Last month we moved house. Boxes were packed, stacked, and labelled. Two young men moved them onto a truck and then off again not far from our old home. I emptied the boxes marked ‘study - books’ and re-shelved the contents in a new room of an interim house, where we’ll live while our down-sizer apartment is being constructed. We sold the loved family home in the hope our children might one day plow the surplus value back into the housing market for future homes of their own. Maybe. We have been negotiating the transition between the social experience of ‘home’ and the commodity ‘house’.
Because of the historical quirks of my education, I thought of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking my Library’ as I re-shelved my books. Benjamin celebrates being reunited with his books after they were two years in storage. He luxuriates in the relation of book and collector as a passion which “borders on the chaos of memories.” Midst the dust and detritus of crates, Benjamin sees a dwelling made of memory emerge with the familiar books’ return: “what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” For Benjamin, the pleasure of remembering, as the collector holds a book, makes a personal order, or makes a home.
I’m happy to have my books at hand and they hold memory in a new place just as Benjamin says. But they are not what might make this house a home. I miss our garden: birds feeding in trees we planted; worrying over the cherry crop; cutting herbs for dinner. The last is a daily reminder of what we have left behind, but the meals which conjure the memory are something like the books Benjamin stacked so lovingly. Home is where my family eats. (I remember visiting Singapore, seeing Bangladeshi construction workers claiming a square of footpath for a shared meal, their removed shoes cordoning an improvised domestic patch.) For us, with little pain and in an abundance of security, we can leave the loved house and garden because we know we can make that life again somewhere else with the habitual order of the dining table.
While we packed and unpacked, fretting faintly and hoping securely, others in Gaza have packed and unpacked, packed and unpacked, packed and unpacked, in a lethal precarity. They face the sort of danger that made Benjamin finally leave his books behind in 1940; a danger that caught up with him in Catalonia, as he attempted to cross the border fleeing fascism. My books line up on their shelves and our family eats at our table, while the United Nations Humans Rights Council informs us a genocide continues in Gaza. Midst the so-called ceasefire, families live a bare life in tents surrounded by rubble. The UNRWA Situation Report #228 states, “Between 7 October 2023 and 27 June 2026 […] 73,054 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 173,480 injured.” These include 1,029 fatalities and 3,294 injuries that have occurred between the announcement of a ceasefire agreement on 10 October 2025 and 24 June 2026. In his 2026 report to the UN General Assembly, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, states, “Between October 2023 and October 2025, estimates indicate that at least 92 percent of Gaza’s housing units were either fully destroyed or damaged; over 90 percent of the population was displaced.”
I read in the Guardian of Mansoura Ibrahim Mohammed Abdel Dayem, a 76-year-old Palestinian woman whose home is now the back of a truck. In their camp, “Mansoura takes a few basil leaves from a plant the family have grown in a tin can, and grinds them with garlic in her mortar and pestle. She adds a chopped tomato and eats it with a little bread.” As she shares this lunch with her grandchildren she reminds them of the farm they left behind in Beit Lahia, “I planted and harvested my land. I had animal shelters where I raised livestock, chickens, rabbits and ducks.” Amongst her portable possessions, she keeps the key to their house. The house in the north no longer exists: “They flattened it: the house, the trees, the well, even a pen full of animals – they bulldozed it all.” Mansoura keeps the key along with a bullet extracted from her son’s back. He was shot when he went to fetch flour at an aid station.
In his rich and strange essay, ‘The Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin states, “Militarism is the compulsory universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state.” A state that forms itself on the order of military force habituates itself to continuous violence. Instead of a national home emerging from the germ of a domestic place, formed in security and reciprocity, such a state can offer only the security of the border. The line of demarcation is its formative image or habitual order, rather than the shared memory of the book or the portable community of the shared meal. Instead, the line must be asserted and reasserted by continuous violence. This is an apocalyptic catastrophe for the Palestinians in Gaza, but it also holds the prospect of an abysmal militarised precarity stretching into the future for the people of Israel. In these conditions, can they ever be home?