No Way but Forward
No Way but Forward narrates the lives of three families in the Gaza Strip who Professor Barber has known intimately via his long residencies in the Gaza Strip since 1995.
No Way but Forward is not a treatise on history, politics, or economy, as is the bulk of the dozens of important books in English on Gaza. Neither is it a book about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Rather, it is a set of stories, deeply human accounts of three young men over the course of three decades as they navigated the formative first intifada, and then faced many obstacles in achieving their cherished education, finding employment, and forming their own families.
These are stories of everyday life in a grim and sorely misperceived corner of the globe, tales of capacity and remarkable steadfastness in trying to forge a good and dignified life under an increasingly severe and repressive military occupation. The narratives are heartening and tragic, gripping and instructive. In seeing their day-to-day reality, we recognize ourselves, our own interests, struggles, dilemmas, joys, pains, including the thrill of birth, worry about school exams and the disappointment of failure, stigmatization and fear of infertility, self-satisfaction of earning a job and promotion, and the agony of learning about a cherished mother’s cancer. Readers will be lost in such familiar human drama—only to be awakened with the realization that all of this played out “over there” among those “hornets” in the “hellhole” of Gaza.
The closing chapters of the book record the direct WhatsApp messages to the author from each of the three protagonists from October 7, 2023—the day of the shocking attack on Israel by Hamas—to October 7, 2024, a full year of the still-continuing, wholesale annihilation of Gaza and its culture by the Israeli military. Their messages record horrific scenes, catastrophic upheavals, deep humiliation, genuine fear of death, hunger, and illness. But they also reveal astounding stamina, resistance, and hope – their classic insistence that there is no way but to move forward.
