Chapter 1: Fear and Bodies – 1 – Fear and Bodies
A chasm of time ago, in the spring of 2022, I moved to the suburbs. My family was fledgling. After my first marriage ended some years earlier, I began a second one in 2019. Then came a baby girl the following year, at a crest in the pandemic. We had outgrown our rental in the Junction area of Toronto. The sedate rhythms of Oakville suited my wife, a committed suburbanite.

When we took possession, we removed our masks and breathed the quietude. Our new house had an extension that flooded it with light. There was a ravine behind the fence of our backyard. We had a kitchen island that on its own was larger than the whole kitchen of our previous place.

The house also had a staircase, exposed all the way to the top. Dark-varnished treads and handrails, with wrought iron balusters. The staircase rose in a seashell whorl up to a skylight, which cast a gentle illumination down upon it. When you entered the house, you could see all the way up to the second floor. It was easy to think: How many years before my daughter descends this staircase in a wedding dress?

Our early days brought predictable excitements and apprehensions. The revelation that we had gone so long without hearing a fire engine howl. The glee swirled with anxiety about filling all this new space. Decoding which of the neighbours were friendly, and which needed to be treated with delicacy. But a feeling I did not anticipate was that I would be terrified of my own second floor.

The staircase. I kept thinking about that staircase, how high and how exposed it was. How a thing could fall from up there, and how much that thing could suffer in the brief journey. A small, fragile thing could plummet, carom against a hard railing, and hit a tread or two before landing, probably in a form unlike the one it started with.

I kept thinking of my daughter—eighteen months old at the time—wriggling and bucking in my arms as we passed by the staircase from our bedroom to hers, or vice versa. How unsteady my footsteps can feel as I’m carrying her, how clumsy and unsafe are my arms.

At first I dismissed these as just intrusive thoughts. I am mostly immune to irrational agitations of this nature. This is owing less to innate poise than to a kind of lifelong recklessness, and a tendency to forget the hurts I sustain, big or small. I simply do not dwell on things that could injure me or others. When I do, I seem to have a higher tolerance for danger than most.

But the staircase was a different matter. I was obsessed with the thought of my daughter falling from that height. With her fragility, it could be fatal. I obsessed most over how I might be the cause of such a fall, that somehow I would trip while holding her, or that my hands would spontaneously spasm.

The visions—for that’s what they became—took on a certain thickness in their character, an omnipresence. No longer were they confined to short, imagistic blurts when I passed by the staircase; they now came to me when I was on my living room sofa, reading or watching TV. They came to me when I was driving to work or taking a walk trying to conjure words for my writing. They were vivid and sustained enough to be viscerally hurtful. Sometimes they were so overpowering I’d let out a small, involuntary scream.

The problem got so severe that I talked to my wife about it, which I did not do lightly. She was already possessed of an extensive catalogue of phobias that I hesitated to add to. But all she did was nod that yes, we do have to be careful around the stairs. There was no terror in her eyes at all.

By now the visions had become laced with impossible elements. My baby daughter would, on the way down, be torn and mutilated in ways that were beyond the capacity of a simple fall. Sometimes there would be flames enveloping her. Sometimes this small person that I adored—sometimes she would be thrown.

The visions were never about hurting myself on the stairs. Only my daughter, over and over.

My new house felt like it had sustained irreparable pollution. The visions were a persistent smear on my surroundings, the new furniture and the new paint. When we were upstairs, I no longer trusted myself to carry my daughter, so I made her walk, even early in the mornings when she still wanted bodily warmth and her little feet were wobbly. As she walked I reminded her in a sharp tone to stay as far away as possible when she passed the railing. If she insisted I carry her, I locked my arms all around her like a football, flexing to an ache, and I moved sideways, crablike, with my back to the staircase. An absurd sight, but I had to minimize the risk.

I’ve never considered the act of writing to be therapeutic, but I did think of writing a short story about the visions. It would be the grisliest of horror stories, I told my wife, a total departure for me. Perhaps then the visions would let me go. But there is a moment in a narrative when you expect a solution to emerge, or otherwise for the story to reach a horrible climax. I had none of the former and no stomach for the latter.

Eventually I had to come to terms with what my visions reminded me of: my father and balconies. My father could not bear seeing me or any of my siblings go near one. If we did, he would rush to scold and yank us out of the danger zone, our thin arms smarting from the roughness.

But it did not make sense to me that I’d inherited this fear from my father. From my previous marriage I’d had a son, who was now in his teenage years. I’d never felt these irrational fears for him when he was a child. Why, now, was I possessed by this new impulse to overprotect? I was in my forties. How could an inherited fear spring up so late in life?

I put this question to the contractor I brought in to give me an estimate for walling up the staircase. For a few months before that moment, the visions had ebbed. My daughter was older. She could handle herself, rarely even allowing me to carry her anymore. Sometimes I could even pass by the staircase without a horrible notion invading my psyche. But in late 2023, the visions came back again, torrid with heat. My daughter’s body felt so endangered to me.

I didn’t know how long I’d have to live like this. I needed a resolution. This was supposed to be a home.

