his release, Israel came looking for him yet again, and he was forced into exile. He and Glick moved to Yarmouk Refugee Camp outside of Damascus. But, during the Gulf War, a pregnant Glick and her husband were compelled to leave as Palestinians were targeted in Syria for not allying with the U.S., as Syria had, against Iraq. Glick returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Philadelphia. But H was denied a visa, and ultimately returned to Gaza. Glick raised their daughter, now 32, in the U.S., traveling with her nearly every summer to visit H.
Glick (2nd from R) and her daughter (L) visited with family friends on a trip to Gaza in July 2023, just three months before the Israeli bombardment began.
Untangling these experiences and family architectures in her semi-autobiographical novel, Glick paints a narrative of resilience, longing, communal grief, and the mythologies of statehood. Her writing on Israel, Gaza, and the Arab world is underscored by empathetic and probing prose, a testament to the complexity of being geographically distanced from a war that, simultaneously, feels immediate and inescapable.
Al-Bustan spoke with Glick in an interview about the intensity of day-to-day life over the past months, as she continues to anxiously monitor the well-being of her family and friends in Gaza.
Lauren Abunassar (LA): You recently wrote an essay, “Of families, mills, and gardens,” for Mondoweiss. In it, you describe the struggle of your daughter’s father, H, and that of your other Gazan friends and family currently living under Israeli bombardment. When did you first decide to write the article and how did you approach a very emotionally-charged story, particularly as events are still unfolding?
Alison Glick (AG): As this nightmare began to unfold, I realized it was going to be different this time as opposed to all of the previous attacks. A number of people asked me to write about it. At first, I was just overwhelmed with horror and grief and disbelief. And then, I was a part of these WhatsApp group texts that H was sending out every day. Especially after he decided to leave Gaza City and make the trek to Khan Younis, his messages became more personal than just political analysis or translations from the Hebrew Press (he’s fluent in Hebrew). And I thought, “Okay, if I'm going to write about this, what do I have to say, to contribute, that's unique?” I thought: “I need to include a Palestinian voice.” And so, with his permission and with our daughter’s permission, I layered both my experience of what is happening as a mother, as a human being, and as somebody who has family and people I love dearly in Gaza, with his perspective.
LA: Has this conflict changed your understanding of home or family in any way?
AG: It has deepened a shift I’ve experienced over the past 30 years. During the first Gulf War (1990–1991), H and I were living in Syria. Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria at the time, surprised everyone and joined the Americans in the Persian Gulf War. The Palestinians did not and were suffering harsh repercussions as a result. Because H was not from the West Bank and did not have a Jordanian passport (most Palestinians were going to Jordan), he had nothing. We decided to come to the United States. My daughter and I were American citizens, of course. But when I applied for a visa for H, it was denied by the U.S. government because of his history of detainment. Our daughter was a toddler and that broke up our family basically. I’ve spent the past 30-plus years trying to figure out what does that mean, in terms of our daughter? What does that mean in terms of my relationship with her father? And what does it mean in terms of my relationship with his family, with whom I was quite close? I had to navigate that as a mother and as an American who was going to be living in the United States with our daughter, and I had to redefine all of those relationships both emotionally as well as practically. At one point, I was taking our daughter to visit him in the summers until she was old enough to travel on her own. When he went back to Gaza, it became impossible for us to enter after the siege. But as it happened, I went with my daughter on a trip to Gaza to visit him this past summer. I was there in July and I hadn’t been in 30 years.
LA: I’d imagine that was quite surreal.
AG: It was a very difficult trip both physically and emotionally but I am so glad I made it. Being there with my daughter as an adult and reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen for decades and then experiencing this genocide and trying to support my daughter and the family members there in any way I can, has made me realize we are still a family.
LA: There are so many people in Europe, here in the U.S., in other parts of the Arab world, who are facing a similar kind of helplessness in having family in Gaza and not knowing what to do. How do you support your family here and there?
