It is really no surprise that Jean Baudrillard developed a particular fascination with the United State of America. Indeed, as he repeatedly posited, there is something unique about the way that this nation deals in signs and symbols.

I began reading Baudrillard’s 1986 book America as I was concluding work on my film The Narrow Land, a documentary examining the shifting culture of coastal Cape Cod in the midst of a tourism-fueled housing crisis. I always found the famous French postmodernist to be incredibly inaccessible, but in searching for a provocative subtitle for my film, I penned the phrase “Cape Cod does not exist” in a vague reference to Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.

Perhaps I am just as pretentious as Baudrillard for writing something so blatantly provocative. At the same time, there really is no “Cape Cod”. Cape Cod is a name for this landmass, which it was given by European explorers. Before it was Cape Cod, it indeed may have been called the Narrow Land, or something else. Cape Cod is an artificial identity, something that has been constructed over centuries and come to mean something specific — something that has little to do with the land itself.

Nowadays, the Cape Cod Canal makes it more of an island than a cape — and one could argue that codfish is nowhere near as emblematic of the region as the oyster or the quahog.

In the final months of production on The Narrow Land, I also learned about another film that would be released around the same time — one of an entirely different nature. That film was Backrooms, an A24-produced analog horror film from Kane Parsons (a director even younger than me at 20 years old).

I had not closely followed Parsons’ rise to fame through his VHS-styled 3D animations of these titular “backrooms”: eerie and seemingly infinite webs of rooms and hallways made up of yellow carpet floors, drop ceilings, and fluorescent overhead lighting. I was, however, acutely aware of the broader internet phenomenon behind them: a larger cultural fascination with “liminal spaces”, which sprang from real images of abandoned malls and office buildings posted on 4chan message boards, and spread to places like Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and beyond, gradually growing to include fictional liminal spaces like David Lynch’s “Black Lodge” from Twin Peaks, and, later, Parsons’ series of animations.

These liminal spaces are defined often by emptiness, by the kind of eeriness that Mark Fisher talks about in The Weird and The Eerie: Beyond the Unheimlich: primarily a deep sense of disturbance caused by the absence of something that should present. However, sometimes their strangeness comes from something that shouldn’t be there but is — like in one scene of Backrooms where main character Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) comes across a stop sign with backwards text in the middle of a hallway. Something is always off.

Backrooms explains the abnormalities of these spaces as mistakes in the process of the rooms “remembering” people and things — like trying to get someone who “has never seen a dog” to draw a dog from loose instructions. It is an endless loop of copying.

Baudrillard highlights America as the pinnacle of his concept of hyperreality, and it is precisely this kind of copying or replication, along with its unending nature, that Baudrillard is concerned with. He refers to America as a “giant hologram” and its inhabitants as “simulation in its most developed state”.

To bring this back about Cape Cod, we have to think about architecture. That is indeed what initially provoked my interest in studying this region’s relationship with housing — it is one of the few regions that actually has a style of house named after it.

Let us examine these two houses, both described as “Capes”. One image (left) shows one of the earliest Capes still standing (17th-century), and one (right) is a 3D rendering of a new house listed on the website of Kinlin Grover (a local real estate agency).

First, the similarities: even in 2026, we still maintain the gabled asphalt shingle roof (although now it is more complex). It is also still a relative plain house, for the most part. In fact, with this grey and white color scheme (which seems so popular nowadays), it actually makes its older ancestor seem to have more character.

That is about it though. The differences are striking. Both are actually two stories, but even just from a visual comparison, we can see how much taller the newer house is. We can also see that the cedar shingle siding has been done away with in favor of vinyl. The listing advertises a fireplace, but you certainly can’t see a central chimney in any of the renderings or architectural plans.

Perhaps the most obvious difference is these stacked-stone accents on the exterior, which not only has the effect of making the home feel more guarded, but also evokes a sense of place quite unlike coastal New England.

