The Country of the Dead

Language Matters by Elias Winter · Sep 6, 2026 · 39m

I. The Strip That Was Never Meant to Become a Country

There are places created by geography, places created by conquest, and places created because history ran out of somewhere else to put people. Gaza belongs largely to the third category.

In 1948, as the war that accompanied the birth of Israel spread across Mandatory Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Some moved east toward what became Jordan. Some went north toward Lebanon and Syria. Others moved south, carrying children, blankets, deeds, cooking pots, family photographs, keys.

Many of…