Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation.

To be alone in the eerie quiet of the emptied home, where he and his siblings had grown up amid the daily bustle of a large family, must have been painful. Still, he stayed and got a hawiyya; he could thenceforth remain in Palestine as a “foreign resident” in his own home. He said it was better than being a refugee.

Abu Nasser showed me what lived beneath public piety. From him I learned who those legislating morality and pretending to be more virtuous than the rest of us really were.

I find that reporters and writers who come here don’t actually want to listen to me or hear my thoughts, except where I might validate what they already believe.

Unlike Jehad, I hadn’t been one for watching the news. When powerless, following world events only highlights your impotence.

“I’ve waited this long, I’ll wait a little more until I can go as a citizen in our own state. I’m not going to ask those sons of bitches for permission to go home. I have underwear older than the Zionist entity.

She was nearly blind and possessed the limitless generosity and kindness that often accompanies sightlessness, as if one’s love for the world increases as the ability to see it diminishes.

Even back in the seventies, Western do-gooders were trying to bring Palestinian and Israeli kids together, as if our condition was just a matter of two equal sides who didn’t like each other, instead of the world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.”

Although Bilal and Ghassan were angry initially at having been cheated, by the time we all met again their outlook had changed to optimism. I suppose that’s what made them revolutionaries. They were all-in, with everything they had, and that meant rummaging through defeat and disappointment to find a new plan and cause for hope.

They had devised a plan to take out Israeli soldiers. “Then what?” I asked. It was a sincere question, but Bilal heard it as something else. “We have no then what here.” Bilal the Coldhearted Commander stared me down with a kind of impatience that stung me. “We do what we can to fight them, and endure the consequences, whatever and however heavy they may be.”

Talk of chores, customers, money, men, and beauty were slowly replaced with stories about the likes of Dalal Mughrabi, Leila Khaled, Angela Davis, Harriet Tubman, and Kathleen Cleaver. Jumana said, “Most of these women had ordinary lives, but life pulled the extraordinary out of them.”

There were others in the world who, like us, were seen as worthless, not expected to aspire or excel, for whom mediocrity was predestined, and who should expect to be told where to go, what to do, whom to marry, and where to live.

“Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?” “I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”

Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.

Bilal surrounded himself with stories, stacked shelves of them to collect people’s pain and paste it into historic events and political analyses.

Another article reflected the authorities’ annoyance with the settlement’s residents. They were newcomers, mostly from the United States, who had been given government subsidies to live on confiscated Palestinian land. Most could barely speak Hebrew, and Israelis saw them as soft and feckless—Jews who had not yet been hardened by the military or the realities of the country. “These people hate each other. If they didn’t have us to brutalize, they’d be killing each other,” Bilal said.

They knew it wasn’t true, but they needed to sustain a narrative of strength, because admitting that the leader of this offensive had slipped through their grip would have been a humiliating sign of their vulnerability.

“Do you think it means anything that we both ended up imprisoned?” Um Buraq asks. “It means fate lacks imagination,” I say, but I sit with the question. “Or maybe it just proves the state will always find a way to imprison those who are truly free, who do not accept social, economic, or political chains.”