Whether trapped inside Gaza or out, the world is shrinking for Palestinians | Plestia Alaqad

The world is big, yet it is forever shrinking for Gazans. In fact, it is as small as 3% of the size of an ever-diminishing strip of land, where the rest of Gaza City is being forcibly displaced, bombed and starved. But our rejection doesn’t end at Gaza’s “borders”.

It follows us everywhere.

Since I left Gaza in November 2023, my life has been defined by visa rejections and endless hours waiting in airport lines. I watch people behind the counters staring at my Palestinian passport with confusion, often having to “call for help” just to process it.

I’ve learned to explain the details automatically: “My name is Plestia, Rana is my mother’s name. Yes, on Palestinian passports, we include our mother’s name.” One rejection after the other; I am stuck in Gaza, I am stuck outside. Where are Palestinians supposed to go? We are pushed out of our own land, then met with locked doors everywhere else. Why should survival mean being permanently exiled from home? Why can someone with the “right” passport walk freely into my country, while I need a mountain of papers to prove I am real, genuine and worthy just to enter theirs?

I still remember one airport officer flipping through my passport as if it were written in an alien language. He looked at me, then at the pages, then back at me, as though trying to connect an impossible puzzle.

This is the reality of being Palestinian. The world has turned our identity into a security risk. Yet this makes me think– what if it was still me, but I have another powerful passport? I would’ve been treated differently. If I have a western passport, I will suddenly stop being a threat even if I’m still the same person. My point here is the double standards.

Sometimes I feel like the only version of Palestinians the world is willing to recognise is the one under the rubble. People mourn us when we die, but fear us when we live. They repost our tragedies, but hesitate to open their borders. It is heartbreaking to realise that our humanity becomes visible only when we are suffering, not when we are simply trying to move, to work and to simply exist.

This all feels like first-world problems; talking about airport lines and visa rejections when a genocide is happening in Gaza. We’re told there is a ceasefire, but in reality the genocide has only taken different shapes and forms. How can it be called a ceasefire when people are still displaced in tents? How is it a ceasefire when a land as small as 365 km² is shrieked so tightly that Gazans are not even allowed to exist freely within it?

I keep thinking about winter in Gaza. It used to be one of my favourite seasons, turning on the fireplace whenever there was electricity, eating corn, watching movies on the couch with hot tea in my hands. Now winter in Gaza means something entirely different. It means thousands of displaced families soaked by the rain, children shivering without shoes, and people drowning in tents that were never meant to be homes.

And while Gaza is being pushed into smaller and smaller corners of what is left of home, the rest of the world moves on as if this fragmentation is normal. People debate politics, borders and aid, but they forget that every decision determines whether a family sleeps dry or soaked, warm or freezing, alive or gone. The distance between safety and danger for a Gazan is not measured in miles, but in minutes, in the sound of a drone, in the direction of the wind, in whether the sky decides to rain tonight.

Sometimes I feel like the world is more afraid of me as a refugee than it is afraid of the genocide and wars that create refugees in the first place. In my homeland, I’m trapped by borders and bombs. Outside Gaza, I’m trapped by identity. So I find myself asking, with Darwish: where should the birds fly after the last sky?

• Plestia Alaqad is an award-winning journalist and author