BOOK REVIEW: Before the Flood - a Gaza Memoir

From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026

  

 Young Palestinian woman harvesting grapes, in a picture taken around 1930

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

Before the Flood is a unique collection of stories from Palestine, stories by turns disturbing, horrifying and yet also hopeful. Its author, Ramzy Baroud, an American-Palestinian journalist and writer, explains towards the dark side end of the book:

"As I continued to write, my position went beyond storyteller into something else entirely, at times gory and frightening, deeply emotional and raw. When the genocidal war started on October 7, 2023, whole branches of my family perished in large numbers. Scores of my cousins, their wives, husbands, and children, died under the rubble of their homes in the most horrific and unimaginable ways. Some were burned alive. Others were shot by snipers. A few were executed while taking refuge at hospitals or standing in line in UN feeding centers, hoping to fetch a loaf of bread…"

Baroud mentions particularly, his sister Soma, "one of Gaza’s most beloved medical doctors", who was assassinated by the Israeli army on October 9, 2024, while on her way back from Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. He says 'assassinated' because "she was the 166th doctor and 987th medical worker to be deliberately killed by Israel up to that date”.

The positive part stems from what is not said explicitly here, the effort to reframe the post-October 7 narrative, which attempted, and all too often succeeded, to present the events of that day as a betrayal of Israel’s ‘gift’ of home-rule in the territory of Gaza. Commentators colourfully filled out the Israeli version of history by writing that Gaza could have become “Singapore” or “Dubai” but instead chose violence. Is that version absurd? But former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett put something like this explicitly in an interview  on MSNBC on Nov. 6, 2023, when he said that, in the case of Gaza, the  Palestinians had “got everything they wanted.” 

And if a flat lie like that was possible, as Israel had actually laid siege to the territory, so much more was the portrayal of the October 7 attack as an irrational betrayal and proof that concessions did not work. 

In an interview with MSNBC, Bennett, who served as Israel's prime minister from 2021 to 2022, said that many Israelis had assumed that if Palestinians "just have good enough lives, they’ll get off our case," but had found instead that "they created a nightmare." He went on:

“In 2005, we pulled out of Gaza, back to the 1967 borders. We handed the entire territory over to the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. There was no blockade, nothing. They had the chance to form the Palestinian state that everyone’s talking about. No one stopped them. They have beautiful beaches and beautiful weather, and they dedicated those 17 years to shooting rockets at us, and to killing us, so would you try it again?”

Above all, the mainstream media treated October 7 as though history “started” that day. No mention of the blockade, nor settlement expansion, nor the constant killings in Gaza and the West Bank. All this was deemed not only irrelevant but off-limits, talk of it a mark of “anti-semitism”. 

This story allowed ceaseless Israeli bombardment to turn much of Gaza into rubble, killing civilians at a rate exceeding that of any other armed conflict in the twenty-first century. 
 
And then, the 'total blockade' promised by Israel’s Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant was delivered. Baroud writes:

"In a video statement, Gallant said: 'We are putting a complete siege on Gaza… no electricity, no food, no water, no gas—it’s all closed'. Gallant said that his country was fighting 'human animals', and that his country would 'act accordingly'. Washington didn’t find Israel’s language or behavior problematic. Instead, it sent aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean to ensure that no one dared obstruct Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza.”

So total has been Israel’s control of the mainstream narrative that it has been able to conduct a 21st century genocide in Gaza, not only with impunity but, in the case of many Western countries, with financial, military and media support. This is the context for this book and its message, that stories matter.

As does the question of where to start the story. This is particularly true in any discussion of Israel-Palestine. Sometimes Israelis like to start it three thousand years ago in a mythical Biblical state of Judea and Samaria, sometimes in an equally chimerical version of Israel’s acceptance of what the UN agreed to in 1947 (chimerical because its leaders openly stated their strategy was to take what was offered and continue to add more later) – and sometimes, with the perennial bias of news, it is started as though history began last week.

The Israelis’ ability to control the narrative has long characterised the conflict. They declare unchallenged that: “The Balfour Declaration gave Israel a legal right to Palestine”; or “In 1948, tiny Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab armies”; or “In 1967, Israel was only defending itself”.

So, it is in an effort to correct this, to tell the Palestinian story, that Baroud’s book is written. At times angry, more often poignant and disturbing, it is a tale about identity and memory that has deeply philosophical implications for political legitimacy and the ability of individuals and peoples to make their own choices. 

As Ilan Pappé puts it in the introduction, Ramzy Baroud offers us two powerful insights. The first is the personal reminder that not one, but three generations of his family have endured a relentless and ruthless attempt to displace and destroy them. The second is an insight into how and why, despite everything, the Palestinians continue to resist, continue to survive. It is in this way that the book points towards not the end of the Palestinian people, as the Israelis now overtly and unashamedly seek, but to a new Palestine:

“…a country where Jews, Muslims, and Christians once genuinely coexisted. It was a Palestine that was part of the Arab world, enmeshed for centuries with the Islamic civilization surrounding it, one that can still become a beacon for the Middle East“.

