Katharina Galor is the Hirschfield Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Brown University. Born in Germany, where her parents had fled from communist Romania, Galor was educated in Germany, France, Israel, and the United States. She is the author or coauthor of four books, including The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (with Sa’ed Atshan), and writes for or appears in various media outlets, including the Forward, Die Zeit, NPR, Israeli TV, National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel. Her book Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship (Nebraska, 2025) was published in September.

Out of Gaza tells the story of Dima Mansour, a young Palestinian who suffers hardship growing up in Jordan and Gaza during the Gaza War of 2014, later escaping to be with the man she loves in Belgium, where she is held in a detention center for illegal immigrants. Her harrowing story is told by Katharina Galor, an Israeli Jewish scholar who forms a close and unexpected friendship with Mansour. Despite the profound asymmetry that defines the geopolitical context of their lives—one marked by Palestinian loss and exile, the other by Jewish trauma and persecution—their bond uncovers surprising parallels in their shared experiences of displacement and survival.

As their friendship unfolds, Galor and Mansour come to intimately understand the lasting impact of ethnic cleansing from the Holocaust and the Nakba, and how these pivotal events have shaped their families, identities, and ties to the region. Out of Gaza delves into themes of identity, belonging, and the enduring effects of historical trauma, showing how empathy and resilience can bridge even the deepest divides.

1. From Amman and Gaza to Brussels

As usual, she didn’t answer my call right away, but she sent a text letting me know that she was busy in the kitchen, and she reached me after she and her fellow inmates had finished dinner. Her situation was grim, but I could sense over the line, me in Providence, Rhode Island, Dima in a lockup for illegal immigrants in Bruges, Belgium, her effort to control her voice and emotions. She was happy I called, she said, but there was nothing good to report. There was the usual daily routine, from time to time a change of guards or movement of convicts. Some of them had more difficult stories than others. A few seemed friendly but then turned depressed and unpleasant. Most were kind and sensitive, but tired of being locked up, not knowing what the future would bring.

Dima spoke in her usual tone, mixing kindness with humor but also hopelessness, telling me about one really lunatic woman who had come to the detention center that day. The woman was a mother of five, each child from a different father, none of whom appeared to be in the picture. A sex worker who, it turned out later, had good lawyers. She did nothing but scream and utter gibberish; once she rolled on the cold concrete floor holding on to some documents. The inmates were scared of her, and so were the guards, who seemed to know her from previous visits.

The eccentric woman was released from the center four hours after she arrived. But her screams, her suffering and misfortune, continued to resonate long after her awkward presence. Why was it, Dima had to wonder, that she, whose entire life had been shaped by virtue, modesty, and piety, remained under arrest in the detention center while a deranged person acting out was allowed to leave?

“I feel my entire life is upside down,” she told me. “When strange things would happen to me in Jordan or Gaza, I could somehow understand. I understood the context. I knew how to read and recognize the codes. Here, since I’m imprisoned, I have lost all my usual references, and nothing makes sense anymore. I realize that my values don’t count here. People have different beliefs, different traditions. This poor woman, her crazy behavior, and how then she is gifted with being released so quickly, is so confusing to me, Kati. I am surrounded by so many strange people and so many weird things. And some of what is shocking to me seems to be normal to others. But perhaps it’s just the fact of losing my freedom that makes me think the world, my world, has lost its sense.”

I was happy to hear Dima’s voice, despite her distress. It was almost as if I had called her to reassure me. I had never been to Gaza myself, and my only knowledge of the CIB, the Centre pour illégaux de Bruges, came from my conversations with Dima and a website containing only the directions to their facility and the capacity for women detainees held within its confines.

I knew, as Dima did, the gamble she had taken in going to Belgium could end badly, and I didn’t want to burden her with my fears. So, what should I say? I couldn’t give her my news, tell her about my travels to southern France, my dinner parties with friends, my son’s wedding plans, and my upcoming trip to Israel-Palestine. How could that cheer her up? It would only make her more aware of her misery.

I was free and mobile; Dima was under arrest, and no one knew for how long. And no one could predict whether in the next minute she’d be told she was being deported back to Gaza or Jordan. I tried to imagine Dima’s beautiful face, framed by a black or brown or blue hijab, with her large dark eyes, and her expression exuding nothing but kindness. She had always looked so proper, so appealing, so put together. I wondered what living in a jail had done to her appearance.

It was just a couple weeks after her twenty-eighth birthday. She was beyond the average age when a Palestinian woman from a traditional background is supposed to be married and have children. True, she was married, but only on paper, and according to a document written by a sheikh the Belgians refused to recognize. But she had never been physically intimate with her husband, despite their now seven-year-long relationship.

The CIB had opened in 1995 in the buildings of the former prison for women previously known as “the refuge” located on the fringes of Bruges, which, for most people, including people like me, is a kind of fairy-tale medieval town. Nothing of the CIB, of course, seemed fairy-tale-like to Dima, even though she had achieved one of her longtime goals, or a dream of sorts.

She finally was in the same country as Amir, the man she had fallen in love with when she lived in Gaza. But she was an illegal entity in Belgium, a number: she was E 2, a refugee without a name, or a home, caged with other women each of whom had her own story of despair. Sometimes Dima made an effort to console one or another of her fellow inmates, but mostly her desperation was overpowering or paralyzing, preventing her from acting as her usual self.

I was not going to shy away from anything to help Dima. But I didn’t quite know how to communicate this to her, or if it would make a difference to her. Words alone wouldn’t go far in the current situation. I wanted to take some action that could help her. But I didn’t have the tools. I had no knowledge of the legalities around illegal refugees in Belgium, or in any other part of the world. Dima and I had known each other for only a little over a year, though we’d gotten surprisingly close in that short time, despite never meeting in person. Our acquaintance was limited to the frames of our computer screens or mobile phones. We were intimately familiar with each other’s facial features and expressions, the sounds and inflections of our voices, and, by now, our stories.

But her being imprisoned, and sensing how depressed and hopeless she had gotten, made me even more determined to be there for her, though my motivations were complex, more than a matter of helping a Palestinian woman whose suffering was at least in part caused by my country, Israel. Her having lost her name and identity, having been labeled E 2, made me think of my father and the tattooed number on his left forearm that he received in Auschwitz: A 15965.