Why are things getting so much bigger? More closed off?

It is almost cliché to write about the American quality of excess. The tendency for things to sprawl. Sprawling suburbs, sprawling golf courses, sprawling strip malls, sprawling highways, sprawling houses, mega-mansions.

A landmark study from the UCLA Costen Institute revealed that American families only use about 30% of their home on average. That is to say that the vast majority of space we take up is really unnecessary. It lends itself to emptiness, to liminality, to spaces that exist only to be momentarily passed through or glanced at.

It’s true of outdoor spaces too. In this country, we prize those large empty, unproductive spaces that sit between our front door and the street. Per the Guardian, “Americans spend an estimated $36bn on lawn care annually, and the amount of lawns we maintain could roughly cover the state of Florida.”

Altogether, that’s a lot of excess space! Many of my Cape Cod neighbors are afraid to embrace vertical density for fear of tall buildings that will make the streets more “urban” — but do they realize that we are building up rather than sideways so that they can continue to spread themselves across multiple acres with their huge lawns, huge living rooms, huge kitchens, etc.?

In fact, the idea that a place like Cape Cod is “too crowded” or “overdeveloped” already totally misses the mark. There’s enough space — it’s just not being used efficiently. Nowhere is.

Towards the end of the second act of Backrooms, Clark’s therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), finds him in one corner of the strange network of rooms, now apparently content to stay put there alongside strange, distorted copies of other human beings. Everything that should be off-putting about the space seems to comfort Clark, for now he is in control — free from accepting responsibility for his actions and circumstances in the way that the normal world demands.

Of all of the facets of America that are contained in Baudrillard’s writing, perhaps none are more significant that the desert. For him, it is a microcosm of the entire nation, an embodiment of a key American feature: wide-open spaces. But like the backrooms, the existence of the desert seems to have implications for life outside it as well.

“When you emerge from the desert, your eyes go on trying to create emptiness all around;” says Baudrillard, “in every inhabited area, every landscape they see desert beneath, like a watermark.” Perhaps this is why — even on the East Coast, where deserts and vast plains are few and far between — Americans perpetually yearn for excess space. Each suburban home is like a small oasis amidst its own desert, where every one of us can hide away from each other, away from the world, firmly in control of all things.

Indeed, wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians flee their homes for the coasts or the countryside in hopes of escaping not just the “urban problems” of modern cities, but also in hopes of escaping the unstoppable engine of change, which routinely disrupts their metropolitan lives. They believe that they can remain still amidst the momentum of history. A fundamental, foolish human impulse.

This is how the countryside becomes the suburbs.

It is no surprise, of course, that Kane Parsons is himself from suburban California, for only an American suburbanite could have made this film. It’s part of a broader canon of films that tap into this environment’s unique horror, including Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) and more recently I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenburn, 2024).

All of these films, but particularly Backrooms, point us towards a truth about emptiness, about excess space — not that it is undesirable, but that it is seductive, corrupting, dangerous. We see this with Baudrillard too, who does not condemn the wide-open space of the desert, but in fact describes it with an incredible kind of sex appeal:

Back to the suburbs, those deserts that surround cities: The thing is that, as much as we urbanists like to hate on people’s taste in architecture and landscaping — people are buying these houses and mowing these lawns because they are convinced that they like it that way — that they are safer this way.

Streets cannot be carnivals where houses speak to each other. To speak would mean vulnerability, interdependence. Our homes cannot be conjoined with each other — for then we surrender the illusion of the individual, the illusion that shields us. Our front yards cannot be points of communion between humankind and nature, lest we lose something to the Earth in the process. And indeed we must always have front yards lest we lie to close to the street, lest we become like the street folk, lest we become like families sleeping one wall apart.

This is the eerie thing about empty spaces. What is there that we do not see? Or, in other words, who or what could possibly occupy this empty space? What might seek such isolation?

