Earlier that day, Israeli Occupation Forces had invaded our village. This isn’t an extraordinary sentence anymore. I wish it were. They invade, people check their phones, messages begin moving through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages, roads empty, shops close, parents call their children, and everyone starts quietly calculating where everyone else is. Where are you? Are you home? Don’t come this way. The “army” is here. Stay where you are. Sometimes they leave quickly. Sometimes they don’t.

That day, I was preparing to leave work. I was sitting on a chair in the supermarket in my own neighborhood, close to home. Close enough that home had stopped being a destination and had become almost a certainty. You know that feeling when you’re almost at your door? Your body has already arrived before you have. You’re no longer really traveling. You’re thinking about taking your shoes off, about food, about sitting down, about your children.

Then there was a soldier. And then there was a rifle pointed at me.

There are moments when time doesn’t stop exactly. It becomes thick. A second stretches itself so far that you somehow manage to fit an entire life inside it. I looked at the rifle, not at him. At the rifle. And what I find strange, looking back, is that I don’t remember making that decision. I didn’t think, Don’t look into his eyes. I didn’t have a little internal debate about whether eye contact was wise. My body simply knew.

Looking him in the eyes could mean something. That was the danger. It could mean courage. It could mean defiance. It could mean challenge or disrespect. It could mean absolutely nothing to me and still mean everything to him. Being in front of an armed-to-the-teeth soldier, I couldn’t afford the luxury of being misunderstood, because misunderstanding in that moment had consequences: my kids orphaned, my wife widowed, my parents bereaved.

There is something horrifying about how grammatically simple those sentences are. My kids orphaned. My wife widowed. My parents bereaved. One bullet could rewrite the vocabulary of my entire family. Father becomes dead father. Wife becomes widow. Parents become bereaved parents. All it takes is one finger, one movement, one second.

So no, I wasn’t going to stare into his eyes and prove something. I wasn’t going to perform courage. I wasn’t going to give him a look that could be interpreted as resistance or pride or masculinity or whatever else a man holding a rifle might decide he sees in another man’s eyes. I had nothing to prove. I had somewhere to return to.

So I made eye contact with the rifle instead. A rifle made to eradicate lives in a split second rather than with a fellow human being.

I keep returning to that. Two human beings on the same street, probably only a few metres apart, and I decided that the safer thing to look at was the machine designed to kill me. Not the man. The machine. Because the rifle, at least, required nothing from me. I didn’t have to worry about offending it. I didn’t have to wonder whether it thought I looked angry. I didn’t have to soften my face for it. I didn’t have to calculate whether fear looked enough like fear. The rifle didn’t have an ego I needed to navigate. It had one purpose, and perhaps that made it easier to understand, ironically.

So I stared into that little black hollow circle. It doesn’t look dramatic when you’re actually there. That’s something movies get wrong. There is no soundtrack, no beautiful slow motion, no profound final speech forming perfectly in your mind. There is just an opening at the end of a piece of metal, small enough that under any other circumstances you wouldn’t give it a second look. And somewhere behind that opening is a mechanism capable of ending everything you’ve ever known about yourself.

Behind me, metaphorically, stood my entire life. My wife, my children, my parents, my home. The stupid arguments. The unfinished work. The things I haven’t written yet. Tomorrow morning. Next month. My children’s birthdays I haven’t seen yet. Conversations I haven’t had. Photographs I haven’t taken. Coffee I haven’t drunk. Apologies I haven’t made. Plans I’ve made under the arrogant assumption that I will be alive to complete them. And in front of me was a hole no larger than a fingertip, capable of cancelling all of it.

That’s what a rifle does to the future. It compresses years into a second.

Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about death as some philosophical inevitability waiting for me somewhere in old age. Death was standing a few metres away holding itself level with my body. I thought about my children, not in some cinematic montage, but more like a fact: They could become orphans. Now. Today. This could be the story they tell someday. Our father was coming home from work. That’s it. That’s how little warning a life sometimes gives you before dividing itself into before and after.

And perhaps the most humiliating part of having a gun pointed at you is that survival requires cooperation. You have to help the person threatening you understand that you are not a threat. You shrink your movements. You discipline your face. You become conscious of your hands, your shoulders, your eyes. You surrender even the possibility of appearing brave, because courage can be misread. Dignity can be misread. Fear itself can probably be misread. So you try to become unreadable. Harmless. Small. Alive. Especially alive.

There are people who imagine courage as looking your oppressor directly in the eyes. Maybe sometimes it is. But I have children. My courage that day was getting home to them.

I don’t know what would have happened if I had looked into the soldier’s eyes. Maybe nothing. Maybe he would have looked back. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared. Maybe the entire calculation existed only inside my frightened mind. But when somebody has a rifle pointed at you, you don’t conduct experiments with possibility. You don’t test the boundaries of another person’s restraint when the cost of being wrong is your life. You don’t get to find out whether your fear was justified afterward, because there may be no afterward.

So I listened to whatever frightened part of my body spoke first: Don’t look at him. And I didn’t. I looked into the barrel.

Eventually, the moment passed. That’s almost funny to write. The moment passed. Such a peaceful little sentence, as though a cloud moved, as though rain stopped, as though the sun came out. The soldier didn’t shoot me. I made it home. I opened the door. And I remained a father. My wife remained a wife. My parents remained parents who had not buried their son.