By now, of course, the precariousness of Palestinian bodies has been demonstrated with a brutality and frankness unseen in contemporary history. When I first had my visions, they were, despite their force and immediacy, at a remove. It felt clear to me that they were imaginative visions. This meant I could dismiss them. Once they had passed, I could separate myself from them, rationalizing that they had no connection to reality, not really. My actual eyes, the organs in my skull, had not seen the horrors.

I would have never expected that these eyes would, starting in October 2023, see so many real Palestinian bodies destroyed in so many different ways. Many of the bodies were as small as my daughter’s, and smaller. What was I supposed to do with these new, far more horrific sights?

The hoariest of writerly clichés is that the role of the writer is to witness. Whether it originates from a feeling of ineffectuality in the face of intractable problems, or from an earnest faith in witness and documentation, I find its durability surprising. Not long ago I read a new novel by a renowned author that centered on artists living through various European wars; at the end, the curative value of the artist as witness was proffered as some kind of epiphany. But as my smartphone had for months tingled every hour of every day with new footage and documentation of an Israeli killing rampage that showed no signs of abating despite unprecedented levels of witnessing, I wanted to heave the book at a wall.

And yet I couldn’t help but keep witnessing. As a Palestinian living in exile, witnessing calamity from afar is an entrenched life feature. Since the turn of the last century Palestinians have been subject to Zionist violence as a matter of course, nearly to the point of inurement. But the war on Gaza was an entirely new outgrowth of that diurnal violence, a thing almost too astonishing for my brain. After alarm and worry and panic and shock and horror and rage and grief had all taken their turns in my emotional system, I noticed that I was gripped longest by a sort of bewilderment at it all. Not just at the volume of killing, but how multifarious it was.

We innately understand that there is a way to kill that, if it does not exactly honour the victim—because murder can never honour anyone—then at least respects their having been a human, their having been a life in the same way as their killer is a life. But the manner in which Israel murdered Palestinians after October 7 was so varied in its cruelty as to feel like an exercise in macabre creativity, like a performance that wants a witness. We saw countless bodies, an unending corpse exhibition, to use the phrase of the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim. Every day when the curtains of our lives drew open, we saw them: soot-gray bodies strewn in the wrecks of their former dwellings, bodies twirling and burning in fire, bodies pockmarked with nodules of gunpowder so numerous they seem like a wallpaper pattern, bodies striped with the serialized cuttings of an inanimate drone, bodies scorched into shades ranging from meat pink to dusk red to crisp black, bodies with blown stumps where their necks once were, bodies with their hearts still beating as they look at their shredded limbs dangling from them like hay from a broomstick, bodies still measured by womb age left to starve and decompose in intensive care incubators, bodies where the final, dark violation is evinced by a bloody circle soaking the fabric covering their genitals, bodies frozen to death in cold tents, bodies squeezed under bulldozer chains into a spongy, fruit-like pulp, small bodies with a solitary round black hole in their foreheads, bodies being gnawed (in real time, as the camera rolls) by famished cats and dogs, bodies lying on the forensicist’s table with a notebook next to them detailing markers of sexual defilement, bodies with Down syndrome gored to their screaming death by army canines, bodies blown into parts small enough to fit into cooking pots, then gathered from the streets by relatives to carry in butcher bags, bodies pushed lazily off the rooftops of their houses, bodies vaporized without a trace like they had been not creatures but mere thoughts, bodies in shrouds arranged together on the ground into one last family portrait, nude bodies in lineups walking on their knees to an executioner, bodies whose heads have a soldier’s foot resting atop them as the soldier preens for a friendly lens, and bodies that only exist in inference, in the vast rubble, not dignified with even a last pair of eyes to gaze upon them in love or hatred.

It wasn’t only the precariousness of the bodies, but their cheapness. How unproblematic it was to dispatch them, in ever more experimental ways. I thought of dollar store figurines, the mutilation of which perturbs neither the psychotic child nor their parents.

It burned me most that so many of the bodies we saw were young ones. Early in the genocide I wrote for a national paper an article in which I was aghast at how many children had already been killed. The number I quoted at the time was a thousand dead children. Now I think of that figure with a strain of grotesque wistfulness; it has since been multiplied dozens of times over. The youth of the victims sometimes felt incidental to the whole genocidal affair, a signal that Israel’s harvesting of humans did not care about metrics of their identity like age; this stood to reason, since the West has always relied on indiscriminateness as a guiding principle of the wars it wages against the Other, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. But I am not so naive to believe Israel’s crime is mere indiscriminateness. I remember Muhammad al-Durrah, from the year 2000, gunned down even as he crouched under the wing of his father. I remember the Bakr cousins, from the year 2014, all four of them shelled as they were playing soccer on the beach on a day clear with sun.

Filling a soldier’s crosshairs with children must be attractive because of how unfulfilled children are. They are engines vibrating with energy and imagination, fueled by their families’ devotion. They have decades of desire ahead of them, of ambition, of readiness to impose themselves and their will. They have more left of every innate resource than I could ever hope to have at my age, and I will always feel it a strange verdict of fate that I should survive and they don’t.

