Other People’s Voices Every once in a while the heart falls silent and a pause imposes itself.   At such moments, I find respite in curating other people’s voices. First, there is the fact that becomes truth: In a Haaretz interview, Nathan Thrall, certainly one of the most astute and sensitive observers of Israel and Palestine, distilled the essence of the dilemma now–for both Israelis and Palestinians. “ As far as [Thrall] is concerned, Israel’s population is 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs, 4 million of whom lack citizenship.” Whichever way you look at it ..read more

The Paradox of Death in Victory and Victory in Death As Israel’s genocide in Gaza entered the starvation phase and photos of emaciated children began to go viral, Arundhati Roy illuminated an essential fact that jarred with the heartbreaking sight: The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war. They, their journalists, their doctors, their rescue teams, their poets, academics, spokespeople, and even their children have conducted themselves with a courage and ..read more

“We Miss White Bread” Her name is Mariam. Why is she upset, the journalist asks. Life is very hard, she explains. Za’atar (thyme) is all they eat. Her father recently left for heaven, and they are stranded in a school, she and her brother. And then the tears. “We have nothing. We miss bread…white bread.” Who will rebuild life anew from the wreckage of Mariam’s childhood? From the ruins of her sisters’ and brothers’ in Palestine, in Syria, in Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Libya…? The numbers tell us that no modern slaughter has been more devastating than Israel’s has been in Gaza. For ease, we ..read more

Genocide! “That bell can’t be unrung. That thought can’t be unthunk.” The label sticks! The International Court of Justice may take years to adjudicate the South African case but the accused, Israel, shall forever have the charge hanging like a badge of shame around its neck. Because the ICJ has, in essence, deemed the sum of what it is committing in Gaza as heinous and premeditated enough to be probed as genocide. For the Palestinian cause, for the people of the Strip who are experiencing mass slaughter, it’s not only a validation, it’s a turning point. Once, well before October 7, a jour ..read more

Can This Israel Survive In the Glare of The Day? Hagar Brodutch and her three children were among the Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, and later released in the exchange of captives in November. She and her kids were held in an apartment somewhere in the North of Gaza. As Israel pounded away all around her, she started to grapple with the twin-truths of the October attack: …it is [her children’s] own Army that was supposed to protect them there in their home, where they instead abandoned them. Now the I.D.F. was shelling them while they are inside Gaza. And it didn’t ..read more

In Lebanon, We Wait As We Watch We hear it in whispers and see it everywhere in screaming headlines. In major crises, public news and the very quiet chatter in the corridors of power rarely agree. But this time, between them, there is hardly any daylight.  The madness of Israel! The tidbits from those who regularly pace these same corridors are echoing what is unfolding before our eyes in Israel itself. This nation is not well. The state won’t listen, they say. It can’t, it just can’t abide that Hamas, in one well-engineered hit, drove huge holes in the mythical fortress it built. It ..read more

Dare We Look Forward? As an excruciatingly painful 2023 folds, the unavoidable question: dare we look forward? How can we not? And inevitably, for many of us, hand in hand with every private fear and aspiration comes the collective one. The private and public realms are just that intertwined in this Arab life. It hasn’t escape me, for example, that as I search for my father through photos and notes and papers and letters and recordings, thousands of Gazan children search for theirs under Gaza’s rubble. It hasn’t escaped me either that as I fight the temptations to stay in Lebanon, Palestin ..read more

Before I begin, some housekeeping. The next This Arab Life post will be on Substack. Migrating, finally!  I am hoping the interaction will be more rewarding for me and you.  To my subscribers, I am taking you with me, so don’t be surprised when you receive the post from Substack. To readers who visit This Arab Life every once in a while, I would love to have you join us. You can subscribe on Substack when the next piece is posted, or do so now to my mailing list below, and I will take you with me. Why This Time It’s Different I have a little sister, whose myriad medical condit ..read more

The Tragedy of the Israeli People We Levantines are forever lost in our stories. Stories that ruin our evenings and scold our mornings, stories that puncture the hours with pain and tears, that tear at the heart and arrest emotion. Stories that plead with the imagination to locate exits and coax the future into a rewrite. And yet in the midst of such stories, even the darkest among them, we smile and laugh, talk and banter, fall in and out of love, kiss and curse. We go to work and build things, we succeed and fail and try again. We go quietly about our day. We even conjure from nothing an ..read more

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