When the Margins Meet the Center: A Palestinian Rahab in Gaza
"The Woman in the Corner Apartment" - Gaza, 2025
Rahab had learned to live in the spaces others couldn't see. The corner apartment on the third floor, damaged in 2021 but still standing, gave her what she needed: distance from neighbors who might ask too many questions about why Ahmad from the corner shop had quietly become Rahab, growing her hair long and wearing her sister's old clothes when her sister died in the bombing.
The siege made everything possible and impossible at once. No hormones, no surgery, no official recognition - just the quiet determination to be who she was with scarves, makeup when she could find it, and the voice she'd taught herself in the privacy of bombed-out buildings. Some neighbors whispered, others looked away, most were too busy surviving to care.
At twenty-eight, she survived by knowing things others didn't - which routes the drones avoided, which commanders took bribes, which families were desperate enough to pay for passage documents that might or might not work. Living as herself had made her invisible to some, dangerous to others, but also useful to those who needed someone operating outside normal social networks.
When the knock came at 2 AM, she assumed it was another desperate family seeking her services. Instead, two men stood in the shadows, speaking Arabic with accents she recognized - not local, not Egyptian.
"We need shelter for three days," the older one said quietly. "We're... documenting conditions here for international observers."
She saw through the lie immediately but also understood the game. Intelligence gathering. They needed someone who wouldn't be missed, whose apartment wouldn't be searched, whose death wouldn't be investigated if things went wrong.
"Five hundred dollars American," she said. "Half now."
They paid.
For three days, she hid them in the bombed-out section of her apartment - behind collapsed walls that looked impassable but weren't. She brought them water, bread when she had it, and information about patrol schedules they claimed was for their "documentation."
On the third night, as sirens wailed and buildings shook around them, the younger one asked why she was helping them.
"Because staying alive means making choices that keep you alive," she said simply. "Tomorrow you leave. I give you the signal cloth for your people to recognize, and my building gets 'accidentally' spared in the next bombing. My elderly aunt downstairs gets to live a little longer."
The red headscarf she tied to her balcony railing the next morning felt like both salvation and damnation. In the apocalypse, there are no pure choices - only degrees of survival.
Three weeks later, when the bombing stopped and she realized her building still stood while others around it had fallen, her aunt came upstairs for the first time in months.
"How did you know to mark the building?" the old woman asked.
Her aunt waited for an answer, but Rahab only adjusted the red cloth on her balcony. Some questions carry their answers in the asking, and some silences hold more truth than words.
Context
I've been working through Joshua 2 using the PARDES interpretive framework, layering childhood memory, colonial critique, commentary analysis, and mystical readings with a justice lens. But sometimes the most powerful biblical interpretation happens when we transplant ancient stories into contemporary soil and see what grows.
PARDES is a traditional Jewish hermeneutical method that reads biblical texts through four interconnected levels of interpretation. The Hebrew acronym stands for Peshat (simple/literal meaning), Remez (hint/allegorical), Drash (interpretation/midrashic), and Sod (secret/mystical). This framework recognizes that sacred texts contain multiple layers of meaning that can be accessed simultaneously - from straightforward narrative to hidden spiritual truths. While rooted in Jewish tradition, PARDES has been adopted and adapted by Christian interpreters who appreciate its sophisticated approach to biblical complexity. Rather than privileging one "correct" reading, PARDES assumes that texts are rich enough to support multiple valid interpretations, each revealing different aspects of truth. In liberation theology contexts, this framework becomes particularly powerful because it allows space for readings that center marginalized voices and experiences alongside traditional interpretations.
What would it mean to encounter Rahab not as a distant biblical figure, but as a trans Palestinian woman in Gaza today? What moral complexities emerge when we strip away the comfortable distance of millennia and place her impossible choices in the context of siege, genocide, and survival?
This reading is part of a broader decolonial study of the book of Joshua - one that interrogates how conquest narratives have been used to justify settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession throughout history. Decolonial biblical interpretation asks uncomfortable questions: What happens when we read these texts not from the perspective of those claiming divine mandate for land seizure, but from the viewpoint of those being displaced? How do stories of "promised land" sound to people whose land is being taken? This approach doesn't reject the text but rather exposes how some dominant interpretations have been serving imperial projects, while recovering the voices and experiences that conquest narratives typically erase or marginalize.
This particular reading emerges from a justice lens - one that centers the experiences of those living under occupation and examines how marginalized identities intersect with colonial violence. Inspired by womanist and decolonial interpretive frameworks, it reads Rahab's choices as survival strategies rather than moral compromises, and her story as emblematic of how marginalized people navigate systems designed to destroy them. As Palestinian LGBTQ+ activists have documented, queer and trans Palestinians face a double bind: persecution within their own communities and exploitation by occupying forces who weaponize their vulnerability for intelligence gathering and propaganda purposes.
The story draws from the full Rahab narrative - her negotiation with the spies, her protection of them, and crucially, the scarlet cord that marks her house for salvation while the city falls around her. It's an invitation to sit with the uncomfortable questions that emerge when biblical narratives meet contemporary realities. Sometimes the most faithful reading is the one that refuses to resolve the tensions.
The biblical Rahab disappears from the narrative after Jericho falls, mentioned only in genealogies and theological reflections. But her contemporary counterpart must live with the consequences of her choices long after the spies disappear. In that ongoing aftermath, perhaps, we find the most challenging questions about survival, complicity, and what it means to protect those we love in systems designed to destroy us all.
Resource:
For deeper context on the experiences of Palestinian LGBTQ+ individuals under occupation, read A Palestinian trans woman’s story peels away Israel’s Pinkwashing Veil