I want to be self-conscious about my witnessing because it helps with the prejudices that I am working against. My own prejudices, before those of others. A few paragraphs back I wrote that by now the precariousness of Palestinian bodies has been demonstrated—that was my diction. It shames me that, as a person who has lived his whole life in a Palestinian body, I have felt that, finally, things have now been demonstrated beyond argument. That, finally, enough Palestinians have been brutalized. That, finally, we can give a rest to all our illustrative bar graphs and citation-laden reports and meticulous histories, because we have an incontrovertible data point for the vast disproportion of human cost in this supposed “conflict.” That, finally, what we always said about the cruelty and unjustness of those who perpetrate this against us has been vindicated.

But the denial of the experience of Palestinians has always been key to rendering their bodies so precarious, so cheap. I’ve internalized the denial so much that I feel it in my heart whenever I speak about being Palestinian—it is a half-thump, a bracing, a dry throat, a foreknowledge of the coming retort. When I offer a fact or even a piece of personal history, I am already aware that what I said is a claim. It was not a fact, or even personal history. It was a claim that, absent proof, exists in the purgatory of the unsubstantiated. It will eventually be refuted by some more legitimate source than me, the body that lived it. At minimum there will be a counterclaim. And in the gap between claim and counterclaim, the truth will fall, limp and untrustworthy.

But I have to resist this feeling. For each of the bodies I witnessed, I suppressed the desire to add a footnote to substantiate it. I will not prove that the bodies existed, that the starving families existed. I saw them with my eyes. Even if I footnoted every last story of every last Palestinian death with a picture of them bloodied and expired, it wouldn’t make a difference. Some will doubt the pictures are real. If the pictures are real, they will doubt the deaths are real. If the deaths are real, they will doubt the stories showing the unjustness of the deaths are real, or that the stories were told fairly.

In a world of polarities, how one conceives of a people’s destruction is necessarily an indication of where they lie on some spectrum of thought. The construct of the spectrum abstracts the reality of the genocide and turns identifying it as such into a symptom of our personal bias. In this twisted construct, Khaled Nabhan, who held his murdered three-year-old granddaughter Reem—“the soul of my soul,” as he called her—stiff in his arms and bid her goodbye with a loving, grief-stricken smile, is himself no longer important. What is important is whose fault you view his grief to be, and whether you believe his grief has been manufactured (or heightened, or accented, or whatever) for the eyes of the camera. In generalities we all profess that grief and loss of life are regrettable, but Khaled—the specific person and his specific incident—is only permitted to be a point on the spectrum, contextualizable and dismissible.

The dismissal of the violence against us is not a by-product of the spectrum, but its purpose. The construct is designed to cheapen; it makes the bodies not a horrifying, sobering end point, but fodder to start a debate.

Any body in our inventory of bodies is likewise subject to similar deconstruction, equally debateable, and thus impossible to consider as part of a murderous design or trend. It is a tactic of domination that our bodies may not, even in their death, be given the grace of honesty about the horror that befell them. The exceptionalism of Israel, the spoiled infant of the exceptionalism of America, is such that its dead are forever mourned lugubriously and without qualification, while for our dead there is always enough qualification and debate to make you forget to mourn them at all.

I used to think the cheapness of Palestinian bodies is clearest when Israel kills a body that isn’t Palestinian, especially if that body belongs to one of the privileged nationalities, the ones we know without having to name them. In those cases, there is a difference in the way the bodies are received. In September 2024, the Israeli army shot Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, an American activist, as she was protesting in the West Bank. This time the body did not belong to a fake American like the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whom Israel killed in 2022 with no consequences. Abu Akleh, we all understood, was American only in quotation marks; she was really a Palestinian with an American passport. Eygi, on the other hand, was not beset by Palestinian blood in her veins. This time, the feeling went, Israel will be held to account for what it has done.

On its own, our anticipation of a differing treatment speaks to how ingrained in us is the cheapness of Palestinian lives. Maybe it comes from an understanding of the world’s hypocrisy, and craving any opening to stem the murderous impunity. People expected an official condemnation by the US government, in-depth investigative articles about Eygi’s murder, and an official memorial perhaps. I wasn’t so sanguine, but I did think some American official would at least promise some cursory investigation. It turns out even I had aimed too high. There were a few articles reporting the fact of Eygi’s death, many questioning whether Israel committed it. But there was no response from the State Department, no official call for an investigation, no in-depth pieces, and decidedly no major outcry from any news organizations. Eygi’s activism for Palestinians had made her body cheap too, no matter how many times the words “from Seattle” were installed next to her name by people desperate for a consequence, any consequence. The cheapness of Palestinian bodies had become a communicable disease.

Around the same time, an Israeli-American man was found dead in the tunnels underneath Gaza after having spent ten months as a hostage. The American president released a statement about him on the same day.