Backrooms, with its ten million dollar budget, signals something important: Not necessarily that there is a sudden new interest in these kind of ideas, but that they are becoming impossible for mainstream media to ignore.

The same creeping feeling that has inspired so much of my work is spreading like a virus.

Like with many things, I was never particularly sentimental about the place I grew up in. Maybe it’s because I was an ungrateful kid, or maybe it’s because Cape Cod is just the kind of place that you have to leave to really appreciate.

As I stood on the doorstep of my childhood home with bags in hand preparing to leave the pastoral seaside for New England’s urban center, it suddenly occurred to me that this place might actually be important. Suddenly, it felt as though nothing would ever be the same anywhere else.

My new film, The Narrow Land was spawned from a question that people both on and off Cape would ask me routinely: Do you think you’ll come back?

Over the last year, I interviewed numerous Cape Cod locals: fishermen, artists, rental agents, cooks, housing activists, and more. I also reflected intensely on both the history of Cape Cod, and my direct experience with it as a child and a teenager, all in an attempt to explain to people my complicated feelings about this question of coming home. The result is this feature-length documentary, which I produced in fulfillment of my senior honors thesis at Brandeis University.

The film is currently on a tour of Cape Cod venues, which kicked off with two sold out shows at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and continues this coming weekend with screenings at Cotuit Center for the Arts and the Eastham Public Library. The film will also be released here on Substack for paid subscribers to Email Collective next month.

Cape Cod has a housing crisis. It’s not a unique problem — many places, particularly cities, across the country are experiencing something similar — but it manifests in a particular way under the conditions of a seasonal tourist economy like the Cape.

I’m not an economist though. What interests me more is the consequences of this problem on the level of culture, psychology, and identity.

A recent study revealed that Cape Cod homes had the second highest percent-increase in median square footage of anywhere in the state. While in most counties in Massachusetts, homes are in fact getting smaller, homes on Cape Cod continue to grow in size (topped only by neighboring Dukes County which includes Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard).

It’s not surprising. I’ve seen this happening in my own neighborhood and across the Cape. A new, wealthier class is moving here, increasingly disconnected from the sensibilities of salty working class Cape Cod. They want bigger houses with big kitchens, big garages, and big bright green lawns pumped full of Round-Up.

I’m not the first to notice this. There has been an ongoing discussion about the changing “character” of the Cape for many years (or even decades) now. Unfortunately, it most often comes up when we are talking about affordable housing developments. It also tends to lack any kind of nuance with regard to what the “Cape Cod charm” we speak of actually is.

People who deploy these kind of aesthetic arguments against new development often invoke architectural “tradition” or history, suggesting that we must preserve the Cape Cod style because it is core to the identity of the region.

But why does our conception of regional architectural history begin and end with White Euro-American culture? If we really wanted to maintain allegiance to the true historical origin of Cape Cod architecture, shouldn’t we advocate for the construction of Wampanoag-style longhouses along Route 6A?

Furthermore, on the Outer Cape at least, the modernist style also has a claim to Cape Cod, just as much as the colonial style that preceded it. Sure, the modernists may have been anything but traditional in their time, but that was decades ago! When I was growing up, places like the Hatch House in Wellfleet were just as emblematic of the Cape as the Atwood Higgins House.

At a certain point, we must ask if we are actually interested in history because it is useful to us, or purely because it satisfies a desire to relive our own personal memories.

The current discourse in American politics is very concerned with images of the past. Right-wingers, in the spirit of “Make America Great Again”, seek to return the country to a romanticized past without the perceived ills of mass immigration, women’s liberation, LGBTQ+ rights, and other “Woke”-isms. The liberal center, too, yearns for the return of the Obama era, before Trumpism divided what they see as an otherwise progressing nation.

Whether either of these pasts ever actually existed as imagined is dubious. And yet all are treated with an unquestioning reverence by their particular subscribers. I point this out not to undermine the value in history and its preservation, but to emphasize how fictitious pasts can be employed to great effect in a wide range of political battles.

