The Plane I Can Still Catch

This month a plane will leave Gaza for Dublin. On it will be some of my classmates, students from Gaza who hold their Irish visas and could not leave with the first group, and I already know where I will be standing when it takes off, on the rubble of the house I grew up in, unless one file in one office in Dublin is opened in time. That file is mine. This is the story of how it got there.

I am twenty two, from Gaza City. I was a first year computer science student when the genocide began. An airstrike brought our home down over our heads, and I was pulled out of the rubble in the clothes I was wearing. My university was bombed, and its ruins shelter displaced families now. For three years I lived between tents, and I kept studying, because it was the only thing left that no one could take. I sat exams under bombardment on whatever connection I could find. I taught myself English. I taught myself to write code on a borrowed laptop with a cracked screen, charged from a solar panel, and I walked the streets twelve hours a day under the sun toward the places people were running from, because that was where the signal was strong enough to send one email. I turned that into freelance work, into more than fifteen certificates, and finally into a place at University College Dublin and a full four year scholarship. The funding for it I raised in my own name, from outside Ireland, until more than seven international and charitable organisations had joined the road, and the university's own foundation agreed to hold it. Everything was paid. Everything was ready.

On 15 July my visa was refused. The letter listed seven grounds. No personal bank statement, in a city where the banks no longer stand. Insufficient evidence of English, from a person who taught it to himself in a tent and has since been put live on Irish national radio speaking it. Gaps in my education, from a student whose university is rubble. Insufficient obligations to return, from a man whose entire family is here. And the one I still cannot read without stopping: the need to study in Ireland is not demonstrated, when the scholarship exists nowhere else on earth but Dublin. I was not alone. As the Department confirmed to the University Times, 130 of us from Gaza applied this year, 39 were granted and 103 refused, students with places and full funding at Irish universities, refused over papers a destroyed city cannot produce.

I could have accepted it quietly. I did not. I went on Irish radio and television, I wrote, I asked people for their voices and not their money, and Ireland answered on the street: universities, student unions, academics, thousands of ordinary people, a protest outside the Department of Justice, and flowers in the arrivals hall for seven of my classmates who did get out. With my solicitors at Phoenix Law I then built the appeal in a few weeks, working every day from here, and on 1 September it was lodged: ninety three pages, every ground answered with a document, everything a person can still pull out of Gaza. UCD confirmed in writing that my place is held pending the outcome and that I take it up the moment the visa issues.

My course started on 7 September. Every morning since, the university's emails reach me as if I were there, my timetable, my orientation, a student life arriving into a phone held over rubble. I read the life that is waiting for me and I cannot touch it. And now there is the plane. A decision on my appeal within a week or two of the day it was lodged puts me on it, in a lecture hall this month, in the same academic year my scholarship was given for. If the file is not reached in time, the next flight may be months away, and a funded seat sits empty through the year it was funded for.

I do not believe the Irish people chose this. I believe a general rule read our files without ever seeing Gaza, and every time a human being actually looked at one of us, the answer changed. The Ireland that stood outside the Department of Justice and the Ireland that stamps the passports are the same country. I am asking the desk to catch up with the street, in time for this plane. No rule has to bend for that. Someone only has to open a file this week and read it with the humanity it was written with.

If you are reading this in Ireland, you have more power over the next two weeks of my life than I do. Say it out loud. Write to your TD. Share this. Tell the people who decide that one of the students they are deciding on can still make this flight, and that the only thing between him and that seat is the time it takes to open his file.

My bag has been packed since June. Ireland, you tell me when.