An early sign of the catastrophic nature of Israel’s assault was when we started talking about Gaza’s civil registers. These are the records of the existence of people, their names, families, and properties. As the weeks piled up, we heard reports that whole Palestinian families had been wiped from the registers. For each of these families, that meant the family name no longer belonged to a living person in Gaza; all who carried it had been exterminated. It meant one less unit of collective rootedness to the land, the bloodline having been drained from the living to seep into the warred-over soil. I thought about how our families often have roots dating back hundreds of years—including my own family, whose members can recite by heart the names of ancestors spanning generations. And yet for families in Gaza, this was the year that extinguished them altogether.

One after the other, dozens of families kept getting wiped, at pace. Until one day, we learned that Israel simply destroyed the Gaza civil registry itself, thus killing two birds with one stone. Now the families don’t exist, and neither does our accounting of them.

A tragedy ancillary to the human cost of the genocide is the loss of family histories. Most families the world over do not feature a historian, or a writer, or a poet, or a diarist, or a filmmaker, or a documentarian, or any kind of official record keeper. Their stories are kept alive by kin, by daughters and sons and aunts and uncles and cousins, speaking to each other over cups of tea or on the phone. Oh, you didn’t know that these two, whose wedding is tomorrow, have had eyes for each other since they were eight years old? Well it’s true, my dear, and we all knew they’d end up together. But these stories, ephemeral in the air in which they’re spoken but enduring in the memories and imaginations of their holders and those who listen to them—those stories are gone when families are gone.

My family is one of the lucky ones. It has a record keeper, of sorts, unworthy and imperfect though I may be.

My ancestors on both sides were survivors of the Nakba. The Zionist gangs that infiltrated Palestine terrorized both sets of my grandparents out of their lands and homes in 1948. Unlike many thousands of Palestinians who perished that year, they escaped with their lives. Their newfound refugeehood took them on a tour of degradation through various Arab states. From the ones that limited them to refugee camps and prevented them from taking a job, to the ones that took their papers and compelled them into military service, to the ones that gave them citizenship but offered no work or prospects. They spent a decade like this, traversing with their freshly cheapened bodies the map lines over which Sykes and Georges-Picot once nodded at each other in approval.

Eventually, my grandparents stumbled their way to Kuwait in the 1950s, when it was still a British colonial protectorate. There they settled. (There they settled for good, is what I wrote before backspacing, having forgotten for a moment the delusion that is permanence for the likes of us.) Kuwait was somewhat less degrading than the rest. In that barely populated but outlandishly wealthy land, the well-educated could always find good jobs. Palestinians, for all their travails, rarely let themselves go uneducated. My mother was a chemistry teacher and my father was a paediatrician. Our family prospered, fashioning a life that on the surface felt warm with relative safety.

But it was a life that was circumscribed in decisive ways. Our statelessness had become a standard feature: the national law was that we and our children could never be citizens, regardless of being born there, or how much we contributed to society. That meant that we could also never own property; only citizens could do that. Our residency was always required to be renewed, and forever revocable at a bureaucrat’s whim.

Basic facts like these begat other oppressions. We could never forget that we were exiles.

I recall there were little prisons everywhere in our lives. There were houses we weren’t allowed to live in. There were jobs we were not permitted to aspire to. There were countries that we saw in glossy magazines, but which our documents would not let us enter. There were things I could not say to my classmates at school, if they were from that privileged class of people called Kuwaiti, or those who had citizenships of any kind. There were crimes it would have been futile to report, depending on who the perpetrators were and whom they perpetrated against. There were social niceties that had to be observed, except that the consequence of not observing them was not a social ostracization but a physical one.

I learned about these boundary lines from the person who took them most seriously: my father. He made me feel them so acutely not just because he was the one who most often enforced the prisons in our family’s life, but also because it seemed to me that he, of all people, should be the least troubled by limits, or beset with fear.

I am careful to say this not out of pride or even love, but to give a dead man his due: Ahmad Teebi was a giant in our family.

From my vantage point growing up as a child, the most salient thing about him was that he embodied that timeless holy grail of the migrant: He was a doctor. He obtained his medical degree from Cairo University in the early 1970s, the first (and to this day, the only) one in the family to do so. For the son of refugees, the achievement conferred on him a certain gravitas, and a mandate to live up to it. If he felt the pressure, it did not often show during my childhood in Kuwait. In a culture where consanguineous marriage was often used to improve familial bonds, my father found his way into the field of genetics. His research specialization was dysmorphology, a line of work that involves some of the most visually gut-wrenching of human conditions: congenital birth defects, almost uniformly untreatable. I remember once or twice I snuck into his office, which was forbidden to the family due to its graphic contents. It was littered with clinical photos and slides from his field trips to faraway locations, together with hand-scrawled notes with words like polydactyly, hypertelorism, nondisjunction. For a child, it was a disquieting menagerie. I remember having this thought: Anyone can muster the courage to be a surgeon and cut up people’s skin and organs knowing they do so to help them, but who has the stomach to witness what bodily affronts had been ordained for people only to inform them, There is nothing I can do for you?

