Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine

In this devastating account, journalist Baroud (These Chains Will Be Broken) traces multiple generations of his Palestinian family tree as each confronts the Israeli occupation. He begins with family matriarch Madallah Abdulnabi’s childhood in idyllic Beit Daras, from which she was forcibly expelled during the 1948 Nakba. Baroud depicts the expulsion with haunting imagery—“hundreds of women and children rushed to the southern road where sunflowers were in full bloom”—and harrowing flashes of carnage (“two little sisters shot holding hands”). These vivid descriptions clarify how the Nakba’s trauma continues to resonate through subsequent generations, particularly as Baroud turns toward the Gaza branch of his family. He catalogs their experiences of “imprisonment, torture, and loss,” including those of Madallah’s son, Ehab al-Badrasawi. In 1987, to the dismay of other family members, Ehab, then a “scrawny” 11-year-old, participated in the first intifada, which erupted after “an Israeli had deliberately run over Palestinian[s]... waiting by a bus stop.” Later, Ehab joined Hamas after Israeli forces killed his younger brother Wael. The book hurtles toward October 7 with mounting horror as both Ehab’s son and nephew join the fight, and it comes to seem as if Wael’s death had “sealed the fate... of the al-Badrasawi family.” It’s an indelible depiction of the generational trauma that defines the Palestinian struggle. (Feb.)