7th May 2021

I write today, for the first time, to an unintimate audience, to a body I do not know. Or at least to a body I feel severed from. I write to them to say I love them. I write to say that my writing, no matter how I wish it to, will not protect them. That even though, at the age of thirteen, in 2003, when I first spoke, when I told others to be wary of the violence that sits in the belly of the sons of a father that is not a father, I knew then the daily occurrences would continue. I am sorry words are not hammers. I also write to people I am told are supposed to be my siblings. Are we not all siblings in this border? Who taught us to hate? Today I read of events. The date is the only event I know. Search this date, I will not repeat the news.

9th May

Let me return to 2003. To a small science lab in suburban London. It is my first time giving an argument in debate. My first debating session ever. We are told to bring a subject that is personal to us. I chose the Storming of the dome of the rock, 2000. I had visited my grandparents in Israel that year. My attachment to Israel is to family, not ideology. I haven’t been back since my grandparents passed. My mother left in 86’. I was raised questioning the politics, the provincialism. We would visit family friends. Car rides would be hour long swear journeys about how Bibi is the enemy, “a piece of shit! A corrupt shit!” Before Bibi was Sharon. I remember him that moment in 2000, when, surrounded by riot police, he decided to storm the rock. I remember thinking why? I also remember having to exit a restaurant because of a bus bomb, stories of car jackings, and the wars that happened because some kids decided to “wander off”. What I had never heard until I was older, were stories of the IDF going into young Israeli’s homes. A friend of a friend told me they had had their hard drives stolen in the middle of the night while they were sleeping. In Israel you hear of resistance in quiet spaces. Where friends convene. I was raised in this resistance. The resistance that happens in private spaces. That understands the violence surrounding every voice in this fight.

10th May

Here we are again. Bound. Attending. The stones. The chairs. All the dust. What materials matter when the conflict remains? To speak in this conflict, one must know where they begin, or where to begin from. To understand that this sequence of events is old. That to have a position is not an act of arrival. For there are no arrivals. There is just being there, constantly. The voiceless are there, constantly. My position is founded in a history of my parents’ history of refusal. My mother refusing her Israeli identity. My father resisting the Israeli political regime. Their exit from Israel in the 1980s. When we resist, we say, we are dutiful. We say, “we remember”. It is our wounds that remain our tools for preparing the future.

The broken broom still sweeps the dust. Preparing the ruinous square, so we can share silence. Here in my room, I sweep. I prepare. I sit. I listen. I attend. I do not speak like I did in 2003. No-one wants to listen. The nuance of our siblinghood is broken by a desire that is unseen. But this is not our unseen. This is an unseen I cannot fathom. For it breaks, not bonds. It speaks over the voiceless. A science of pain. An unseen that wishes to convince you, my unintimate audience, that we are not made up of honey and apples and olives and watermelon and dates and coffee. And that our dream for minutes of silence to read and days of sitting in the street enjoying coffee with friends the way you do are not valid.

11th May

The broom is our companion.

12th May

I deal with dailyness. Only dailyness. Because it is too much labour to speak like this. Because I know how it is for those on the ground. But also, because it is too much self-explaining, to you, to have to make you understand, how I wish to say I love and want to protect my 3 and 5-year-old cousins who are in bomb shelters, and also, how I want to protect my friend Sohaila’s cousins in Gaza who don’t have a shelter to shelter in and who can’t even get word to her. We are trying to hold spaces. We are trying to say that each individual who is conflicted can be here with us. Daily. Just trying to make their coffee and say their mourning prayer without the sounds of violence overhead. We speak to open a bit of space for silence by way of messages. To halt the news. The headlines. The political agendas. The spectacle. To halt the means that sever our ability to tend to the work that needs tending to. That severs our nuance.

14th May

Every time glass breaks, I am constitutionally broken again.
Every time glass breaks, I hear the echo of a dispossessed body.
Every time glass breaks, I ask who has the right to exist?
The speed of the glass’s destruction cannot prevent the force of its return.

15th May

The broom is a prisoner.

16th May

I return to the private spaces. I can always be found there.

18th May

Throughout my youth I was told a story by my father and his friend Amit about a play they staged (they both worked in theatre – my father as a set designer, Amit the director) called the Island. The play is by Athol Fugard and is about the South African apartheid. They decided to stage this play in Israel, on a small experimental stage with two Arab actors. Situating the play in the politics of Israel of the time. The political consequences of this choice were not lost on them. This was 1980s Israel. These were Arab Israelis, who unquestionably were underrepresented within the field. The play was staged in a simple manner. A small, elevated square. A broom. These were their tools. As the days unfolded there were protests. My father and his friends were stoned. Attacked. They knew this would happen. They continued. They knew this play was important. They knew it was essential to speak about apartheid in Israel the way it was spoken of in South Africa. We see this discussion today, but this was the 1980s. This story was implanted in me. I carry it on me like a tattoo. You must understand, this fight we are fighting, it is more than exhausting, it is equivalent to the tiredness of mourning. It is ageless. If you feel tired, ask for help, but do not wane. Know your intentions are of validity. Know when we speak, be a whisper, be a scream, be a memory, there is something there that carries. I carry it for you. I am a carrier. In the basement, where I burn coffee beans, I also repeat the process of preparing letters to send, dispersing information, dispersing this very information I am giving you now. The space that seems quiet, the unseen I know, is where our resistance grows.

