I retreat to three unreadable cities.
Writing has failed me over the past two years, as the ebb and flow of Israel’s all-out attack on Palestinian lifeworlds reshaped our reality. By « writing », I mean the discipline in which, through arranging words, I attempt to uncover something of my own thoughts. When I craft fiction, I feel as though I can create meaning — even the flimsiest of meanings — out of chaos. In attempting to put into text a few swirling ideas — paying attention to them, tracing their trajectories — I have often believed that I might discover a narrative, something to impose coherence upon the world’s disorder. But lately, this process has failed me.
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I do not mean that I haven’t been putting words to paper. On the contrary, as can happen in times of crisis, I write incessantly — short form, half-essays, scattered poems, bits and pieces of stories, a few lines. Yet each time my mind tries to shape meaning, something resists: no narrative, coherent or not, emerges.
This is not to say that the political implications of what we are going through are unclear. They are clear as day: Israel’s guilt is undeniable, as is the complicity — muted, apologetic, or outright enthusiastic — of governments worldwide. Nor would I claim that writing — documenting, resisting, pushing back, exposing the conditions of our eradication — is futile. What I mean is that the onslaught is so relentless, so cruel and unceasing, that on a personal level I fail to construct a narrative. I fail, daily, to make sense of it.
One could argue: it is senseless. Senselessness is this destruction’s defining characteristic. Yet one could also argue that this colonial project is calculated, structured, purposeful. This is its spectacular strength: it is both senseless and full of sense at the same time.
Still, I fail to create a narrative. Each day brings new horrors, new developments — expected or unexpected, but all equally devastating. Writing falters in the face of such brutality.
I feel my grasp slipping on my own country, on a few of these places I call home. What I call home becomes less clear, less understandable to me. And so I return to moments, to perspectives that anchor me: a garden in Jericho, the view of Jerusalem from Tokyo, the hush of night fallin over Bethlehem. I revisit these instances obsessively, sometimes because they offer no meaning but slivers, insights.
(And of course, the city that remains above all, that overrides all else, is Gaza. I do not speak of Gaza here. But Gaza will always be here.)
I do not speak of Gaza here.
But Gaza will always be here.
Today, when I write, I find myself holding a kind of triptych of cities in my mind — the winding paths connecting this triad exist only within the contours of my imagination. These paths do not follow a pattern, nor do they map onto anything concrete; rather, they serve as fleeting threads of reflection. As everything shifts around me, I return to these quiet, tentative fragments — pieces of a puzzle.
Even as I write this, I recognize the familiar pull of my own habits, the tendency to impose meaning where none may exist. What does this triptych of cities truly offer? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps only a scattering of stray, momentary thoughts on Palestine, lost among the millions of thoughts already lost. And maybe that is enough, for now at least.
Across the occupied territories, Israel has constructed one of the most intricate and pervasive surveillance systems in the world. I am watched everywhere — by the unblinking eyes of control towers, by the magnetic card issued at the military center, by unseen forces that reach, I feel sometimes, through the screen of my computer, even into my bed. My body and mind exist under relentless scrutiny, under physical and psychological assault.
Every word I speak, every movement I make, every bit of fiction written and erased, every explicit or unspoken gesture is a site of interroga tion. I am a text — an object to be read, analyzed and deconstructed by technicians and soldiers who seek to interpret me in the most dehumanizing way. Under such a gaze, every moment of withdrawal, every act of reclaiming even the smallest fragment of myself, feels like respite and resistance.
For a Palestinian writer, legibility is often a prerequisite. Your writing must be clear and linear; realist and accessible; entertaining but moving. It’s the price you pay to have your words recognized, acknowledged, allowed. That is why I am drawn to genres that resist such legibility: fairytales and science fiction, prose poetry and legend. I embrace the subversive pleasure of genre, an instinctive defiance against the rigid frameworks of writing and reading imposed upon us.
Fiction, when blurred, fragmented and nonlinear, offers a kind of refusal of the double prison of imposed legibility: the scrutiny of the Israeli apparatus and the expectations of a foreign audience. It becomes a guerrilla literature, a way of slipping through the cracks of prescribed meaning.
I frame it through the Palestinian condition because that condition is the ground from which I write, the lens by which I understand part of the world. But the impulse to retreat, to slip beyond imposed meaning, is not uniquely ours. It emerges from many conditions, many histories of domination and surveillance.
How does one elude the gaze and create on one’s own terms?
Who decides what meaning is imposed upon my existence? Who grants themselves the right to observe, to define, to understand? How does one elude the gaze and create on one’s own terms? I try to gain insight by looking elsewhere.