AG: Well I’m an activist. So, I’ve attended and spoken at demonstrations. I’m volunteering now for the uncommitted campaign in Pennsylvania. But I’m also just making sure, as much as possible, that these people don’t feel forgotten. Making sure they know that there are other people here who support them and are trying to stop the genocide. The streets are flooded every day. I’ve always found Palestinians, frankly, to be politically sophisticated. And they understand the difference between the government’s policy and how people think.
LA: You mentioned this bombardment feels different. How so?
AG: The mask is off of Israel and Israeli policy. It's very clear that their intention is genocide, that their intention is ethnic cleansing. And that what they want to happen is to kill as many Palestinians as they can get away with, to make Gaza so unlivable that people will leave, or those who remain can be penned in even further and controlled even further. On the resistance side, I think that the world has also now seen that the mask is off. Of course, there are people and organizations and governments, first and foremost our own, who are trying to pretend otherwise. And they are trying to “manage the conflict.” I hope that the world sees that nobody is going to be fooled yet again by this performance of concern for Palestinians. The mass mobilization [in the streets] that has been sustained for over six months now has shifted things in terms of fighting for Palestinian freedom and life in a way that I have never experienced in my lifetime.
LA: One thing I’m thinking quite a bit about is the responsibility of witness — whether this be a human responsibility, the responsibility of storytellers, etc. You also explore this in your writing: the pain but the crucialness of this witness on a pragmatic level as you’re trying to monitor the status of a loved one in Gaza, but also in terms of storytelling as an act of witnessing. What role do you find storytelling has in times of catastrophic loss like this?
AG: I think storytelling cuts through the 24/7 media buzz and body count. It allows people who may think they don’t have a way to connect with Palestinians to see them as gardeners, fathers, as people who laugh and cry and like to go to the sea. It creates a bridge and gives people a way into what we think of as a complicated issue when in fact it’s not complicated. It’s pretty straightforward. What’s complicated is people’s own emotions. But the facts are quite understandable. I think storytelling helps to cut through some of that.
LA: Of course, much of the conversation around Palestine and Gaza right now has to do with the unfolding genocide, catastrophe, violence. But can you speak about the Palestine you remember?
AG: It’s this place that is beautiful. It’s a place filled with people who tend gardens, with people who laugh and enjoy life and fall in love and fall out of love and dance and sing and make jokes and get mad. It’s a very vibrant society. Gaza in particular is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there. But there is something about it that just grabs you. It’s something about the Gazans. Of course, they are warm and welcoming and hospitable, as most Palestinians I’ve met are. But it’s also their sense of humor and their creativity and ability to survive and adapt and even flourish in the most difficult of circumstances. That doesn’t make it okay of course. But there is a sense of humor they have, and the power of humor, and almost humor as a weapon. I think people who live under very oppressive situations and regimes develop that sort of humor and embrace of life that, to an outsider, is obscured by the decontextualized way the media reports on places like Gaza. Ultimately, it’s a love of life.
LA: In 2022, you posted on social media a quote by human rights attorney and Al-Haq co-founder Jonathan Kuttab: “The struggle of [unlearning Zionism] is an internal struggle. And it had to be in a way that says ‘there’s another way to be a Jew in the world.’” Can you speak a bit about what you had to begin to unlearn or how your perspective on Israel and even Palestine or Palestinian resistance shifted once you traveled to and lived in the region?
AG: I think that one needs to unlearn, frankly, a racism that is taught. That, you know, all Palestinians want to kill Jews, and that they're dangerous and you need to stay away from them. And, on the other hand, Israel is this shining beacon of light because it’s the only democracy in the Middle East and, of course, has the most moral army in the Middle East. And so, it's unlearning a mythology that is imbued with untruth, both about Palestinians and about the state of Israel… This wasn't a land without a people for people without land. It was a land with a people with a deep history and culture. And those who came to settle it were in fact settlers and colonizers. So, it's also understanding the history of the region, the history of that particular issue, and also history at large because, of course, settler colonialism isn't unique to Palestine. We ourselves are settlers and colonizers and live on stolen land.
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Lauren Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer and journalist. A Media Fellow at Al-Bustan, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in journalism from NYU. Her first book Coriolis was published by University of Arkansas Press as winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.