I had not yet recovered from weeks of geopolitics-induced emotional turmoil when I was sent an article titled Even With a Ceasefire, Gaza Has No Future. I had read versions of this sentiment countless times over the past weeks, gnawing at the little relief I had managed to foster. The anger these articles engendered swelled, took residence between two of my ribs—I had an inexplicable side stitch for days on end. I thought there must be room for anger, its disorganized walk, its accusatory tone, its indiscriminate pointing. This is what I want to write here: something I wish I had read; something less analytical; something that rang truer; something that carried a fraction of the emotions demanded by the last months, full of wrath—when it is still an emotion, before it turns into raw material. I wanted to write something to a you I see everywhere yet who doesn’t exist: a unified Western gaze I find crushing, a you to which I also somewhat belong.
When a ceasefire was announced in Lebanon on November 27th, 2024, countless people all over social media and newspapers rushed to say that we should not be too relieved, nor too joyful. The ceasefire might not be respected, and anyway, we still need to see if Israel pulls its troops out of the south. A few weeks later, when the Assad regime was defeated and overthrown on December 8th, not a single person around me who wasn’t Syrian was able to express straightforward joy. Given what had brought the authoritarian regime down, things might turn out to be just as bad, just as oppressive, arbitrary, and violent, or indeed moreso. Still, a few weeks later, on January 19th, 2025, when a ceasefire agreement came into effect in Gaza and videos of children celebrating were flooding my social media, I saw friend after friend insisting yet again that this is a small and fragile victory that might be crushed at any moment. Israeli forces might keep bombing, it is just a matter of time before they do so. There was no reason for joy.
Of course, all of them have been proven right. Israel never stopped bombing Gaza or South Lebanon. Its brutal attacks on Palestinians and its use of starvation as a weapon of war are intensifying as I write this. All of the victories listed above come too late, after too much suffering and too many deaths. They are strikingly fragile and profoundly imperfect. Ideally, Israel would leave Lebanon in peace for good, there would be no corruption or sectarian divide in the country, a president could be held somewhat accountable and forced to do a decent job. The government would invest in public services. The economy would get better. Yes, I too wish that Syria was now suddenly profoundly egalitarian and democratic. I wish that after all the unnamable violence this was fully emancipatory and necessarily synonymous with peace and prosperity. Of course, a ceasefire agreement in Gaza is only a first step that can be reneged upon and violated at any moment. Nothing has truly been won, Palestine is far from free. I know that not even 24 hours after the ceasefire was first agreed upon, 70 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. If there were any justice, any reward for suffering, all of these countries and their people would live under utopian socialism and nothing less. I understand the importance of staying alert, of reminding each other that this isn’t good enough.
Fig.1
But when I see videos of people on the ground celebrating gleefully, when I see traffic jams on the way to Damascus because people are rushing to come back home, when I see parents crying with joy because they get to rebuild their children’s old bedrooms, I cannot understand the endless commentary on all sides of the political spectrum demanding caution and measured response, despite understanding the obvious veracity of their claims and the realism of their warning. We are speaking different languages. I fear I do not have the necessary distance to comment. All I feel is relief, and grief, and rage, and joy, all at once. This isn’t a topic or an issue; this is life in its most brutal force.
Every time I tried to reach for a little bit of hope over the last months, I got a slap on the wrist. Political commentators, professors of international law or political science, all the way to my leftist acquaintances, all of them with their commentaries and analyses, seemed to repeat a metaphorical finger wagging in my face: not so fast! That’s hope. It’s not for you! Try this: it’s called being realistic and nuanced. It will help you in avoiding further disillusionment.
I wish I could brush off this kind of admonishment by now, but I am always left with nagging questions that I already know the answers to: do people around me think that Arabs are so narrow-minded, overtaken by their feelings and pain, or uneducated, or unwilling to face reality, that they do not understand the politics that rules their lives as well as Europeans do? There is a particularly Western accent to the underlying idea that only distance brings clarity, that knowledge is necessarily disembodied. This is evidently misguided: no one knows the importance, meaning, and reality of a ceasefire better than a Palestinian now sitting in a tent in the killing fields South of Gaza.
I do not know what a ceasefire truly is (and, most likely, neither do you). I will not comment on the necessary tempering of joy because I only feel a fraction of it, because I understand nothing.
Arabs and death are now inextricably linked in Western culture, made synonymous by decades of gruesome images and evident rhetorical dehumanization. It is now difficult to imagine anything beyond destruction for Arabs. They are either threats to others or are themselves threatened, constantly switching from terrorists to victims or being both simultaneously.
Rebuilding is allowed, but building isn’t. Arabs in the Middle East are stuck in repetitions, armed only with the politics of damage control. It is clear from editorials, opinion pieces, and Instagram stories alike that Arabs cannot rejoice in the possibility of a brighter future. To imply a future, any future, is already idealistic.
As Edward Said points out, the repetition of the dominant Western narrative amounts to “a virtual orthodoxy, setting limits, defining areas, asserting pressures”. (1) For Arabs, the limits are clear: there is nothing but a distant glorious past, then a painful one, and, finally, a thoroughly fucked, ever-lasting present. The temporality is truncated, patchy, precisely where something else could reside. In this sense, not only is a better future compromised, but so is our ability to imagine it. An Arab future is thus rendered an oxymoron: all there is is the now, in its pain and limitations. Even leftists insist that we put the blinkers on: imagination proscribed. Hope—with its powerful shimmer, its creative force—is necessarily impossible, forbidden.
