Like Schrodinger’s famous cat, I am trapped in a box. I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on my homeland, Gaza.
So many people know I am inside it, but none can tell if I am alive or dead.
Everything in life seems to follow a certain binary system, from electrons, which spin in one direction or the other, to human beings, which can be either alive or dead. Still, this does not seem to apply to me, because whether I’m living or dead at any given moment is unknown. I am no longer part of this binary of life and being, it seems. So, what am I?
The Gaza box
What makes physics interesting is that the process of solving most of its problems starts with the word “imagine”. So let’s imagine our own version of Schrodinger’s thought experiment. Let’s imagine everyone on Earth has been put inside a box, but our box has paths that lead to one of two labelled outputs -“life” and “death”.
For those of us in Gaza, the paths to “life” have repeatedly been blocked since the Israeli occupation began in 1967. We have all been pushed into paths that would lead to a single outcome: death. Israel has famished us, limited our access to water, shot at us, bombed us, prevented us from accessing healthcare It has pushed us onto the paths of death in every way it can.
In this box in Gaza, any path I take would eventually lead to my death. Like Schrodinger’s cat, I am locked in a box that will eventually kill me.
Luckily, I am not dead.
Yet.
But am I alive? I am writing this, surely, but I cannot leave the box. The only outcome available to me is death. So I’m afraid I cannot say that I am alive either.
Seemingly, my existence has now become identified by the superposition of the states of being simultaneously alive and dead. I am alive in a lifeless life, and all the possible paths ahead lead to my death.
Time bomb
As part of his thought experiment, Schrodinger sealed a cat in a box, along with a device that would kill it when a tiny bit of radioactive substance randomly decayed and emitted radiation, but it was impossible to tell when. In my situation, Israel has placed me in a box with any house I could take shelter in, and then turned these houses into time bombs that could explode at any time.
Late in October 2023, Israel alerted two of our neighbours in Khan Younis that their houses were going to be bombed. One of these houses was right next to ours. So my family decided to flee to my aunt’s house, waiting to see what happened.
Initially, we thought our return would be in a matter of hours, or maybe a couple of days at most. But we could not return for months.
On December 5, 2023, we had to flee again, when Israel shelled the area of my aunt’s house. Seeking relative safety, we relocated south, to Rafah.
When Israel advanced on Rafah in early May 2024, my family and I had no option but to return to our neighbourhood. Perhaps in deference to chaos, the two houses the Israelis initially threatened were left nearly intact, but the rest of my neighbourhood was rubble. Our house was heavily damaged, but still standing.
We were back to square one – our neighbour’s house remains under threat – Israel can bomb it any minute, without further warning, as it already issued its warning last year. But this time, my aunt’s house was not an option, the seemingly arbitrary, random, Israeli destruction had flattened it.
Although we were forced to flee our house several times between July 1 and August 31, following the Israeli military’s orders, we always went back home.
This means that we must stay vigilant 24/7, but we have no better option.
What deepens our torment living in our half-destroyed home, waiting for the next “evacuation order”, is that the only bathroom left standing in it is at the closest point to our neighbour’s house, the time bomb Israel is waiting to explode. In our box in Gaza today, avoiding the bathroom is biologically dangerous; using it is circumstantially dangerous.
I learned from a few friends of mine that we are not alone in living in anxiety due to a threatened but not yet flattened house nearby. Many houses that were threatened prior to the Khan Younis invasion remain intact, or at least standing till this moment. Neither their owners nor their close neighbours returned to their homes. We all know the destruction is coming, we just don’t know when.
Perhaps Israel is doing this on purpose, to keep us on edge, as it clearly enjoys playing torturous psychological games with us. Schrodinger’s cat was lucky, I doubt it ever understood the arbitrary doom awaiting it.
Equilibrium point
After 14 months of the war, the scene in Gaza has become extremely chaotic. Nonetheless, certain paths can be followed even in chaos. Recently, I’ve noticed that my movement is similar to the quantum harmonic oscillator (QHO). I go up, I go down, back and forth, returning to the equilibrium point. My oscillations can provide me with a property of life, inasmuch as they might lead me straight to death.
I go up and down like an elastic spring whenever I carry gallons of water from the ground floor to the rooftop using my house’s stairs, which are about to fall apart after an Israeli bulldozer uprooted all my trees and stuffed them underneath. I do this every two days.
In the QHO, electrons can also use a kind of stairs. It’s called the ladder operator and it’s how electrons move between energy states.
It can be further divided into creation and annihilation operators. Imagine climbing a ladder, and the rungs can either propel you upward or break, and plunge you to your death. A creation operator propels electrons to a higher energy state on the ladder of orbits. An annihilator operator drops them lower.
However, when I imagine myself as an electron, it is not the stairs I am climbing that are the creation operator – it is the water, because it creates the ability to move from a lower energy state to a higher energy state, from being more thirsty to less thirsty.
In such hard conditions, annihilation operators are manifold and unpredictable. Whenever I go to the market, I take a detour. I do so to avoid annihilation operators – it’s not easy to wear my worn slippers on the razed lumpy main road – not to mention the waves of dust the crowds create.
Nevertheless, while I was on my way to the market, an Israeli drone, perhaps the ultimate annihilation operator, made a sudden appearance. It targeted a man right on the head a few seconds after he passed by with his motorcycle.
As with the QHO, creation and annihilation operators can appear simultaneously. Lately, Israeli helicopters have expanded their activity area and come to hit targets in east Khan Younis, where I live. This happened twice while I was busy with my creation operation: carrying water.
Still, I keep doing the same things, using the same paths, hoping that I will collect the shrapnel of what remained of my life, and climb from a daily death to a daily life.
Again, I know that I’m not alone in this. There are two million boxes in Gaza that have the same probabilities, because we are all subject to the same conditions.
Despite all I have said about ladder operators and raising energy states, none of us can reach the top to open the box.
In Schrodinger’s cat experiment, everyone asked whether the cat was alive or dead, but no one actually opened the box to see. If they had, the superposition would have collapsed and the cat would only be dead if they didn’t open the box in time.
We are not cats. Please open the box!
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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