'Limerick never failed to make me feel at home': From Gaza to the Treaty City

25-year-old Tamar Nijim said: 'Limerick never failed to make me feel at home. They made me feel like I didn't lose a family, but rather like I had more family. I always have angels that are like protecting me from any harm.' Picture: Brendan Gleeson

For 52 weeks, crowds in Limerick have come onto the streets as one to protest in support of Palestine. At one such event, on Bedford Row, 25-year-old Tamar Nijim met 44-year-old Philip Meaney, and thanked him for sharing a fundraising campaign set up to help her family.

Week after week, over the last year, the pair have been protesting together against the war and are now ‘best friends’.

Before moving to Limerick in August 2023 to study in Mary Immaculate College, Tamar had spent her entire life in the Gaza Strip.

“I never expected this to happen. When the war started, I was like, ‘It's going to be a couple of days as usual’. Maybe a month, but it wouldn't be a year. There's no way this could happen.

In Limerick, Tamar feels she has found a safe space.

“I saw protests [before], but I never saw a protest where people come together and become one family.” 

I feel the love inside people during the protests, how they speak about Palestine, how they stand for Palestine. Every time I lost someone, it was a way for me to escape and see people care.

Even though life in Limerick is very different from the one she lived in Gaza, Tamar said she has always felt at home in the Treaty City, where she is surrounded by ‘angels’. “The way people believed in me and supported me made me strong.

“I know it's a different background, but Limerick never failed to make me feel at home. They made me feel like I didn't lose a family, but rather like I had more family. I always have angels that are like protecting me from any harm.” 

Philip said when he first met Tamar he was keen to show her that she has people in her corner.

“I'm aware that Tamar is scared about losing her family. I just want to reassure her that she won't be alone, if that does happen. Just for her to know that there is a community here that loves her and will help her,” he said.

Over the summer, they had a barbecue cook off — Ireland versus Palestine. In Philip’s kitchen, Tamar cooked a feast while chatting to her family over the phone. “That night, we had a celebration of the community that came from the protests,” recalls Philip.

Tamar said she and Philip share a sense of humour.

“I always tell him he could be Palestinian by heart if one day we had to choose another nationality for him,” she said. “Phil is everything that a man means to me. He's like my big brother and my dad at the same time, he's my best friend.”

Something that had a big impact on me was Tamar showing me pictures she takes at the protests and sends to her family, how much joy and hope that gives them. She told me they couldn't believe that someone loves them that much. And it absolutely broke my heart.

Back in Palestine, Tamar worked as an English teacher. Some of her students were killed in a strike at the Al Nuseirat Camp, at the beginning of the war.

“I've always heard this sentence, ‘We're just numbers’. They passed knowing that they're not numbers. I am in a position where I can tell their stories. They had dreams, they had hopes, they were flesh and blood. They were beautiful the way they were. They were somebody's family.” Philip admires the resilience shown by Palestinians.

Philip Meaney and Tamar Nijim became friends after a Limerick protest, and have since become family. Picture: Brendan Gleeson

“I suppose it's part of their upbringing. Tamar is so self-assured, and she seems like more of an adult than me most of the time, she had to grow up fast.” 

Tamar said: “You don't have a choice. If you're in Gaza Strip, you have to grow up. Because you could be 10, and then your whole family is killed. You have your two-year-old brother, who's gonna take care of him?” Through the years, she has witnessed distressing scenes. In 2014, her cousin, who was pregnant, was killed in a strike alongside her husband. Another strike claimed the life of Tamar’s grandfather.

However, she said it is different since October 7 — that the killings are "ugly".

“When we are inside the war, we wish one thing, ‘Please God, if I'm gonna die, just make me die in one piece’. And the fact that you pray for this, it's heartbreaking.” 

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began. Tamar said: "There are the remains of other people that are not being counted because they don't have time to collect those rubbles and get them out of there. They only have their hands to dig with. 

You either choose to give up and die without talking about it, or you become the trauma itself. I know I cannot guarantee life to my family, and it's something that pisses me off, that I come from a place where my lifetime is limited by colonization and occupation. You have to live today like there is no tomorrow, that's the way we live.

Tamar said she is disgusted by the fact that some individuals are trying to profit from the war by charging to help get people out of the country.

“You’re putting a price on my life, knowing that people cannot afford it. Some people sold their kidney just to save their kids. I’m watching all of those people being killed and I can't do anything. That's the hardest part for me,” she said.

Philip recalls accompanying Tamar to a house viewing, and while there, she received a distressing call.

“Her family called. You could hear them screaming. It was the day the Israelis went into the Nuseirat camp. She was looking at the room, but I could tell she was on another planet. Her family was literally under attack,” he recalls.

He wishes more people would realise that it is not “antisemitic to be out protesting for the liberation of Palestine”.

“You're not doing anything wrong, they're literally carpet bombing children. It's colonizers on someone else's land, and they're ethnically cleansing them right now, blatantly supported by the US. It's almost hard to grasp, how it's still going on when all eyes are on it.” 

While Tamar hopes to be soon reunited with her family, one thing is clear — she has two homes.

“I always tell them, if I had to, the same way I'd die for Palestine, I'd die for Ireland,” she said.

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