Cape Cod finds itself in a peculiar political struggle over housing. Almost all locals know that something must be done to resolve the crisis, but attempts to build more affordable housing are often slowed, if not stopped, by fierce public debate over the size and character of such projects. Opponents suggest that over-development will ruin the historic and unique character of Cape Cod, while those in favor argue that the Cape Cod charm is actually being destroyed by the lack of options for young, working families. Both yearn for a Cape Cod that, we are told, once existed many years in the past.

The only party offering a meaningful vision of what the future could be are the corporate developers. Indeed, it is a future made up of large rental complexes that generate millions of dollars in revenue for these companies. It is not a future that takes into account the environment, or the popular sentiment of Cape Cod locals. Yet it is really the only future that is being presented.

While various groups debate the best way to keep the past alive, only the developers are able to escape the seduction of nostalgia enough to present a vision of what a Cape Cod of the future could actually look like. It isn’t pretty, but without real alternatives, what else can we expect?

After spending a year researching this topic, the parallels between our local problems on Cape Cod and the problems of the nation could not be more clear. But given the region’s history maybe that makes sense.

When I think about the problematic legacy of colonialism in this country, Cape Cod feels like an arm that reaches back into the past: the mythologized point of “first contact” between the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower and the Wampanoag people — a deeply violent and complex relationship that would last for centuries, and come to define the power dynamics and culture of the country we now live in.

This film is not a historical one. If anything, it is more of a personal diary of the present. But I bring up this history to underscore exactly what I hope to convince you of in its 80 minute runtime: that looking at Cape Cod is like looking through the troubled childhood memories of America. Therefore, I hope that you will treat it not as a regional ethnography, but as a national one.

Where to Watch It

Friday, May 29nd | 7pm | Cotuit Center for the Arts | Cotuit, MA

Saturday, May 30th | 1pm | Eastham Public Library | Eastham, MA

OR WATCH IT ONLINE this June by becoming a paid subscriber to Email Collective.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Email Collective is thrilled to publish this new article from our dear friend and colleague Matvey Agranovskiy, as our first entry in our new home here on Substack.

The boom in watermelons marked the beginning of the scorching season in Israel. One of these days, I remember walking into a supermarket around the corner from the co-housing I lived in. There, encountering a soccer-ball-sized bunch of green fruits, they jumped into my eyes with a special appeal. Having to reside in Tel Aviv for half a year with almost empty pockets, I couldn’t resist being subverted by the financial charm of those 2-shekel natural delights. A small portion of the money was sent to me every first week of each month by the officials of one of the only nation-states in the world that pays its new citizens for residence instead of taxing them. Of course, there were reasons for that temporary pleasure meant to attract desperate immigrants like me during their first months in the Promised Land, which was promised by someone who does not hold much authority for the Israeli secular majority these days.

Watermelons, born and raised in the Holy Land of Palestine, found their way into my shopping cart on that hot day in June as one of the material benefits of that Promise. After finishing my grocery shopping trips, I would walk back up the street, focusing my gaze on the blunt details of the grandiose white building I lived in, which most of my neighbors were dissatisfied with due to its age and repulsive condition – something that gave a sense of life to the lifeless desert. Yet, something was weird about the entourage of that construction, as if a new family moved in and didn’t fully settle in. The building had undergone multiple renovation attempts, with chunks of plastered white being applied yearly to the molded walls of the strictly squared rooms, only to have that plaster come off by the end of each year.

Repatriates from Russia of the Soviet generation saw, with a frown of disgust, a nostalgic resemblance of these buildings to Khrushchevki; European Jews desperately tried to make the most out of those miserable spaces, while many other wondering nations, most of whom ended up in Israel for some unknown reason, like a Japanese guy next door, distanced themselves from the acknowledgment of the challenges of living in those dull cubes perceiving them as necessary cultural elements of their exotic experience. Although it was truly only the preppy American Jews who secretly hated those multicultural anthills that were very different from the fancy upper-middle-class households in the suburbs of New York, Boston, or LA that they came from; nevertheless, they proudly tried to act as if that internal dissonance was just an obstacle to assimilation that they had to overcome on their way to living the American dream in Israel.