One painting has meant so much to me over the past few years: in March 2012, the Palestinian artist Vladimir Tamari (1942-2017) completed a large, luminous work titled Mount Fuji Seen fromTokyo and the Bird of Peace Over Jerusalem. Like much of Tamari’s art, the painting bursts with color, comes alive with exuberant shapes that evoke a childlike sense of wisdom and wonder. At its center, Mount Fuji rises in quiet majesty, while above it soars the bird of peace. Jerusalem appears in the background to the left, walled and distant, shimmering like a faraway star.
This painting feels like the apt depiction of a first encounter with the world — geographies blend effortlessly, unconstrained by the rigid borders that define adulthood. Born in Jerusalem and having lived in Tokyo for decades, Vladimir Tamari overlays two landscapes — not as opposites but as a continuous, interwoven space. One might just as easily see Mount Fuji Seen from Jerusalem and the Bird of Peace Over Tokyo. He invites us to reconsider how we navigate the world’s divisions, both physical and imagined. His painting envisions a world unbound. Yet it is also a painting of exile, of a forced separation.
Tokyo appears in the foreground both gray and vibrant, wrapped in a mist evoking the tsunami that struck Japan just a year earlier. Two suns hang in the sky: one golden and radiant, a promise of joy; the other red and ominous, a forewarning of disaster. The painting seems caught in the pull of a great wave, collapsing two disaster-struck cities into one and layering two histories to create a third. It is at once a memorial, a tribute to catastrophe, and a dream of what might still be possible.
Tamari’s work reconfigures cardinal points, dissolves the fixed coordinates that govern our ways of seeing. His art is marked by a sharp eye for color, a tendency toward spatial abstraction, and a vocabulary at once scientific and childlike. He offers more than an image; he offers a model of liberation, a guide for creative vision.
Not having Jerusalem grants us the unsettling luxury of reinventing it.
His Jerusalem is an imaginative horizon, a model for writing. It is an invitation to dream, to ask what a liberated city might look like and how it might unfold within our texts. Jerusalem becomes fluid, mutable — it can be coastal, mountainous, metropolitan. Not having Jerusalem grants us the unsettling luxury of reinventing it.
This painting teaches me that two drafts — two visions — can be layered to create something new. That garments, lives or texts can be cut, glued and mended. That ultimately you can take yourself less seriously. And thus, something emerges that is sewed together yet cohesive: this painting.
The Jerusalem I know intimately can be layered with other, dreamed Jerusalems. But in practice, it’s all an illusion. Israel’s bureaucracy fragments Palestinian lives into legal and administrative categories, making access to the city nearly impossible for many. I have frequented Jerusalem, but always as if uprooted — symbolically forbidden, or at best, a precarious presence within it. The Jerusalem I know is doubled: a ghost geography imposed upon the first, a city that both exists and is withheld.
But as I speak of Jerusalem, I think of a town not far from it, in the nearby desert. Here’s another image I turn to: Jericho, the oasis jewel. If you’ve ever seen it rise on the horizon as you drive toward it, you understand how quiet gestures can suddenly become spectacular. At first, it wavers, flickers like a mirage, multiplying in shapes and colors. The desert stretches out before you, then fractures into the city’s roads and gardens. Ochre cliffs rise in the distance, their edges softened by the heat. Orchards and groves burst in vibrant greens and golds, oranges and yellows — date palms, banana leaves, citrus trees.
Further to the right, the sea lies motionless, an expanse of dead blue. High above, a red dot traces a slow, steady arc across the sky — the cable car moving to and from the Mount of Temptation. This is the initial, sweeping vision of Jericho: a city sketched in light and color; ancient, surreal.
Jericho: a city sketched in light and color; ancient, surreal.
Then, you cross into its world. The desert’s hues give way to a lushness which isn’t necessarily there. You guess it, right beyond that road; somewhere just around that next side-street. Jericho reveals itself as a city of gardens, both public and private, where life tucks itself away, where existence takes refuge. It is a city of concealment, of shelter. In a territory defined by surveillance, where transparency is enforced and everything must be legible, Jericho offers deep and protected spaces — places where no one can find you. Or so you can imagine.
Much like Jerusalem seen from Tokyo, Jericho complicates my geographic imagination. Its tropical lushness electrifies my senses, unsettles my concept of place. It creates the illusion of being somewhere else — somewhere distant and borderless — even here, where the occupation has shrunk movement to almost nothing.
On the outskirts, the city dissolves into desert — or perhaps it’s the other way around: the desert dissolves into city. Jericho thrives in this liminal space, neither fully one thing nor the other. In a country defined by its apartheid policies — where crossings are not only difficult but often impossible — Jericho exists as a city of thresholds, of crossings. This thrilling in ways that words can hardly capture. It is, after all, the city of the moon. Though today merely a moniker, the city’s lunar aura is unmistakable once the sun sets on this oasis — a place purloined from the world, stolen from itself.
