Palestinian writers have long explored the horrors of amputation

By Graham Liddell, Hope College

Words fail as 2,000-pound bombs shred lives and limbs.

The sheer number of children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza is devastating – at least 13,000 children in the first six months of the war. But somehow I am even more dumbfounded by the headlines, piled one after another, about children who have managed to survive a bombing but at the cost of one of their limbs:

In November: “‘I want my legs back’: the child amputees of Gaza’s war.”

A few days after Christmas: “… Children in Gaza Face Amputations Without Anesthesia …”

In January: “More than 10 children losing legs in Gaza every day …”

By February, the grim had turned grotesque: “‘Dining table amputation’ …”

Though the current scale of pediatric amputations is unprecedented, the loss of limbs and the dividing of territories have been all-too-common features of the Palestinian experience since the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their land or fled from it.

For this reason, amputation has long played an important role in Palestinian literature. In the narratives of the Palestinian writers whom I’ve studied and translated, lost limbs represent both physical and metaphorical loss.

Amputation as indignity

During the Nakba, thousands of displaced Palestinians fled to countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, where conditions for refugees were dire.

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novel “Men in the Sun” is the story of three Palestinians who try to migrate clandestinely from Iraq to Kuwait in search of a better life.

At the novel’s climax, the refugees suffocate while hiding in a lorry tank at the border – the consequence, Kanafani suggests, of their timidity in the face of oppression. However, two examples of amputation in the story reveal the author’s more complex thoughts on internalized victimhood.

The first amputee readers meet in the novel is Shafiqa, the stepmother of one of the refugees, Marwan.

Shafiqa lost her leg during the bombardment of Jaffa by Zionist paramilitary groups in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

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