Here, I was a minority, favoring the interior of those proud children of socialist modernism, prominent as an architectural style in the early stages of Israel’s becoming as an ethno-state – something that on the urbanistic level has always been a log with the internationalist legacy in the eye of a proud Jew. Living in those suprematist capsules from outer space was not just aesthetically pleasing for my unpopular sight but seemed very simple and practical. Already in the first weeks after my arrival in Israel, I realized that, escaping from the horrifying future predetermined for most males of draft age in Russia, my home country, my fate is meant to follow me wherever I go. Those “life prospects” turned out to be an excellent chance for many to become more than just human beings, citizens, or mere chunks of meat, but not for me. The draft letter I received within weeks started the timer for me before I would have to leave my “second home”. Although, until this day, I see the intention of answering the basic question of “what is home?” as meaningless or even destructive.

Back then, it felt like I was standing in the waiting line for a needed change that would have allowed me to leave the place that only brought anxiety and uncertainty. Counting the days before my departure on my never-ending journey and hoping that nothing unexpected would prevent it, I ultimately found that all the other things appeared to be of secondary importance. Every day, I tried to find a more effective way to accelerate the coming of the nighttime, of nothingness, which helped this chapter of my life pass more quickly. Hand in hand with the breezy and calm night, sleep, being my best friend, always gave me an illusion of total departure from the unavoidable real world.

On that particular day, as I hurried into my apartment with the bags of groceries that I threw into a barely operating fridge that suffered no less from the scorching heat when the sun is all the way up – as if a warden, reminding of its gaze – I could not resist cutting that fresh watermelon to enjoy it for the first time of the year as a celebratory meal of the summer on my spacious balcony. I came out with a plate full of thick chunks of reds and greens and started devouring them in a rush.

After pressing the sweet and watery mass of a watermelon inside as fast as I could, I felt happy, despite the heaviness in my throat, a symbolic symptom of existence in the society of consumption. Every day would be an unsuccessful attempt to find something exciting externally while trying to preserve some stability of the internally bitter spirit, which I desperately tried to soothe with the sweetness of that purchase. A trivial thing like a watermelon landed on the border between phenomenal and noumenal, giving more than just its striking refreshment by its material merits that outweighed the temporal drawbacks of that guilty pleasure of the body.

Suddenly, while on the balcony, looking at the baby blue sky that was slowly perforated by the sharp horizon of the grey city landscape of metal and glass, I was struck by a feeling of nausea. For a moment, I saw Palestine in those green peels of watermelons from which all the truth was bitten by me or by somebody very similar. The repellent feeling intensified after I thought, for a second, about the sheer death that a few hours from Tel Aviv, behind those artificial mountains, was mutilating humans by the hungry teeth of the war machine – the gift of a century from the Israeli national heroes of the defense forces to contemporary history.

I rarely left my apartment, not wishing to bear the discouraging reminders of the very real instance of my life that I wanted to change as soon as possible. With that, I ended up staying inside for the majority of my time in Israel, and when I say inside, I mean it in all the possible senses. Back in Russia, I was quite unsure of how to understand the concept of inner emigration. I would never have expected to truly experience it after the attempted real emigration that made me realize that you can only be truly safe not in your flat, your room, or your bed, but in your silly little head. All the occasions when I had to leave that safe state of isolation mainly were when I had no choice, like having to bear the needs of minimal communication with my neighbors or visiting the supermarket. I tried to abstract from the outside elements of the place where I had to be, and, in a continued attempt to set my mind off on something else. In those days, I occasionally wondered how something so big as a watermelon, compared to all the fruits, could be considered a berry…

I recall one morning, stepping outside to find numerous metal barricades scattered all over the square on my way to the nearby university library – another destination that helped me kill time during those late spring days. At first, I was confused, thinking of the expansion of the never-ending construction, which is a common symptom of countries with grand ambitions. Seeing armed soldiers actively walking back and forth around the square, I realized that it was something different.

