Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, which has been the most reliable English language news source regarding the conflict in Palestine since before October 2, 2023 and even more so since that date, writes history from the heart.  His stories of families (including his own) and their lives as refugees, freedom fighters, doctors and more remind the reader that the political history of a people is ultimately the history of people.  In the case of a people under fire, under occupation and under constant pressure to deny their culture and therefore their lives by colonial powers convinced that their oppression and repression will defeat those they oppress, Baroud’s words are in themselves weapons of the struggle.  His most recent book, titled Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine, continues this tradition.

Baroud’s description of the first days and weeks of the genocide brings everything back: the horror, the anger, the frustration and hopelessness. One can feel the fear and despair, the disbelief followed by a nagging voice in your head reminding you that this has always been the Zionists true vision and Washington’s secret hope—decimate the Palestinian population, destroy the idea of a free Palestine and move on to the business of making the land that is Palestine into a colonialist utopia.  Then, the reader is taken back in time to the genesis of the story being told in these pages.  It’s a tale of resistance to colonialism that moves from one generation to the next; one historical moment to the one that follows in the context of a world where the colonizers are primarily of European descent and distinctly related to a perception of the world to its south as something to be dominated. 

Baroud’s text begins by locating its origins in Beit Daras, a town in Palestine that was overtaken and destroyed by Zionist militias during the Nakba.  The reader is introduced to Madallah, a matriarch whose life is representative of the stories being told; whose abilities include being able to communicate transcends this dimension.  From that beginning, the reader finds themselves in refugee camps and on battlefronts; battlefronts which are all too often the places where people live, work, worship and celebrate. The profiles Baroud constructs are of real people, people as real as the reader and their friends and family; the circumstances are considerably harsher and more tenuous because of the occupation and its enforcers.  In his portrayal of these lives, one meets a young man who becomes a petty criminal and a young woman who dies a freedom fighter, killed by a future prime minister of the Israeli government.  The conflict between the occupied and the occupier is not just the common thread that provides a context for all the people and events relayed by the author, it is a fact of life and a reason for living for many if not most of those who appear in these pages.  

More than just a part of the setting of the history being told, the resistance is a living and genuine protagonist in Before the Flood.  From the early battles in the 1930s before the Nakba and the never-ending struggle afterwards, the reader finds instruction on the Intifadas, the wars between Tel Aviv and its neighbors and the recent phase that became an international condemned genocide (that continues today hidden behind a fraudulent ceasefire).  Inside the resistance itself, one reads of class differences that have defined approaches taken by the organizations of the resistance—one ultimately favoring accommodation and potential surrender, the other accepting a history that makes it clear that colonizers do not relinquish the lands that they have conquered without a long and often violent struggle.  Baroud’s depiction discusses the transition from a mostly secular liberation struggle to one with its foundations in what is ultimately a struggle informed by Islam that originated in the previously existing Muslim Brotherhood.  The character of the resistance is a reflection of the Palestinians, from Arafat and Fatah to the PFLP to Hamas.  Its continuation through generations is testament to its necessity and the commitment of its supporters; it is also a reason for its changing tactics and internal struggles.

The current situation in Palestine may be its most difficult yet.  The brazenly illegal and colonialist slaughter and destruction of Gaza led by Tel Aviv and Washington continues as it intensifies in the West Bank; the Nakba seems never-ending. Banks and corporations intent on theft and profiteering hover around Donald Trump and his Gaza designs like flies around manure, hoping for a piece of the real estate fantasy he and his son-in-law are hustling to the world.  Netanyahu and his government of homicidal sociopaths demand a world where all Palestinians are either dead or enslaved, living in medium security prisons disguised as residential zones.  Washington and Wall Street eagerly accommodate this desire, lining up investors and corporations whose pursuit of profits determines their morality.  Ramzy Baroud’s Before the Flood reminds us that humanity comes first; that it is this priority that in the most fundamental way possible is what drives the Palestinian resistance.  It remains for us to remember and repeat this truth.

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