I have thought of the why and I was left with anger.
There is, I think, genuine—and kind—fear in this banning of hope. The idea is that if one tries hard enough to preempt pain, then it might be avoided, or pushed away a little longer. I understand the care imbricated in this, in saying that there can be no joy until everything is okay. But we know that would mean pushing laughter away for so long that it becomes impossible. If we wait until we reach permanent security and stable prosperity, we might be left with nothing but a diaphragm’s soundless, absurd flapping.
Fig. 2
Another hypothesis emerges from the usual grind of being ahead of the curve, of having the right Hot Take before anyone else does. Instead of waiting for the consensus to slowly turn on itself (as it inevitably does). You will be one of the first to have said it! Why waste time on rejoicing because of what seems to be fleeting good news, when you could skip that step and go straight to seeing this joy’s weaknesses, pitfalls, and dead angles? There is prestige in the dismantling, or, in more truthful terms, in taking a popular idea and simply flipping it on its head. It is also importantly preventive: since the tide inevitably will turn against the oppressed, rejoicing for even a moment of respite is embarrassing, as if caught red-handed in placing hope in a faulty, precarious location—to be rendered a fool by investing hope where there was nothing but temporary distraction.
I have one last, even grimmer explanation for this unease with Arab hope. I think the idea of Middle Easterners surviving, or perhaps even thriving in the future, doesn’t sit quite right with many Westerners. There is something about this idea that seems impossible. No matter how much you will it, Palestinian liberation, an emancipated Global South—or the humbler vision of a happy Arab—are never to be expected or accepted. This is a disquieting realization: perhaps you do not believe in your own political ideals. Only their theoretical existence is certain. You do not think they could be in the world—although you believe they hypothetically should. Liberation thus sits amid disarray, collecting dust, never truly expected to materialize. What I really mean to say is: You’re just not used to seeing Arabs alive by now, are you?
There seems to be a necessity to remind the world of an Arab’s destiny, that is, the fate of not having any. The promise of disappearance. This inability to envisage a hopeful Arab world and to rejoice in solidarity with this being is a profound failure. It says, in the clearest possible way, that the dehumanization is to be total, that no matter how much Europeans and North Americans have genuinely cared about and organized for the welcoming of Syrian refugees or against the annihilation of the Palestinian people, they haven’t quite reached the stage where empathy and its unthinking directness prevail. The dehumanization has worked its way in so deeply that it has extirpated the very possibility for hope. Mohammad El-Kurd has said it already: “We are not human, automatically, by virtue of being human—we are to be humanized by virtue of our proximity to innocence: whiteness, civility, wealth, compromise, collaboration, nonalignment, nonviolence, helplessness, futurelessness.”
And so, in all my understanding of the necessity for nuance, and in all the joy I experience when observing slithering hope, I cannot help but be disappointed (which is, I am guessing, precisely what you are trying to save me from). It is a deafening disappointment, the kind that can only stem from the relativization of tears of joy. Images of people celebrating the possibility that they might escape death, at least tonight, or in the next few days, cannot outweigh the powerful images of destruction that the Middle East inevitably conjures up. I understand: you watch Arabs finding relief and cannot help your kneejerk reaction: no, do not rejoice, Arabs will keep dying. It’s what they do.
I refuse this shrinking, this wilting idea of a non-future, where nothing is ever won and no horror ever stops; everlasting pain among temporary bodies meant to die in a spectacle for Western audiences. I cannot accept it. We must imagine what comes after this.
I will cry with relief.
I will move to Beirut,
I will see Jiddo again.
We will rejoice.
We will remember the political promise of hope, the grieving there is still to be done, and the future there is to be built.
Darwish, right as always, orders or perhaps begs: we are still alive, do not remember us.
Of course, the warnings have proven right: the horror didn’t and won’t suddenly stop once a ceasefire or the fall of a regime is announced. There is no clear line between war and post-war, no borders to the compounded violence suffered. Our understanding of the last years latches onto concepts that inevitably fail us; “the terms ‘war’, ‘peace’, and ‘ceasefire’ fail to account for experience”. (2) I do not resent the warnings for their inaccuracy. I resent them for their tone and timing, their eager crushing of Arab hope. But hope is precisely what is needed—along with anger—for revolutionary change. It is the sine qua non for our leap from here to utopia. Hope does not have to be realistic, nor does it have to be everlasting: its passing, fluttering existence is the difference between the fragile possibility of a different future versus its complete annihilation. Its beauty resides in the fact that it is always unreasonable and untimely.
Ceasefires and the falls of brutal regimes, of course, are only grief-burdened beginnings. With this knowledge, I remind myself of the need to remain critical, alert, and organized, despite hope, but also importantly because of it. There is a necessity for all of us, you and I, flawed and together in this vastness, to keep hope where it belongs: somewhere close at hand, maybe on the kitchen table, at the core of every tender thought, clinging to the napes of our necks. What a precious thing hope is, our sundial, our thrumming (a joyous hypothetical, a love note).
//
- Footnotes
(1) Edward Said, Permission to Narrate, Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984), 35.
(2) Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism – Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford University Press: 2022), 77.
Images: Details of Byzantine mosaics, and a door knocker, all taken in Lebanon by the author.