My father was the eldest of seven children, and from his youth he was their linchpin. As they scattered across the world, Ahmad was the fulcrum of familial connection and trust. A sister would call to ask how her other siblings were, because she knew that he would know. A brother, afraid for his money from his own appetites, would call to ask if my father might take some capital and invest on his behalf. It was an article of faith among them that Ahmad knew what was best, and that he would act on it.

His personality assisted with his mantle. He was gregarious and abidingly social, with a voice that reverberated across rooms. If he told a joke, he laughed and laughed at it until everyone else had no choice but to join in his laughter, whether due to mirth or oppression. If you entered a crowded room to look for my father, you’d not have to look long: everyone’s heads were already turned in that direction. Belying his affability was the authority we felt in his presence, underpinned by an imperiousness that made him difficult to defy.

In 1973, Ahmad was finishing up his medical studies in Cairo. While he was there, his father, Said (my grandfather, after whom I was named), would sometimes send Ahmad newspapers from Kuwait to keep him apprised of the local goings-on. Back then, the newspapers annually published a list of all the high school graduates, together with pictures of the highest performers, ranked. You scanned the lists because in a country as small as Kuwait you might recognize some of the last names, and if you did, you should call and congratulate the family on their offspring’s success. (The lists of high achievers were often cramped with Palestinians dying to prove their worth with overperformance.) In his final year, as Ahmad leafed through Al Qabas, he saw a photo of a beautiful young woman, with feathered hair and a knowing, elusive smile. All he knew about her was that photo, and that her marks ranked her first in the country, with an eye-popping average score.

His fingers still smudged from the newsprint, he called his father back in Kuwait. Baba, I am almost finished with medical school, he said. Can we see if I can marry this woman from the newspaper? Do you think she would take me?

She, and her family, took him, although not before some early trepidation and resistance from my mother. To her eyes, this new Dr. Ahmad looked too much like her beloved older brother Sulayman, whom she could not bear the thought of replacing in her life. But she agreed eventually, finding in the resemblance a sign of her nascent love.

In the wedding pictures, my father is wearing a velvet suit, hair combed over his balding head. On his arm is my mother, vivacious in her long-sleeved, filigreed white dress, the elegant pride of her family. My father looked powerful, and happy.

I pile together the various parts of my father’s life to understand the total of the load he carried. He had the responsibility of parents who gloried in him. Siblings who connected through him. My mother who took him as her partner, and his young children who were dependent on him. Then there was his newly acquired position of societal rank and enmeshment, which he could not permit himself to relinquish or miscarry, as a historical matter as much as a personal one.

As I consider him now, these responsibilities clarify the importance of the prisons to him. His prisons sometimes reflected real, written-down laws, and sometimes reflected realities that didn’t need laws. Some of the prisons were made of my father’s abundance of caution. However these boundaries originated, he was extraordinarily careful not to cross them. His fear of the consequences, to him and especially to his dependents, coloured how he lived.

For my father, the way to account for the precariousness of our lives was to give as much as he could to our new environment, and be content with whatever it gave in return. And why shouldn’t we be content? Our prisons were not actual prisons, with barred windows and cruel wardens. We were far from the cells in which Israel chucks Palestinians, without charge or accusation, with the casualness of a hair toss. We were not even in an open-air prison from which leaving is barred, where a fast-food meal has to be smuggled across borders through secret passages. By comparison, things were rosy for us in Kuwait. There, unlike in the West, most everyone you met sympathized with Palestinians. They told you they understood your plight, and shook their heads in sorrow at the thought of what you must have gone through. You felt the pain in the intensity of the prayers they said for you in your presence. Underneath our skins and beyond our passports, our plight is a collective one, they told you, even as they start businesses while you are permitted to do no more than be their employee. They understood that you were a victim of a massive historical tragedy, which they believed would inevitably be corrected. Time will pull the bloody threads of tragedy out of your lives and transform it into a heroic narrative instead. You will need everyone’s help for that to happen, they said, and we are ready, whenever the time comes. They agreed with you that this or that hypocrite ruler of this or that country had betrayed you, and made your journey even more difficult. They may have even agreed, in whispers, that it was possible our ruler had not been as helpful as he could be, or perhaps he just has a different approach to helping—a longer view, or a more strategic one, the wisdom of which you will see in good time. On the whole you had to concede that your life was pretty good, all things considered. Everyone loves you, the way you speak, the food you make, how bright you are, and how useful. They are, truly, your brothers and sisters.

The reality was that after my grandparents left Palestine’s newly redrawn borders, they and all their subsequent lineage were suddenly barred from going back. The new Zionist masters had made our homeland unavailable to us on a permanent basis. Our new country of refuge, then, with how it’s taken us in, must be honoured and respected. The need for self-preservation, together with an Arab sense of propriety and deference to hosts, mandated it. So what if our new society had a set of rules that forever marked our difference and inferiority? We had no choice but to live with it.

The first rule in my father’s prisons was to minimize any talk of politics or history. He fed us children the basic facts, and no more. I grew up knowing that we were Palestinian, and that we were unjustly displaced, but not the history or the specifics of that displacement, not even my family’s own history. What knowledge I had came from TV programs, or the official curriculum, when it veered in that direction. The 1948 massacres at Deir Yassin, Lydda, and Tantura were not things my father recounted to me. I became aware of them on my own, via stray references in magazine articles. I caught wind of the more recent Sabra and Shatila massacre on the car radio once, as part of some retrospective program that my father hurriedly turned off.