In fact, the book’s central method is the restoration of historical continuity — what the French call the longue durée. Baroud writes:

“Even if Palestinians have not made a common agreement to wait for the invaders to leave, or for Palestine to once again become a place of social, racial, and religious coexistence, they are driven, even if subconsciously, by the same energy that compelled their ancestors to push back against the invaders. Characters in this book fulfil the historical role that was assigned to them by circumstances beyond their control. They are reanimating the past, just as their descendants will shape the future.”

Where today the media narrative is constructed around assumptions of relative calm (self-defined simply because the issue is not in the news) and sudden barbaric rupture, here instead is a tapestry woven out of generations of displacement, accumulated trauma and resistance. Baroud offers historical continuity stretching from the Nakba through to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, saying:

“The deep-rooted historical continuum between the Palestinian past, present, and future is the very essence of this book.”

However, Baroud's aim throughout is not merely to supply “more context” ut to use family memory - his family’s memory - as a counter-history to conventional narratives built around the actions of leaders and states. Instead of diplomacy, treaties, and military operations, ordinary Palestinian lives here become the story. Take one episode within it, that of the Saraya, the Gaza Strip’s notorious prison. Of this, Baroud writes:

“All Gazans arrested and tortured in the early 1996 were familiar with the Saraya, which they dreaded because of what they or their loved ones had experienced there at the hands of the Shin Bet. The Saraya’s history is one of conquerors and resistors. When the Palestinian rebellion was in full bloom in the 1930s, the British began building new prisons in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. The Saraya prison, completed in 1936, was used to detain and torture many… When the British left Palestine, the Egyptians took over the prison, made some repairs, and resumed the war against Gaza’s political dissidents. When they left, the Israelis took over, repainted the walls, and placed Hebrew signs on top of the Arabic ones that had once replaced the English. There, the Israelis perfected various torture techniques, including the use of deafening music and electric shocks to the genitals.”

And when the Israelis finally left? Then the Palestinian Authority took over the prison and the torture continued! Baroud recounts the case of Ehab, one of his relatives.

“He had experienced the same torture techniques before, though at the hands of the Israelis, not fellow Palestinians. His interrogators denied him sleep for days, while officers took turns beating him for hours on end. … Once his face and other parts of his body stopped bleeding, the torturers would return and carry out the same process all over again.”

Today, people often ask of modern Israel how those who ostensibly fled the racist violence of Europe could so easily have switched from victims to perpetrators. Baroud answers this obliquely, not by describing the Israelis but with reference to the PLO.

“The question of how the freedom fighters of yesteryear became the torturers of the present was a recurring subject of conversations between the leaders of Hamas in the Saraya prison. The common wisdom at the time resolved that the illusion of power, and the wealth that is often obtained through political power, were the main reasons behind moral corruption — a notion not entirely unfamiliar to Palestinian society”.

Perhaps the most piquant of Baroud’s insights comes early in the book. This is that:

“Palestinians are the perfect example of history being shaped by ideas, not guns; memories, not politics, collective hope, or international relations. The Palestinian people will eventually win their freedom because they have invested in a long-term trajectory of ideas, memories, and communal aspirations”

Baroud recalls that  the former United Nations Special Rapporteur, Richard Falk, summarised the struggle in Palestine as a war between those with arms against those with legitimacy – and that, given time, it is the side which has the latter which eventually triumphs. Perhaps here we might also make the currently fashionable distinction between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ victories. Israel’s destruction of Gaza, along with the seizure of the destroyed terrain, can be seen as a tactical success - but strategically, it has cost the country whatever legitimacy it retained around the world. Today, the political and media elites still speak Israel’s stories, but the people no longer listen. They have seen too much horror with their own eyes.

And what the world sees now, the Palestinians have seen many times. But not just at the hands of Jewish settlers and American war planes. This is why, Baroud writes:

“…the culture of Muqawama—Resistance—is deeply ingrained in Palestine. It is a culture as old as time. Innate. Intuitive. Intergenerational. It precedes the birth of Israel by thousands of years… [there] in legendary battles against the Macedonian invasion fomented by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Many characters began their relationship with this narrative as storytellers or researchers, but soon became victims of the Israelis’ genocide, thus becoming the story. When one of those storytellers was killed, another seamlessly continued where they left off — a wife telling the story of her husband, the son of his father, the sister of her brother. Without prior coordination, they shaped the narrative with no gaps or interruptions. This achievement is not my own. It is theirs."

Before the Flood is especially valuable in the way that it weaves both the abstract general and concrete particular together.

"Historians also tell us that when Palestinians rebelled against Israel, they had a justified set of demands: end the military occupation, dismantle the settlements, free the prisoners, allow displaced Palestinians to return to their land, and more. While the youth of the Intifada did not object to any of these demands, it was clear that when the customers of the hummus restaurant at the Jabaliya refugee camp market abandoned their freshly baked bread, raw onions, and chickpeas and ran to join the angry mourners, they were not compelled by a cohesive political program. When yelling “God is great!” they shouted a phrase that has always united Palestinians, underscoring their collective understanding that there is a transcendent force superior to all of us—greater than the soldiers and their guns, the Arab leaders and their empty rhetoric, the PLO’s hotel-based revolutionary slogans, and even Israeli drivers who can, at a whim, decide if Palestinians live or die."

This book is not, in many ways, an easy read. But nor is it the end of the story.

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

By Ramzy Baroud 

Seven Stories Press (2026)

ISBN: 1644215284