Soul of My Soul

The Palestinian Grandfather Who moved Millions

Yesterday, Monday 16^th December 2024, Khaled Nabhan was killed by Israeli shelling that targeted the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. In case you were somewhere under a rock and hadn’t heard of him over the past year, he was the Palestinian grandfather whose image became iconic when he was pictured kissing the eyes of his murdered granddaughter - yet another child casualty of Israel’s relentless campaign against civilians in Palestine.

The scene where he whispered to her that she was “Ruh al-ruh” in Arabic, “the soul of my soul”, with the calm and dignified composure of one accepting, indeed surrendering, as it were, to God’s will with stoic resignation, has become iconic, inspiring depictions of him in memes, posters, t-shirts. He has entered the iconography of popular culture as a hero embodying compassion, dignity and even resistance, through his spirit of goodness.

Khaled Nabhan was another of those people that Israel – and the architects of Western propaganda – don’t want you to know about. He had that kind of unshakeable inner strength and depth that few can aspire to. In the West, we revere people like the Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, who maintained his dignity despite the brutality around him in the concentration camps, where his mother and wife perished. They’re worthy of reverence. Men who are somehow able to derive strength and meaning from their trials and instead of succumbing as most of us would do to depression and grief, instead go on to greater heights, inspiring those around them.

They’re not supposed to look like Nabhan, a Palestinian man, the men that mainstream Western media tells you are “bad”. In fact, many social media sources over the past months and days, have pointed out, with irony, how his “turban”, beard and brown skin characterized him, by typical Western media/propaganda outlets, as the quintessential “terrorist”.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Perhaps we need to rethink our conception of what a “terrorist” is, because it is starting to look like all the Western tropes about the Middle East, Muslims and Arabs are in serious need of an overhaul – in other words, a huge reality injection.

Nabhan’s 3-year-old granddaughter Reem and 5-year-old grandson Tarek, children of his elder daughter Maysa, were killed in Israeli airstrikes in November 2023. His grief – so contained, so dignified – served as a symbol of what the Palestinians have been enduring not only since October 7^th but since the last 76 years and more.

In the period after losing his grandchildren, Nabhan volunteered himself to help with injured Palestinians, especially children. For a year, he helped displaced and injured people, feeding starving children, stray cats and taking care of his daughter and elderly mother – holding his family together despite his own tremendous grief and suffering. He even kept up work as a manual labourer, under extreme conditions of hunger and displacement himself.

Inspiring support and admiration from around the world - in February 2024 he was even referenced by the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud, in his campaign to end the US arms support to Israel - Nabhan used the resources mobilised through worldwide admiration for him, to tirelessly help others, in the face of Israel’s complete obstruction of aid into Gaza.

And then yesterday, this icon of humanity, this example to all of us – was brutally murdered by Israel. They finally managed to kill him – but not before he had shown the world what true humanity, compassion and dignity, in the face of the brutality and degradation Israel aims to relentlessly inflict on the civilians of Palestine, looks like.

We must ask ourselves, how many more? How many more innocent lives must be sacrificed to feed Israel’s monstrous and bloodthirsty campaign of revenge, as inscribed in its brutal Dahiya doctrine of “collective punishment”, and how much longer must the Palestinians endure this?

So many of my friends felt some kind of almost personal connection with Khaled Nabhan, so many tears were shed yesterday and continue to be in the aftermath of his passing. New memes sprang up yesterday, of Nabhan in ethereal flight over some celestial landscape, hand in hand with his beloved grandchildren – reunited, once more, with – in those now immortalized words - “soul of his soul”. And that is how I, too, like to imagine him. May he rest in peace in the highest gardens of Paradise.

Sobia Quazi