21st May (ceasefire)

A claim is not a claim when there are deaths in between the claim.

23rd May

At Passover we say, “next year in Jerusalem,” but in my family we all laugh. We do not wish to celebrate next year in Jerusalem. To refute Mahmoud Darwish, “we don’t love Jerusalem.” This is the irony of the modern Jewish family. We practice something akin to tradition, but it is performed as a familial ritual, and sparingly. It presents itself as the performative synthesis of our understanding of our roots to our Jewish religious culture, but it does not define our Jewish ethnic culture. Nor does Israel have much to do with this definition. Yet, something strange happens when the conflicts reappear in Israel. It’s as though all of sudden we are thrown into a pool of Jewish bodies and cast in a one of all situation. Anti-Semitism suddenly feels more intense. The resistance, the refusals we made earlier seem empty. Fear takes hold, for many, the natural response is to step away. To hide. Hiding from ties to a place that holds no real connection to your personal definition of your identity or personhood and hiding from getting hurt for being Jewish. If you fight you receive conflict on all sides. Jews ask you “why don’t you support Israel?” – If you don’t fight others ask, “how can you, as a Jew, not fight for injustice? Silence is violence!”

How can you speak for both? How can you say, I love my Israeli cousins but dislike Netanyahu’s policies, when all a person wants to think is that all of Israel is represented by this far-right leader? How can you say to your cousin that you want to be pro-Palestine, when they say to you “But if we do not fight the Arabs, they will erase us?” How can you fight all sides at once, and still stand on your feet? How can you express pride to be Jewish and remain in this space of refusal and resistance? This is the unstable ground that we are situated in.

27th May

My Jewish friend in Chile messages me, they are burning the Israeli flag at the embassy. She asks me if I am safe in writing this to you. I tell the story of my father and the play, and the protests. I tell her we have no choice. We know the consequences; if I must write this then I must risk my safety.

30th May

The broom is a warrior.

1st June

I buy an olive tree in London and buy olive oil that plants trees in Ramallah. I gift a tree to a friend. Sohaila is writing an essay on the trees in Palestine. I continue my proposal to protect the trees in Spain. Across the world the Olive tree is in trouble, it too is becoming an exile. It too wants fertile ground.

3rd June

The fall of Bibi begins.

6th June

I slip in. Sleep is harder. I text my mum. I ask her to remind me why she left. She says she couldn’t take it anymore. She says she didn’t want that for us. She says she argued with my youngest cousin the other night, he believes in something we don’t. You feel alone with this intensity. Not everyone wants to deal with it. Not everyone wants to care for it. You feel alone because you want to protect so many bodies.

I slip too much. Feel too vulnerable. Lose control over my sensitivity, become noisier, when I wish to be more silent. Pushed into noise the noise pushes. I hold my breath. I wake up earlier and earlier. Take colder showers. I wait for the sun. I listen to the birds. I don’t text anyone else. I take myself away from social situations. I avoid noise. I wait for my apples to ferment and turn to cider. I unpack the remaining candles from a box I was sent months before by a friend. There is still some wax to burn, so I light them, and watch as they empty out. These slow processes I use to slow myself, but also as a reminder that as time passes our struggles strengthen.

10th June

If I am to keep holding this space for you, then I must ensure the space is always prepared, keeping it tidy, ensuring the residues of dust can be amassed into the excess of our protests, and should a stranger arrive, they too know what these excesses can do.

14th June (ceasefire ends)

We waited for change, but this may not be change. It may be worse than change. It may reveal a worser cognition, some force that drives everything in multiple directions faster, with more force. For this new face only has a short time to achieve their aims before another face comes to articulate another idea. Grief will be heightened when there is less time between blasts. Our calls are unheard. The ground shakes. The roads are littered with stones and rocks. The air a shockwave covered in grey. Months pass in minutes. Dust swirls into the sea. Bodies are covered in tablecloths. Food is shared in sparing fragments. A new leader brings new chants. The broom awaits our hands. This may be just as bad as the last.

16th June 2021

Today, like every day, I sweep the dust in my room. This is not a closed gesture. The sweep is now a protest. The dust is now our material force. I collect it in an empty jar, prepare it for transport, knowing there is nowhere it can be sent where it will not speak. Knowing that silence is a noise. Knowing that in my conflict to protect, I find little shards of glass in every sweeping. The broom has become a hammer.