My father’s philosophy—which I gathered but was never told—was that talking about such things only brought about thoughts and desires that children cannot be trusted with. Ours was a just cause, but you never knew who to trust, or when talking about such things will hurt you. That kind of knowledge requires nuance. Children could not be entrusted with nuance; it could barely be entrusted to adults. So we were given silence.

I was barred from watching the evening news (although I sometimes caught glimpses of the nearly as disturbing Egyptian melodramas that preceded it). Whenever there was mention of a casualty in the West Bank or Gaza, whether it was brought up by a guest or by the television, my father motioned me far away. Go, go, to your room. I don’t know if he was sheltering me from associating with victimhood, from the notion of death itself, or from the fact that death is happening to people so proximate to us, whose precariousness was very like ours.

Growing up, our family’s flat was a community hub. It seemed like we had company over three or four times a week at least. Mostly other Palestinian families, fellow physicians from my father’s work, or fellow teachers from my mother’s. My father insisted that I sit with the other men, but my presence was contingent on not saying anything foolish or dangerous. If, during one of those visits, I took my adult playacting too far and opened my mouth to express a viewpoint, my father would start with his glares and manufactured coughs. I was sensitive to these public reprimands. Soon, I felt it was safer to bar myself from speaking. Who could trust what I might say, or think?

Sometimes—not often—after our guests had gone away, my father would gesture at the rationale behind his prodding guidance. I just want what’s best for you, he’d say. I want people to think you’re smart and mature. That you are stable.

I didn’t parse his words too carefully back then. At that age, my father’s attitude felt like an indictment of me as a person. I am not trustworthy, I am not knowledgeable, I am not smart or measured enough in my actions, I am not fit to be with others. It never occurred to me that it might be a symptom of his own debilitations.

Fear left to its own devices runs amuck. It becomes a way of life. It infiltrates. Our bodies felt to me like they were threatened everywhere. There was no safety. It didn’t help that my father was a veteran of numerous health troubles, including his first kidney transplant in his twenties. He knew in his flesh the potential consequences of not acting in self-preservation. But his fearful impulses extended far and wide. If a glass of water spilled, my father could not last a minute without requiring it to be wiped, for fear that someone might slip and fall on it. Bodies of water were verboten, and his kids did not learn to swim until later in life. Running too fast in his presence meant an inevitable fall and had to be reprimanded. Once, I went outside to the courtyard of our apartment building and saw on the sidewalk a smattering of prescription pills, together with an open pill jar, near where our car was parked. Someone must have spilled them and not bothered to clean up. Eight years old or so at the time, I collected the pills one by one, reaching my fingers under the tires of cars and in the crevices of the asphalt. I dropped them all back in the jar and rushed inside to hand it to my father, worried that otherwise one of my younger siblings might mistake a pill for candy and pop it in their mouth. My father rewarded me with a week’s worth of loud praise for the maturity and care that I exhibited. I don’t think my high school graduation had him bragging to people as much as this incident did.

My father’s fear of harm led my mother to dismiss some of his concerns as the sign of a mwaswas—an Arabic word that has its origins in a quasi-religious vein, describing someone who has been whispered to by Satan. I was fascinated that my rational father could be gripped by doubts of a cosmic, almost superstitious nature. Being mwaswas seemed a complete explanation for erratic behaviour—it was a condition beyond one’s control, a paralysis of fears one had to submit to since it came via powers of a higher order than them. I didn’t understand it this way back then, but it must have been handy to manage trauma by reducing it to a mere bedevilment.

The defining example of my father’s mwaswas state was his conduct around balconies. In a childhood spent ensconced in a series of apartments, balconies represented a delicious liminal space for me. Between the heat that consumed your flesh outside, and the lonely, thunderous shoves of the air-conditioning inside, the balcony felt like the best of two harsh worlds. The thought of standing on a balcony and gazing at the world of swirling dust, weaving BMXs, and parked Cressidas and Caprice Classics—as a child, such power felt almost royal.

Except my father strictly forbade any children to venture anywhere near a balcony. The children could get between the spindles (even if our bodies were too large), or they could hop over it off some platform (even if there was no platform in sight) and plummet into the depths below (one or two storeys). Even if we stayed some distance away, he’d still be fixated on the matter, checking in our direction every few seconds. It became a sort of family mania: if there was a balcony, each family member would warn the other to stay far away or suffer the consequences. Sometimes a less cautious elder, most often his father-in-law, would prevail upon my father that I or one of my siblings could survive a moment sitting on a chair on the balcony. My father would be forced to concede, his anxieties having to take second place to the rules of propriety. But the whole time he would eye us like a hawk.

To me, the fear that motivated my father to shelter me from knowledge of historical massacres is of a kind with the fear that made him scramble, falling over furniture and things, when he saw me stride in the direction of a balcony.

