Five millennia of continuous urban life. That’s how my baba used to boast about the only city he ever loved. Gaza. Ancient and resilient. When we were children, my brother and I spent an entire summer excavating in the garden of our grandfather’s home after learning that the soil beneath Gaza held treasures that went further back than the Bronze Age. We didn’t recover ancient treasure, but we learned how precious the soil was that sprung the pomegranates, the lemons, the figs, the tomatoes and the almonds that we feasted on.
We understood what it meant to belong to a city that belongs to five thousand years of continuous life.
