Marwa, a fourth-year medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, came to the world's attention because of a UNICEF video released several months ago.

"I should be studying at Al-Azhar University, but it got bombed and life stopped. This month I was supposed to go to hospitals. I was supposed to start my internal medicine rotation. I was very, very excited. I bought my scrubs and my lab coat and my stethoscope. But life stopped and the war came," the 21-year-old says.

"Now life is very difficult. No sleep, no food, no water, no electricity, no life... Barely. It's not life. I dreamed of being a surgeon. Yesterday, I was telling my sister that I dream of a world where a doctor shouldn't, wouldn't have to do surgery without any anaesthetics, wouldn't have to see his patients die because there is no electricity. I dream of a world where medicine can save people from devastation and death. But I fear this dream is not possible."

What is haunting about the video is the youthful simplicity of her wounded words, delivered with an astonishing smile that reveals an utter absence of anger towards Israel in spite of so much pain that it has caused to her Palestinian life. "I pray that they could look at us as humans, not just political situations and political conflicts," she says. "We are humans."

Then Marwa appeals to the world: "Two million people trapped, nowhere to go. We should be more valuable to the world than this."

Of course they are. Marwa's presence on earth not only encircles Gaza and surrounds the rest of Palestine, but it emanates outwards into a moral indictment of a war that has taken more than 40,000 lives and injured close to 100,000 people. And that war not only continues but has expanded into Lebanon.

According to UNICEF, Marwa's family was displaced again after she had spoken to the organisation a few months earlier. But she stayed in touch, sharing some of her experiences and providing a glimpse of daily life amidst conflict.

Life in a refugee camp means living in space borrowed from hostile time. The physical degradation of an accustomed lived environment is only a small part of the story. "It's not exhausting to carry water for long distances, and it's not exhausting to cook on fire. You get used to it," she says on audiotape in the new video.

"It is, however, very exhausting to live in constant fear. And it's not death that we fear. It's surviving death." Really? Yes. "If you survive a bombing, then you either end up wounded, having to go through a limb amputation without any anaesthesia. Or you survive, and you lose your loved ones. Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to be the sole survivor of your entire family?"

Marwa rises from the ruins of Gaza to touch with her grasping fingers the human reckoning with time itself, time being the final site of both birth and death, of love and destruction, of being and non-being. Marwa bears testament to a world undone but also testimony to the possible undoing of the undone. She embodies the great hope of Edward Said that since history is made by men and women, it can be unmade and rewritten.

A new history

How may this occur? Consider something very simple. The two extreme sides in the conflict are represented by two illusions. On the Arab side, the illusion is that Israel can and must be obliterated from the map of the Middle East. On the Jewish side, the illusion is that Palestine will never come into being.

These are illusions. The reality is that Israel exists, and its existence will be defended by its citizens, a fearsome defence force and the combined economic, political, diplomatic and ultimately military might of the Western world.

The reality also is that Palestine exists. It is a nation which is yet to be a state, but there is nothing to say that it will not be a nation-state. In fact, if nationhood is defined by a sense of common ancestry, future and purpose, a sense of collective being that is fought for tooth and nail against inimical external forces, then Palestine qualifies for statehood without question because a state gives a nation two additional qualities: sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Many in the West, and certainly in the world at large, would affirm that Palestine is a nation-state in waiting. What precise form its territorial integrity will take is the only remaining question, but political sovereignty must come to a people who are empirically sovereign already. That is so unless they are destroyed physically as a people through genocide and total exile, which is not possible for even the wildest adherents of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) to imagine, let alone execute.

Combine these two perspectives, and we arrive at the proposition that Israel is real and so is Palestine. Hence, what must remain on the diplomatic table, in spite of a war that has spread from Gaza to Lebanon, is the supreme realism of the two-state solution embraced by the United Nations.

The UN has pointed out wisely that the denial of the right to statehood to Palestine would prolong the conflict indefinitely; while a one-state solution - with huge Palestinian populations inside that state without any real sense of freedom, rights and dignity - would be inconceivable. The two-state formula is the only way to address the legitimate aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinians are not a demographic threat to be contained through death, displacement or subjugation; and Israelis cannot be annihilated, frightened and driven from their country through terrorist attacks such as the one on October 7 last year that ignited the present conflict.

Realism must arrive one day.

Our Marwa should be a surgeon by then. What she needs is peace in which to fulfil her aspirations to minister to the Palestinian body politic.