Out of It Quotes

“We can't just run away. It's our land. Our people. We have a duty.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

“He could never go back to that place, it had been sealed off to him for ever, blown to the sky with explosives then flattened to the ground with bulldozers, built over with tarmac, lived on top of by other people.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

“Nothing you do for them will harm the enemy, the real enemy, it will only draw in more support for them as a party.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

“All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

“Soldier on guard says they've identified “someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost”. The other soldier, in the lookout, says “A girl about ten,” but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[...]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [...]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to “if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?” [...] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

“To hell with memory. It was like feeling around in basket of apples only to be confronted by a snake.”
― Selma Dabbagh, Out of It