October 2023

Hamas attacks southern Israel on October 7, and the world as we knew it cracked.
So, now we spend our time counting breaches. Which ones will prove durable, which ones seismic?

Hard chore. Hard lessons learned from the 2011 revolts.

There is one breach that I find myself constantly perusing. I have the sense that it will very likely deepen and rip through the toughest presumptions that have long frozen the Israeli-Palestinian mythos.

It’s probably 1997, and I am sitting with a friend in a café in Beirut, not too far from Palestine; Palestine as a yearning, a dream, an idea, because that was all there was of it for him and me.

The encounter taught me the wonders of boundless passion and commitment–and the utter folly of them if left to run unschooled and wild.

In October 1973, we Ammanis covered our car lights in a deep indigo dye. It was a time of war, so we were advised to brownout for a couple of weeks. The Egyptian and Syrian armies had just launched a joint surprise assault against Israel. Jordan did not participate in the war, but we were told to brownout, and brownout we did.

I don’t remember having a sense of dread. I was still very young, but, like many in my generation, I had internalized our chronic jitters as, paradoxically, a normalcy of Arab life.