Upon this day, seeing a person with a gun is a traumatizing experience for me, but for Israelis, it is a joy of the day to encounter a soldier taking a seat in front of you on a bus who would decide to rest a gun between their legs, unintentionally pointing at you – no comments could be made of your discomfort. The Israeli hostages who attempted to escape their custody in Gaza on December 15, 2023, were pointed at by the same gun. The IDF did not save them – they were accidently killed by these “liberators” who are accustomed to pointing and shooting at everything that is moving in the occupied lands. One might wonder about the odds that this time the pointed gun will not fire in the same way at me. My fellow Israelis will probably be remembered as fallen heroes of the war between Israel and Hamas, and not between Israel and reason.

Oh, what a holy relic the M4 rifle is! There is so much excitement in the air when the soldiers are around – everything is hot about them. Sexualized physical strength combined with humanitarian blindness is the main tactical feature of one of the best armies of the world, which overperforms its patriotic duties in annihilating all the enemies of the State by adding to the list the majority of the civil population of Palestine and even sometimes its own fellow Israelis as a humble bonus. There is definitely something phallic about that obsession with carrying guns in public, especially for the female soldiers. I always thought that it was kind of unfair for only males to have to worry about the army draft in my home country of Russia. Although the fact that almost everyone is expected to become a soldier in Israel, regardless of gender, was nowhere more soothing. That rampant line of thought made me even more terrified of the armed soldiers, who were dumbfoundedly strolling around the square, like a disorganized flock of carnivorous birds in search of their prey.

With that in mind, I rushed through those frightening figures without any contemplation of their reason for being there; one starts asking fewer questions after some time living in Israel, not because one finds answers to any of them. In the calm and cool room of a library, I recall starting to read the local news, which I had only referred to on special occasions. The Haaretz article from the previous day claimed that the yearly student protest, commemorating Nakba Day, had been canceled by local authorities for the first time in years. That would not have surprised me, knowing how devoted the right-wing government of the state was to counter any pro-Palestinian narratives. Nonetheless, it appeared that after a long attempt to appeal the initial restrictions, the local minority of students at the university next door ended up being allowed to hold a yearly gathering that had never been interrupted in that manner before.

I realized that all the soldiers I saw at the square were there to fulfill their honorary obligation to guard the system by ensuring that the protest proceeded without any unexpected instances of violence from the other side of the barricades. The event was supposed to begin at noon, so sometime before that, people started gathering on the high viewpoints around the square, close to the small portion of protesters behind bars, with the most vocal branch gathered across the road from the square.

Those were the anti-protesters, who would be gathered yearly by the ultra-right-wing organization (the name of which I do not remember), that could not have even been given political status due to its animalistic radicalism. One could not compare those masses of fundamentalists to anything but beasts, whose constant noise could have been heard half a mile away from where they were shouting racist slurs at the pro-Palestinian protesters at the square. It is as if a truck has dumped a big pile of degrading trash in the middle of a street, the smell of which could not be avoided by any passersby, who would squeeze their noses, unable to bear that pungent odor. However, on that day, everyone seemed accustomed to that pleasant aroma. I fully realized then that the armed soldiers were around the square precisely for the reason of taming the enthusiasm of those wild masses.

