Before October 7, 2023, 2.3 million people lived in the Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, a territory of 360 square kilometers with a thousand-year history. The strikes of the Israeli army have so far caused 40,000 deaths and multiplied the destruction. A toll of corpses and ruins that increases every day.
From 2019 to 2023, Guillaume Lavallée headed the Agence France-Presse (AFP) bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He was thus able to go to Gaza, “at the end of the beach”, almost every month for four years. Each time, he met colleagues, sources, friends, restaurants, habits.
The journalist also always had the feeling of “falling into another world”, even if this image, he admits, makes him uncomfortable.
“I don’t really like this grammar of things. But between an ultra-technological state, with bridges, roads, things that work and cultivated land, and Gaza, where everything is shattered, where nothing can really be developed, the contrast is heartbreaking,” explains Guillaume Lavallée, who publishes Gaza before the 7th. Diaries of a siegethe heartfelt account of his experience on this permanent war zone. “I don’t know anyone who went to Gaza, well before October 7 [2023]and who was not deeply affected by it.
With this story filled with questions, made up of reflections and explanations, encounters and scenes from daily life, a book he had started working on before the Hamas attack in Israel, Guillaume Lavallée takes us with him into the belly of Gaza: he visits a biscuit factory, climbs aboard a small fishing boat (whose engine runs on liquefied plastic made in Gazafrom recycled water bottles) or evokes the condition of women.
The journalist also recounts the countless difficulties faced by Gazans who want to enter and leave Gaza, the lucrative business of the border.
So many profound human dramas unfolding in real time. He had already applied the method in War drone (Boréal, 2017), on the ground of post-September 11 Pakistan. An interest in humanity to which he had also given free rein with In the belly of Sudan And Travels in Afghani (Inkwell Memory, 2012 and 2022).
Gaza explained to his mother
Born in Quebec City in 1977, Guillaume Lavallée completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Université Laval before pursuing a master’s degree in political philosophy on the Arab world, which he completed at Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, Lebanon. He began doctoral studies in Muslim philosophy at McGill University before switching to journalism and becoming an AFP correspondent in Sudan and Pakistan.
Taking advantage of unpaid leave, he is a visiting professor at the UQAM School of Media for the current academic year.
But it is first to his mother that Guillaume Lavallée recounts his experience, addressing this woman who is now losing her memory — even paying tribute to her. The book could also have been called Gaza explained to my mother.
“Since 2001, I have spent half my time abroad, mainly in the Middle East. When I come home, we talk a little, then it’s over, we have to quickly get back to daily life.” It was also, explains the man who co-founded the Fonds québécois en journalisme international (FQJI), a way of bringing gentleness to the story, vulnerability, far from the image of the adventurer in a war zone that could stick to him.
“I wanted to create a bridge to the reader, for whom all the questions of the Middle East were very distant and dissociated issues.”
It seemed important to him, he adds, to address the whole question of the memory of Gaza. The one that is prevented or erased, the one that is forgotten or destroyed. Because the thousand-year-old history of Gaza is also that of a true crossroads of civilizations.
A media crisis
Regarding Gaza, Guillaume Lavallée feels that we are also currently experiencing a media crisis. “I spent my nights, during the last few months, watching what was circulating on Telegram, Instagram and Al Jazeera. Then I watched the Israeli channels, then our own channels. I think there are people who are deeply out of step. Emotionally, even a year later, Israelis and Palestinians are not at all in the same place.”
While the Israeli press is mainly interested in the return of the hostages, he notes, the Arab media will instead focus on the daily destruction. “Here, what fascinates me is that people who follow the conflict no longer go through the major Canadian or Quebec media to understand it. For months, they have been getting more information through Arab channels and Gazan influencers on social networks.”
A situation that, according to him, creates a significant gap in the heart of Western media culture. For many people, it then becomes very difficult to see the immobility of their society in the face of the suffering in Gaza.
While he points out that Israel has created the breeding ground on which Hamas was able to germinate, the attack of October 7, 2023 remains above all, he is keen to emphasize, the decision of a movement that has its own logic. But not all Palestinians in Gaza are terrorists. We are immersed in gray, and nothing is ever clear, Guillaume Lavallée points out. It also seemed important to him to show the extent to which the Israeli siege has allowed Hamas to fuel the frustrations of the population of Gaza.
The fact remains that by waging a war of blind destruction in Gaza, he believes, Israel is waging war on itself.
“From October 7, I knew that October 8 was coming for Gaza,” says Guillaume Lavallée. Everyone loses, everyone has lost, he believes. And in the face of these two extremist logics facing each other, hope seems slim to him.
While Gaza is often referred to as an “open-air prison,” after turning the last page of Gaza before the 7thsome may now hesitate to use this expression. Because the territory of Gaza, explains Guillaume Lavallée, is flown over day and night by surveillance drones of the Israeli army.
A real gold mine for the very dynamic Israeli military-industrial complex (with its exports amounting to 13 billion US dollars in 2023), which has been using Gaza for years as a laboratory – offensive drones, artificial intelligence, electronic surveillance.
Guillaume Lavallée testifies and confirms it to us: because of the omnipresence of drones, “a sound of lawnmowers” is the background sound in Gaza. In these conditions, it is difficult to look up at the sky, to spot a bird, clouds, a few distant stars, and to follow their course in thought, outside the walls.
In Gaza, Guillaume Lavallée makes us understand, the sky is not open: there is a ceiling.