He could not imagine a scenario in which our bodies were not in danger.

And now, I couldn’t trust my own hands around the staircase of my house.

The contractor who came, in December 2023, to give me a quote about walling it up was a Syrian man. He scratched his head in confusion when I told him what I wanted. He asked me flatly why I’d want to ruin such a beautiful feature of the house.

I felt stupid. I must’ve seemed to him like some disturbed character from Poe. I explained about my visions. I said I was so very tired of feeling fear. I’d had enough.

He smiled. Ah yes, you are mwaswas, he said, using my mother’s word for my father’s hysterical phobias.

He added: But I advise you to not make decisions right now, habeebi, it’s too soon.

What did he mean it’s too soon?

He said: Look, the fighting will stop, and we will all stop having these visions.

I wanted to explain to him that my problem started in 2022, predating Israel’s war on Gaza. But as I said it, I had a shiver of recognition. I remembered.

Before October 7, Israel had launched many cyclic assaults on Gaza. The last one was two years before, in 2021. Israel’s warplanes had bombed many buildings, reducing them to rubble and fire. Children had fallen from these buildings too. I followed these events every day on my phone and my satellite TV. They had happened almost a year before we moved into our new house.

My visions were not imaginings after all, they were reenactments. My mind was effecting upon my daughter’s body horrors that happened to other people’s daughters, other people’s sons. It turned out that I had inherited the fears of my father, just not in the genetic way I suspected.

At least I could pinpoint how I got my bodily fear. My father has been dead for many years now, so I cannot ask him about his.

I turned to my mother. When I asked her how her husband got like that, she said: his father taught him the fear.

My grandfather Said Teebi was a Palestinian like the many Palestinians who became small details in the colonial expedition of fabricating a home for the Jewish people. Said was from a village called Salama, some three miles east of the glittering coastal city of Jaffa. My grandmother Nima Owainat was from Qalqilya, a bit farther to the east.

Nima had lived near Jaffa most of her life, and so she did not have the distinctive Qalqilyan accent that rendered the rounded qaf sound into a hard kaf. Still, Said sometimes teased Nima about that accent, calling her the girl from Kalkeelyeh.

In 1948, the couple were still newlyweds, really. They’d married the year before, after Said had come back from Al-Azhar University, the famed Islamic studies institute in Cairo where he took his degree. He had already started teaching in a neighbouring school, while Nima was busy establishing their small home.

From the moment Said and Nima married, they never used their first names. Instead, they called each other by the name of the child they planned to have: Ahmad. Said called his wife Um-Ahmad, and Nima called her husband Abu-Ahmad. Mother of Ahmad, and father of Ahmad. It was their demure way of planting between them the seed of familiarity, a union in the form of a future child.

And now Nima was pregnant.

Early in that year, people were afraid that the Zionist militias would come to Salama any day. Said sometimes got his hands on the Falastin newspaper. There were articles that told of ships filled with Jews from Europe arriving on Palestine’s shores every week. There were even more alarming articles about clashes with Zionists in various Palestinian towns, and about massacres whose horror could scarcely be believed.

Said learned about what the militias had done in Deir Yassin to the south, and what they had done in Tantura to the north. In Deir Yassin, the Zionist gangs took the town’s citizens out of their homes, and, for an audience, trotted them through the Old City of Jerusalem. Some they executed near the quarry, others they took back to the village to execute there. Women and children were not exempt; they numbered half of those killed. It was not just a massacre, it was an announcement.

To my grandfather Said, this massacre, and others like it, were not yet the bloody history that my father would end up shielding us from. They were current events.

Some men from Said’s village had already fled, believing they’d be back in a few weeks, once the Zionists were quelled for good. Other men were preparing to resist. Salama was populated mainly by lifelong farmers. Most didn’t have firearms, although with the imminent threats, they were trying to obtain some.

Said and Nima did not want to leave. Salama was their home, and their families were all there. Still, Nima’s pregnancy was already advanced, and Said had never touched a rifle in his life. The young couple knew that some people went north to Lebanon. Others went east to Transjordan. That country, albeit impoverished and resource-deficient, would later hand out citizenship to any Palestinians who crossed over, part of a deal it struck with the Zionists. Others still went west, and jumped into the sea, letting the boats choose where they went. How could the destination matter, really, when every destination was not home?

Said and Nima decided that if they had to go, they would go south, toward Egypt. Said favoured it because it was familiar. He knew Cairo bustled with life and opportunity. He dreaded the heat but at least he had acquaintances there, and could find his way around its tight alleys. It could be a good way station for a short while.

Said and Nima finally left in the middle of summer. Already nearby Jaffa was being demolished, with the Manshiya neighbourhood especially resembling a project of gray destruction. Nima was no longer moving well. Said, slight but determined, held her hand, and let her arm rest on his shoulder. They took the journey by foot, along the coast. The walk was slow, and the sun did not spare them.

