The Questions We Asked Ourselves

Over Dinner Last Saturday

You’re looking at Jenin in the late 19^th century.

Every topic was thrown around the dinner table. Israel’s ambitions in Gaza and Lebanon; Hamas, Hezbollah, and resistance under the banner of  لا إله إلا الله (there is no God but God); Hezbollah’s role in shoring up Bashar Assad’s regime and adding to Syria’s torment; colonial legacies and imperial designs; the US as an agent of chaos or a mere opportunist on welcoming landscapes; we Arabs as victims or lead authors of our rolling predicaments.

We were nine, each with a story to tell about war or flight or death or survival or loss or exile–and perhaps all of these.  

Palestine, as always, was the uniter and divider: in supporting its cause and people, unity; in how we translated this support, division. From there, our positions on every crisis that has unfolded in its shadow found its place on a map crowded with factions migrating from one camp to the other, depending on the issue and theater.  

I very quickly noticed that, along with the camaraderie, pain underwrote almost every word uttered. The Syrian’s, the loss of his country; the Lebanese’, ours; the Palestinian, hers.

Then there was the shared pain of the miserable choices we are forced to make, the humiliating compromises we are compelled to accept, the mourning for the convictions we shed, and the indifference we finally wear as armor against disillusionment and despair.

And with such pain almost always comes the trap: an attachment to it so deep, it renders you incapable of grasping that to feel it in oneself is necessarily to feel it in the other. Not just acknowledge it, but feel it! Because in conversations about life and death you never ever want to find yourself playing that dreadful game of comparing anguish on the grid of heartbreak. You want to cleanse it from the murk of politics, of hate, of prejudice. You want it to be a journey towards empathy and emotional complicity, not exceptionalism and enmity. 

And so, inevitably the hard questions imposed themselves. Within this small universe of ours, do we ever want to compare the Palestinians’ pain to the Syrians’, Lebanese’, Sudanese’, Yemenis’, Libyans’…? Do we deploy the numbers of women and children slain, the starved ones, the homeless? The method of murder? The depth of the destruction and its width? The time it took?

Remember Sudan

Do we adjust the decibel of our outrage to the identity of the culprit? Do we conflate a people’s agony, the justness of their cause, with the abhorrent conduct of those representing or backing them? Do we absolve Israel of its sins because those in our midst are guilty of some of them; do we excuse ours because they are committed by allies or kin?

Do we not have the choice to reject every act of cruelty purely on principle without forgoing the flexibility our circumstances sometimes demand of us, like embracing political foes in one arena and standing against them in another?

Can we, for example, condemn Hezbollah’s role in Syria but support the movement in its resistance against Israel? Can we reject its ideology and politics in Lebanon but accept its protection against a marauding enemy?

Remember Syria

Hezbollah may well be a cynical political actor manipulating Palestine for its own narrow ends, but can we not be similarly self-serving? Do those attacking such malleability towards Hezbollah not find themselves doing the same when it comes to the US, knowing full well its abysmal record everywhere in the Arab world?

Had Hezbollah not formed in 1982 to resist Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, would the Israeli army have withdrawn in 2000? Would we now be lamenting our ethnically cleansed southern region and contending with a cancerous settler movement? Would international law have protected us or, as Doron Nir Zvi–one of the leaders in a settler enterprise vocally eager to conquer and settle the south–said about the ease of colonizing the West Bank and the Golan Heights, “The dogs barked, and then things moved on”?

I cannot sum-up an hours-long conversation in 1000 words or less, but this was the gist of the discourse over cold almond soup and Sayadieh (fish and rice) last Saturday. And there we were, factions migrating between camps.

Frankly, I never really found this weave of quandaries hard to disentangle. Hard to live with, yes, but not hard to unpick. Eighty years into the war over Palestine, it should be starkly clear to any observer, especially those in Israel and the West, that Palestine, for us, is incessant and ever present. It is, therefore, willful ignorance to deny that this brutalized nation, as history, as trauma, as injustice, as politics, as fiction and poetry, as cause, suffuses our angst and collective memory as Levantines. And it is clearly the sentiment of many Arabs beside. Because as varied as our beliefs are, as contentious as our arguments are, and as fluid as our identities may be, Palestine is uniformly us. Its woe is that intimate, and we are that human.

Confounded by this inescapable reality, Israel and its Western friends have taunted us for decades about the fury we feel about Palestine and the seeming quietude that descends upon us when it comes to our homegrown tragedies. Insensible, of course, about their own role in helping spawn the upheaval that permeates our region, they think themselves clever in catching us picking and choosing our way through our grievances.

By what gauge, though, do they measure our actual pain for suffering neighbors? And it would never occur to them that perhaps we are so visibly triggered by the Palestinians’ plight precisely because in their capacious roster of valorized victims Palestinians have always been so conspicuously absent. That our cries for this people are so loud because theirs are so unforgivably faint.  

It could never occur to them either that our regimes are not the sum of us. Which is why, unfailingly, they keep predicting Palestine will fade only to be shocked that it still kicks and screams–for life.

It’s one of the brutalities of politics that the official West didn’t ever feel obliged to explain its own selective humanity, never on more scandalous display than today in full view of Israel’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns in what remains of Palestine for its Palestinians. In full view as well of the sense of horror so many Westerners are experiencing at their democratically elected leaders’ complicity in such crimes.

But then why would such leaders see the need to explain, when the reasons are so obvious and so utterly drenched in shame.

On this very matter, tellingly, the nine dinner guests were one.

What do we call this?

Signing off with this recent tweet by Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann, one of his country’s true sages:

On Another Note

In 2003, novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux was diagnosed with breast cancer. The week before her surgery, she plunges into a love affair. She “always wanted to preserve images of the devastated landscape that remains after lovemaking,” but never thought to capture it. In the morning after that first night, she found “in the hallway the composition formed by our shoes, our clothes all mixed together and piled here and there, mostly red and black. It was very beautiful. I took two photos.” Others followed.

I chose three excerpts from her story in the New Yorker:

In the Métro, at the bank, I’d look at old women, their deep wrinkles, their drooping eyelids, and say to myself, “I’ll never be old.” It wasn’t a sad thought, just a surprising one. I’d never had that thought before.

The thing that struck me most was the simplicity of it all…

I had told very few people about my cancer. I wanted no part of the kind of sympathy that, whenever it was expressed, failed to conceal the obvious fact that for others I’d become someone else. I could see my future absence in their eyes. They had no idea that it was their deaths I was seeing, which were every bit as certain as my own. And I had an advantage over them, which was that I knew it…

I don’t know how to use the language of feelings while “believing” it. When I try, it seems fake to me. I know only the language of things, of material traces, visible evidence. (Although I never stop trying to transmute it into words and ideas.) I wonder if contemplating and describing our photos is not a way of proving to myself that his love exists, and in the face of the evidence, the material proof they embody, of dodging the question for which I see no answer, “Does he love me?”

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