I stood on a hill with a few confused others, who, like me, were apparently unaware of the protest and were sinking into the same landscape from a distance. The baby blue sky was sharpened by the corroding grandiosity of the grey buildings on that sunny day. A few dozen protesters at the square appeared very disoriented. Despite the clock already striking twelve, the main figures had yet to arrive, so the only action the dissenting youth could take was to pace back and forth, much like prisoners on their daily walk. Many of them wore keffiyehs, which I had seen for the first time with my own eyes in Israel. I was not expecting to see any Palestinian flags, knowing how big a taboo it had been in recent years. Nevertheless, some protesters at the demonstration held up oddly-looking half-circled pillows styled like watermelons – a message that was clear to everyone but disturbing only to the majority. Like the few little seeds in the watermelon I had eaten the other day, protesters were there, in the middle of the violent hatred that embraced them from all sides of the square. Eventually, I decided to move closer to what seemed to be the entrance to the gathering, recognizable by a higher concentration of armed soldiers.

I stood next to a few individuals who appeared to be organizers with keffiyehs on their shoulders – representatives from the local left-wing party – one of whom was wearing a red star military cap, like the one worn by Che Guevara; it was redder than anything else around, definitely redder than the hot melting sun and the artificial blood that the protesters spilled on the grey bricks of the square as a symbolic act to mourn the killings of Palestinians. The red star was certainly a couple of tones redder than the pulp of red flesh under a thick crust of green in a watermelon, which, from the outside, would remind me of green military helmets. In a couple of minutes standing there, I would see intended participants rushing through the little crowd of gapers, which I was a part of. Their fast movements appeared to be caused by anxiety about reaching the intended protest area safely. Only at the entrance to the happening would they take out their deeply hidden keffiyehs as a means of answering the question from the two welcoming folks who were giving out flyers and asking if they had come for the protest. Behind the organizers stood two soldiers who would check protesters’ bags and let them into the protest area through an artificially created corridor, marked by the same metal fences that led to the center of the square.

I decided to have a few words with the organizers, who didn’t speak English very well but handed me the flier, which, as they tried to explain, was the Hebrew translation of the speech that was supposed to be given in Arabic at the protest. It was fair that they assumed that I spoke no Arabic, so the Hebrew version was more appropriate, even though to this day I speak not a word of either language. Only later, after I got back to my place, did I Google translate the speech meant to be given remotely by an Egyptian journalist who managed to escape Gaza and was willing to address all the enthusiastic protesters through the first-person account of all the atrocities the brave heroes of the state of Israel were committing not that far away. The crowd consisted of Palestinians, Arab-Israelis, Jewish leftwingers, and other members of the pro-Palestinian minority of Israeli society.

Aside from my total alienation from community involvement in those few months in Israel and unawareness of the event until the last hour before the start, I was not that fond of joining it, knowing how these sorts of approved happenings operate in “Israeli democracy”. The blunt performativity for its own sake of some of these gatherings helps reaffirm the status quo of the brutal hegemony of the ruling system that will appropriate it for its own political mythology. I do not mean to undermine the fact that it was not just an act of raising the voice, but, in some way, an act of 21^st-century martyrdom, taking the potentially vile circumstances of holding such an explicit stance, knowing how easily the university could expel students and fire faculty for such unpopular opinions in Israel.

One of the last people to squeeze into the protest area was a French couple of exchange students, who were one of the only people I got to become somewhat friends with in Israel. For them, coming to Israel with their pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist aspirations after October 7^th was the perfect timing for their “anarchist actions” in the nationalist majority of Israel. They were one of a few who didn’t bother hiding their identities with masks, due to the temporary nature of their immersion in the political dissent in Israel while pursuing their ultimate task, which was rooted in their innate Parisian middle-class background.

When the planned program for the protest finally began, the soldiers standing at the entrance started to push away people who were around but not entering. They wanted them to either enter the protest area, go behind the fence on one side, or join the anti-protesters on the other side of the road. They pushed me off behind the fence, where I could have been closer to my initial point of observation from the top of the hill. By then, all the possible cracks between the bars were filled with people, some of whom proudly stuck out Israeli flags, which had never been in short supply in the country.