As I look at a map of Palestine from 1947 published by National Geographic, and I confirm it with countless more detailed maps in Arabic that I scoured from archives, I can see the names of towns my grandparents probably passed on their way: Beit Dajan, Isdud, El Majdal, El Jora, Khan Yunis. But I do not know where they stopped, or what they did at the stops. I don’t know if some motorist saw Nima’s belly and took mercy, letting the couple ride in their car or on the flatbed of their truck. My grandmother was voluble, and quick to laughter, so maybe that helped. Was there at least a bus, or a horse, or a donkey for part of the way? At night, did they sleep on the streets? Did they find hospitable houses?

Said and Nima both passed away before I was an adult; I had no chance to ask them. Their story’s features are blurry to me. The vanishing of stories is not a side effect of displacement, it is a primary objective. The stories, untied from the land, dissociate and dissolve.

Finally, the couple reached Rafah, the border town at the southernmost tip of Gaza. They crossed what looked like a makeshift checkpoint at the border.

Once in Egypt, Said was surprised. Egypt was no longer treating him the way it did when he was a visiting student, just a year or so before. Back then, he had been allowed to enter, go anywhere he liked, find a residence, and pursue an education. Now, the Egyptian soldiers told him he could move no farther than the refugee camp set up on the Egyptian side of Rafah. He had exited Palestine only to find himself in this place that was neither his home, however blighted by colonizers bringing war, nor a non-home with safety and opportunity. It was something in between, with none of the features of a reasonable life.

Here are the tents, the Egyptian soldiers said, you may take one if you wish.

Said and Nima laid down their blankets on the floors of their tent. Nima settled in a corner, relieved to be off her feet. She loosened the knot in the bottom of her cursory veil and let her cheeks breathe. Her feet and legs were enormous with bloat. Neither of them had eaten a proper meal in days. She had many aches and pains, but she tried her best to forget them. There were no medical services anyway.

Said spent most of his days in the Rafah camp searching for food, and Nima cooked what he brought in borrowed pots.

For the life of him, Said still could not understand why he wasn’t permitted to go farther into Egypt, to the places he knew and understood. He was the same person he was the previous year, the same blood and mind. But now that he was a refugee, it was like he was from a different planet. He felt like his worth had been slashed to nothing.

From what I remember of my grandfather, he would have likely argued daily with whatever Egyptian soldier he could find. We only need to venture into Cairo temporarily. We need a place to live until things settle down, and some work so I can provide for my unborn child—my first one. Are you aware that I am a scholar from Al-Azhar? What do you have that I don’t have, soldier?

Later, in private, one of the soldiers would come to Said offering to spirit him farther into Egypt, for a fee. But Said was young and destitute. All the money he had was not nearly enough to take the soldier up on his offer.

Only days after they had arrived in Rafah, Nima went into labour. Her baby, Ahmad, the one she’d been dreaming of, was coming. She was alone, her husband having gone on one of his errands. I don’t know what time of day this happened. Their flimsy tent had made it so that any time of the day was the same, exposed to the elements as they were. Nima’s labour progressed with alarming quickness. She screamed for Said, over and over. Some women from neighbouring tents came to coach her through it. The soldiers shooed them away—Go back to your own tents.

When Said arrived, he panicked at the sight. It was too soon; they had not yet prepared for the delivery. It was Said’s turn to scream: Are there any doctors? Anyone who can deliver this baby? Please! But he knew the answer. There were no doctors for the camps. There were not supposed to be any. He ran to a soldier. The soldier—and this was a familiar sight—shrugged.

Actually, I don’t know if it happened exactly that way. But I do know this: Said, my grandfather, a schoolteacher in his early twenties, was forced to deliver his first baby himself. The women who came to the tent had brought warm water but declined to help more. They had glimpsed that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and it made them afraid to do anything. So it was left to Said. He was terrified. He pulled the baby. He did not know any better. In his panic he kept pulling, urgently, strongly. Nima pushed and cried. Said pulled.

The baby seemed to emit a cry. But from what Said could see of him in the tent, the baby was blue. Talk to me, son. Talk to me. The baby did not answer, not with a cry nor with a breath. The baby was dead.

Said looked at the baby for a long time before letting go. The nature of his new reality had probably not crystallized yet. But this moment, which he will rehash many times in the future, will be the one he comes back to. This moment when no one cared to help him, when his environment—this new nowhereland—seemed most arid and hostile, when he had suddenly become a different person, an unwanted, useless person, when he could not even bring his firstborn safely into the world.

I assume that’s the moment when he began to distrust his hands, and himself. I assume that’s when he began to fear.

Said buried the baby in the ground of the camp. He did not want to name the baby, but Nima insisted. She said she’d heard the baby cry, so the baby deserved a name, even if they could not bear to give it the name they had planned, Ahmad. Instead, they called the baby Jihad, a name signifying struggle. The struggle that was Nima’s journey with the baby, and the new struggle that was now her and Said’s lot in life.

A year later, Said and Nima had left their nightmare in Rafah and traveled to Beirut. There, Nima did give birth to a baby named Ahmad—my father. He was not Said and Nima’s firstborn, but he was their eldest, with six more to come.

But already in this young Palestinian family’s life, this family that had fled, already there had been born a body and a fear.