I long to learn from Jericho, to retreat into my oasis self, to become unreadable and stolen unto myself.
My body is a text open to interpretation; to declare myself unreadable — free from imposed meaning — is both shield and provocation. And so I long to learn from Jericho, to retreat into my oasis self, to become unreadable and stolen unto myself. That may sound like an abstract or lofty declaration, but for a Palestinian, the struggle lies in avoiding being reduced to a text for a state to decipher. (In this, we are the forerunners of the rest of the world’s inevitable fate.) A Palestinian is deemed dangerous by default; moves through space as a body to be scanned, a thought to be analyzed, a file to be dissected. (Yet the danger the entire world poses to Palestinians is rarely considered. We endure far more violence than we could ever inflict.) A network of readers — X-rays, soldiers, scanners, commentators — inspects his body, studies his words, all in search of traces of danger. And danger, in this context, is anything that literally or symbolically threatens the colonial project of which he is a victim.
How to navigate both retreat and exposure? I learn this from Jericho as much as from the imagination of my hometown — from Bethlehem at night, when it slips away from the world. In slipping, in becoming more than what is legible, Bethlehem reveals its truth. My town becomes itself at night. In the darkness, it sheds its layers,
reveals another city. Less readable. Shifting, untethered, free.
But these are just words. This is just me, imagining something of Bethlehem. I must confront reality. Let’s turn our gaze to the settlement across from my town.
This is just me, imagining something of Bethlehem.
I first began to understand Bethlehem as truly coming alive after twilight when I was a child. It was around the same time that the settlement of Har Homa (the Hebrew name) appeared on a hill we call Abou Ghneim (in Arabic). As a child, I misheard it as Abou Gheim — « Father of the Clouds ». It was once a dense forest, cleared to build a settlement in the mid-1990s. Construction of Har Homa was approved by the government of the then newly elected Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But I remember the forest of Father of the Clouds. On Abou Gheim, I envisioned a hill stretching toward the sky, a deep and mysterious forest — an almost impenetrable jungle teeming with strange croaking, roaring, unearthly creatures. Somewhere there lived a man called Father of the Clouds. A wild man, for he lived alone and free — sometimes sad, I assumed — in the heart of the forest. At times, I imagined this beast-man as Lahmu, the pagan god from whom Bethlehem may have taken its name. A bearded figure, remnant of Bethlehem’s wild, ancient past, roaming the wilderness across from my home. He was the spirit of the place — Cloud Father, feral on his high hill.
This place became Har Homa, the settlement. Its Hebrew name, « Wall Mountain », was euphonic, precise, efficient, Biblical and military. At night, the divide between Bethlehem and Har Homa dissolves into a sea of black. It always reminds me of a space station in orbit, Har Homa, floating far above us. And so, it looks at us and shines — its windows aglow, lights shimmering, thousands of settlers living their lives in their homes. I think of this place where Cloud Father once roamed, now some sort of intergalactic spaceship. What must it be like to live as a settler? To exert violence as a settler? To hate as a settler? What must it be like to exist in such a state, trapped forever?
I do not wish to conclude with the settlement, especially as, at the time of writing, violence escalates in unprecedented ways in the West Bank. At least in this brief text, I do not want it to be the only horizon we see, nor thedominant structure shaping our landscapes. What I wanted to get to is this: look to the east that otherworldly settlement. Yes, its lights devour the night, leaving no space untouched. Its glow encroaches on this protective darkness. But there, can you see it? Can you imagine it, perhaps? There is still night to the east and west of the settlement. Its colonial light has not yet fully claimed this place. This is the darkness of the valley. There, in that darkness, once was something else; there existed another hill, another valley, and there, once, lived a wild man.
From my place in the night, watching the settler lights unseen, I know Bethlehem. Now, Bethlehem returns to itself and teaches me to write — stone alleys, apricot orchards, and on other, distant, hills: fields of poppies. My town blooms, earthly and grounded, in contrast to this vast orbital sprawl.
Though I can’t possibly write a meaningful, cohesive narration, I see them, and they teach me: I see Bethlehem, its landscapes of shadows, and Jericho, its secrets and revelations; and Jerusalem, remembered from Tokyo. In the night of one town, and in the gardens of another, and from a metropolis at the other end of the planet: I see them — my town, my country, untouched and free.
You’re reading this essay for free. With a subscription, you can read the full magazine, and you get access to our fabulous Library.
Subscribe now and get our past issues Six and Seven, too, for no extra charge. A glorious starter pack, making it five book-length editions for the price of three.
Fragments of this essay were originally published in French in Revue Makan #2, Manufacturing Narratives, edited by Ali T. As’ad.