Our Guernica

I live in Nicosia, Cyprus, just over 400 kilometers from the Gaza Strip, a short boat ride through the Mediterranean. And yet, right now, this neighboring land seems to be further away than any other place on the planet. A quick search for directions on Google Maps generates a mere “can't seem to find a way there.”

In every sense of the word, Gaza is cut out: a piece of land that is inaccessible, out-of-reach, forbidden, off-limits, a place without a way to get there.

This prohibition is eerily familiar to me. My childhood unfolded against the backdrop of the so-called “dead zone,” the forbidden strip of land that cuts across Cyprus from east to west, separating the north from the south and dividing Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots into the “us” and the “them.” I grew up with the sight of barbed wire, patrolling soldiers, and military barrels full of bullet holes neatly stacked along the streets of my hometown. The prospect of war still features prominently among common childhood phobias here, even though there hasn't been active warfare since 1974. I know all too well that every cut-out land is filled with leftover wounds, visible and invisible, insidious and malignant.

Wounds in Gaza won't heal for generations. While still in the torrent of ongoing destruction, they continue to multiply, deepen, fester. As I try to wrap my mind around the harrowing testimonies of Mohamed Abu Shawish and Hala Al Sarraj, around what is unfolding currently, at this moment, just 426 kilometers from my current location, my mind's eye intuitively conjures Pablo Picasso's monumental 1937 painting Guernica. Over the past several months I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures and videos of emaciated women and children, of buildings reduced to rubble, of vibrant streets turned instantly into a single shade of gray, of death. And yet, at this very moment, I resorted to this man-made image of war, which art historian T. J. Clark aptly described as “our culture's ‘Tragic Scene