“Doomsday Diaries" (Excerpt)

“I used to have hope,” my father tells me over the phone.

“And now?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know. But I do know that we will go on.”

I know this truth, though I do not know its shape. It is not necessary to name it hope, but there is no denying the Palestinian ethos is overwhelmingly one of life. We insist on surviving, on loving even the shattered versions of existence granted us. We are masters of paradox, creating beauty and care inside cages, beneath debris. We are fluent in absurdity, shapeshifting to sustain our humanity within ever-contracting walls. Seventy-five years of deferred justice have not extinguished our determination to build, rebuild, write, marry, birth, dance, remain.

Even so, we know we deserve so much better, and so we press against our oppression with imagination and defiant love. As Palestinian scholar Sophia Azeb puts it, “We are not beholden to structure our epistemologies and aesthetics and politics solely within the architecture of this catastrophe.” Though we have never known a free Palestine, no number of bombs can extinguish the inborn will to live in dignity. In this way, our resistance is, to quote Mahmoud Darwish, incurable.

This is the heart of Israel’s problem — not one of Palestinian savagery but of Palestinian life. It is a scourge on the Zionist project, our century-long refusal to disappear. It will remain a scourge so long as the state of Israel exists as a structure predicated on our death. The moment we face now is apocalyptic, the engines of destruction roaring at our gates and in our skies. Each moment is an atrocity. Genocide has begun. But Israel is mistaken if it believes this will be the final word. Palestine will live.

The Hollow Half (Excerpt)

My grandmother, a young woman in sixties Gaza, woke often with a thudding chest, the night tangled in her hair. With my young father in tow, she sought solace from neighborhood women. One read meaning in coffee dregs, peering into small porcelain oracles. Another, Sheikha Amna, offered prayers and protective charms to secure the younger woman’s fate. These women granted my grandmother story in the chaos of exile, reason and agency inside loss. But later she ceased searching for such solace. الله قدر — in matters of fate, it was best to contend quietly. The blue plumes of her bakhoor wafting wordless, heavenward.

In the realm of records, her trace has always been slight. Born without a birth certificate in the days of British rule, her name was first written in 1955. A UN worker made the inscription—once in English, once in French — and handed her the paper slip. Her name, a token traded for sugar and wheat, in languages she couldn’t read. She would have been roughly thirty then, a refugee of seven years, mother to a daughter and three sons.

Before, in her Palestinian village of six hundred, names were known by heart. She was bint Mohammed al-Mukhtar, ibn Yousef. Her lineage, a chain of masculine names, a tether to time and place. Her town, ʿIbdis, first appeared in Ottoman files in 1596, and may date to the Byzantine period between the third and sixth centuries, as Abu Juwayʾid.

The Ottoman officials in ʿIbdis marked down thirty-five households that year, not bothering with names. Their interest was in dunum, the rich fields yielding wheat, barley, and honeybees. Later, the villagers added grapes and oranges alongside olives, chickens, and mish-mish. Hundreds of towns like ʿIbdis dotted the rolling countryside. Each had its defining feature, preserved in stories and poetry. ʿIbdis’s boast was its jamayza, the stately sycamore tree.

Horea was the name given to her when she was born. حورية, easy to mistake for حرية — freedom. Sometimes, I wish حرية was her name. The meaning of حورية is not fixed but hovers around beautiful woman. Sometimes translated as nymph, a word found centuries back in poetry and Qurʾanic verse. In English, it can also be rendered as dark-eyed beauty. Sometimes, virgin of paradise. Some hadith, with a hint of colorism, describe a woman so gorgeous her flesh glows translucently. Is this what makes an angel? Something desired and vanishing? She was translucent for me, too, for all those years.

Yet her girlhood was a sturdy-bodied thing, her name double-known. She was daughter of the mukhtar — chosen one, a mayor of sorts, a man appointed to lead village affairs. Like most other village girls, she was never sent to school. Instead of holding pencils, her fingers grew deft at taboon dough, spark-quick as she flipped white-bellied bread over flame. As a young wife, she carried lunch daily to her husband in the field. Passing neighbors on the way, they embroidered greetings in the air. She set down the basket of bread at her husband Musa’s feet. May Allah give you strength. Receiving, he said, May God bless your hands. After eating, she yoked her afternoon to his. Together, they worked the land until evening called them in.

“The Work of the Witness” (Excerpt)

In the mornings, as others stumble toward their coffee, I wake and gather news of the dead. First, I check WhatsApp, where, on the best days, I will receive a picture of bread — my family has eaten today. On the worst days, I learn of relatives starving, sick, or killed. Next, I turn with loathing to social media. Too weary, anymore, to brace myself, I compel my thumbs to scroll (could there be a more banal verb for this, the perusing of atrocities?). Horror follows abomination follows tragedy, a gliding series of symmetrical tiles, each one smaller than my hand.

Watch, I tell myself. I see what must have been a building, though all that remains is a smoking hill of sharp debris. Watch, I tell myself, as thin men in sandaled feet rush into the frame. They begin pawing at the slabs of cement, rebar, brick. Shouts ricochet. The camera moves closer. My ears begin to ring. I long to click away. Watch. These are your people. I force my eyes to stay.

Bear witness. This, an admonition often repeated through these killing weeks. Bear witness, a cry against the fierce, orchestrated attempts to deny the devastation wrought in Gaza and the West Bank. Bear witness, we tell ourselves as helplessness threatens to engulf us on our far end of the telescope. Bear witness, we say, yet three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask — what does all this looking do?