Outside the bar, cigarette in hand, H is talking about hauntology. He mentions photos from an archeological dig in British mandate Palestine where the Palestinian workers look spectral with their tools, their faces blurred next to their British supervisors who stand in sharp focus next to the site. Eerie omens of things to come. I catch myself thinking of this 1904 photo of a Congolese father staring at his his five year old child’s severed hand and foot that was cut by the Belgians as punishment for his failure to meet his daily rubber quota. He, too, looked like he had already departed this world before his heart stopped beating. Almost a century later, not much has changed for either people. Both Palestine and Congo are still in the throes of genocide. The former is being punished by imperialism for refusing to concede its right to exist. The latter, because its cobalt fuels our computers, cell phones, and other appliances that have made us addicted to our comfort. Its diamonds sit on the ring fingers of Westerners dreaming of, and planning fairytale weddings paved by a trail of African blood.
The zionists are both haunted and possessed by opposing forces. Their generational trauma molded them into their former detractors, and as they’ve colonized Palestine over the course of a century, they have brought with them a bloodthirsty demon that stretches its tentacles into their beings generation after generation. The white man kills and the Arab pays the price. Watching this genocide unfold in 4K, where a media war is fought with rookie hasbara and shameless displays of soldiers’ ghoulishness on TikTok helps us determine that we are dealing with a nationwide psychotic break orchestrated by narcissistic psychopaths self-exonerating through internalized narratives of victimhood. Bolstered by the absence of red lines and an endless supply of ammunition funded by our tax dollars, the permissibility of this atrocity spells the end of a world order refusing to die.
The zionists are also haunted —and will remain so— by the ghost of every martyr that has ascended since 1948. We know the Levant is strewn with ghosts of decimated universes repeatedly slain, never laid to rest. In Gaza, and throughout Occupied Palestine, ghosts are a thorn in the usurping entity’s side, and they will be its downfall. No amount of exhumed graves, illegally harvested organs, car parks built on mass graves will ever change that.
On Instagram, the algorithm catapults me to a post of old photos of Gaza’s old Shuja’iya train station, which once connected the Levant to Egypt. It was, as you can suspect, destroyed by the zionist entity in 1967, marking the beginning of the strip’s transformation into a concentration camp that would become fully sealed off from the world beginning in 2005. A few days later, Bisan posts a video filmed before the genocide where she gives viewers a tour and a historical overview of Gaza’s refugee camps. She mentions the railway in Buraiyj that passed through Lydd and Haifa, both ethnically cleansed in 1948. In grieving the lives lost, I grieve also the world we were robbed of, the lives that could’ve been lived in a universe where the colonial borders drawn between Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria had never existed. I grieve the past and the present we were stripped of. I do so with an unfaltering belief in an alternate universe where that world exists. While there’s no undoing the past, our future is one where we will merge with that parallel universe and catch up with our other selves out there. One day, in our lifetimes, we will take the train from Beirut to Akka, from Tyre to Gaza via Haifa. The Shuja’iya station will connect again to Alexandria. I will not be told otherwise.
Reader, while I’m grateful for your time, your presence, and your attention I cannot in good conscience utter the words “happy new year.” My wish, however, for 2024 is that it be the bearer of our inevitable collective liberation. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Further Reading
Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Protean Mag
A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha, The New Yorker
What a Palestinian-American Wants You To Know About Dehumanization, Hala Alyan, Teen Vogue
‘The bombs are still falling. My heart breaks every day’: novelists Sally Rooney and Isabella Hammad on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Isabella Hammad, Sally Rooney, The Guardian
A New Poem by Fady Joudah, Fady Joudah, ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly
Zeina Hashem Beck’s Survival Sonnet, Zeina Hashem Beck, Los Angeles Review of Books