Among that seemingly calmer group that was silently eating the protesters with their piercing gazes, I recognized a familiar face. There was a guy whom I would always see around my house. He had an athletic body, but always a numb facial expression of a quite unintelligent grimace with a forced frown on his forehead and a red, bulbous nose. The familial stranger appeared agitated, walking back and forth, occasionally looking at the center of everyone’s perverse interest. Suddenly, he stopped and, with all his might, screamed, “Am Yisrael Chai!” Then, he took an awkward pause to take a breath and screamed his lungs out two more times, breaking off the last time halfway through. His howl of nationalist pride was unexpected even for all those pathetic flag holders, who thought that they were doing something good by being there.

The rising tension of the protest, only reinforced by the unforgiving sun, prompted me to decide to move a little and try to head away from the overwhelming circumstances of that nationalist hell, the heart of which happened to be across the road. I had to walk by the entrance to the protest without stopping so that the soldiers could perceive me as a passerby. A long artificial path, consisting of barricades to the right, behind which I could see the protesters in the square, and a wooden wall that separated the construction site, which had been there for a long time already. A long “Bring Them Home” banner stretched all the way across the wooden wall, with pieces peeling off due to months of exposure to the sun. Who knows how long that banner would hang there…

On my way through the no man’s land, I grasped a silhouette of a person running fast toward me with an Israeli flag. His short height and chubby figure made him resemble Gimli from The Lord of the Rings, as if he tried to fight the forces of Mordor. As he drew closer, I noticed a few other people with cameras trailing behind him, along with a few military personnel. At some point, he acted like a mad bull at a Spanish encierro, changing his direction off the clear path and hitting the metal barricade with his whole weight. Although he managed to pass through the first level of the barricades, the soldiers from the other side were waiting for him at the next one. Passing by the point of action, I concluded that it was certain he thought he would be the hero of the day, for many people saw his face filmed by the cameras that caught up with him after the collision, along with the other soldiers who, while holding him back, let that triumphal fiasco of the blitzkrieg look even more theatrical.

While reaching the other corner of the square, the horrifying hum of anti-protesters slowly intensified until I began to feel it not just with my ears – my whole body echoed with shivers. I thought that if one of those young students with keffiyehs, by accident, got lost in the labyrinth of the barricades and happened to be in front of the proud über-Zionists – they would absorb every fiber of their enemies’ flesh and spit out the keffiyehs as black and white bones that were not supposed to be eaten.

Luckily, most of the anti-protesters were held behind the barricades. The brave heroes of the patriotic land of Israel were much more densely situated in the prescribed area for their reactionary protest. The jungle of thousands of flags, banners, speakers, and inhabitants was located right in front of the apartment complex where I lived, which I could reach only by walking around the block. Despite the installed boundaries, there were a few exceptional characters who managed to surpass the restraint. One of the last images that haunts me to this day is the one of a bold guy in his late 50s with a beer belly who was among the escapees, waving a “Trump 2024” flag that on the back side had an Israeli Star of David. As the main antagonist of the nerve-wracking silent horror, the patriot was able to give me chills without the excessive audible presence, which might have been lacking only due to the never-ending wall of sonic hate from the anti-protest mass, of whom the ogre and a few of his beast friends were the outliers, trying to have a direct encounter with the enemy forces.

I remember coming back to my place after an hour of seeing all of that too-real tragicomedy under the flaming Middle Eastern sun and dropping into my bed, thinking that an afternoon sleep could cure my migraine. That day, I realized that all those months that I was in Israel, that migraine was there; I just did everything to pretend not to notice it – sleep was my savior. I was also always told that sugar heals all troubles, and recently, I have been following that advice while eating my watermelon, which made my life in Israel a little sweeter.

Matvey Agranovskiy is a writer and a researcher. He works on French and Russian 20th-century thought, with a focus on the problems of finitude and language.

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