Nothing happened.

That’s the strange conclusion. Nothing happened. If you were recording my life as data, perhaps that encounter wouldn’t even qualify as an event. No bullet fired. No wound. No ambulance. No death. No headline. Man going home. Man encounters soldier. Soldier points rifle. Man survives. The End.

But something did happen. For a few seconds, I saw how thin the membrane is between my ordinary life and its disappearance. And then I went home and continued living that semi-ordinary life.

That may be one of the strangest things about living under occupation. You can look into the barrel of a rifle and then, not long afterward, be back inside worrying about dinner. Your children need something. Your phone rings. Someone tells a joke. There are dishes. There is work tomorrow. Life rushes back in and fills the space where death was standing five minutes earlier. And you let it. You have to.

I don’t walk around every day consciously thinking, My kids could be orphaned. My wife could be widowed. My parents could be bereaved. I couldn’t live like that. Instead, those thoughts live somewhere underneath everything else. Most of the time they’re quiet. Then soldiers invade the village. Gunfire shot somewhere in the distance. A military vehicle appears. A rifle rises. And suddenly those thoughts climb back to the surface.

Then the danger passes, and you push them back down again because somebody needs tomatoes. Because your son wants ice cream. Because you have work. Because there is coffee to make. Because tomorrow exists, and despite everything, you have to behave as though you expect to see it.

I still think about the fact that I never looked into that soldier’s eyes. Two human beings a few meters apart, and somehow the most human decision available to me was to avoid the human being entirely. Instead, I made eye contact with his rifle. Maybe because, in that moment, the rifle was the only thing between us that wasn’t pretending. I knew exactly what it was capable of.

And it knew nothing about me. It didn’t know I was a father. It didn’t know there were children waiting for me. It didn’t know my wife or my parents. It didn’t know where I had been that morning or what I planned to do the following week. It didn’t know what I had written or what I still wanted to write. It didn’t know anything about the life sitting directly in front of it.

It only knew how easily all of it could be erased. And for those few seconds, so did I.

Most people think The Odyssey is about the journey. About monsters, storms, gods, impossible islands and impossible odds. And sure, all of that is there. But underneath all of it is a much simpler story. It’s about a man trying to go home. Not trying to become king. He already was. Not trying to become rich. Not trying to become famous. Not even trying to find peace. He just wanted to go home.

There’s a scene where Calypso offers Odysseus something no human being has ever really been given. Stay with me, she says. Stay here and you’ll never grow old. Never die. Imagine hearing those words. Imagine someone placing eternity in your hands and telling you all you have to do is stop looking back. No more fear. No more loss. No more wondering what tomorrow might bring. Just stay.

And Odysseus says no.

Not because Ithaca is a paradise. It isn’t. It’s a small, rocky island that has been falling apart while he’s been away. His palace is in chaos. His wife has spent years fighting off men who have already decided he’s dead. His son grew into a man without him. Everything waiting for him is harder than what he’s being offered. Yet he still longs for home.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how irrational that sounds. On paper, Odysseus makes the wrong choice. If you wrote the decision down as a list, nobody would choose Ithaca. Immortality or mortality. Safety or uncertainty. Comfort or struggle. Paradise or a kingdom that might not even welcome you back. It’s absurd. Unless you’ve spent your whole life understanding that home has never been about any of those things.

I don’t think people realize how often Palestinians are asked the same question, just in different words. “Why don’t you just leave?” I’ve heard it from strangers. I’ve heard it from people who genuinely care about me. I’ve even heard it from Palestinians. And honestly, I understand why they ask. Look around. Everyone seems to be out to get us. Radical settlers who want the land without the people on it, an occupation army that decides which roads we’re allowed to drive on, and sometimes, painfully, our own people too.

Read more

I want you to notice that word, workday. Because that’s exactly what it is for them. Somebody woke up that morning, had their coffee, maybe complained about traffic, put on a uniform, and drove to a stranger’s house to give a father 40 minutes before turning his life into rubble. Then, presumably, they went home for dinner. Slept fine. Came back the next day and did something just as ordinary. That’s the part that keeps me up more than the demolition itself. Not that cruelty exists; cruelty has always existed, but that it’s been made so administrative. So routine it doesn’t even register as anything on their end. A form gets filled. A clock gets started. Nobody there is having the worst day of their life except the people losing the house.

This has been happening for decades now, and no matter the circumstances, the situation Palestinians are put in is severely heartbreaking. I keep waiting for it to stop being heartbreaking, for it to just become another fact I know the way I know the boiling point of water. It never does. It just sits there, heavy, every single time.

Take Jerusalem, or other parts of the 1948-occupied Palestinian territories. When a demolition order is issued against a house there, the Israeli occupation forces give the owners two “options.” Either the IOF demolishes it and the family pays the demolition fees themselves, fees they usually can’t afford, or the family demolishes it with their own hands.

Sit with that for a second. A house you worked your entire life to build. You stood over the neck of a plumber or a technician to make sure they did the job right, because it’s your lifetime house and it has to be perfect. You spent weeks picking out tiles, furniture, little accessories nobody else would even notice. You spent days and weeks with interior designers and engineers, placing each detail with care, and love, and worry. And now that it’s finally done, now that you’ve settled in and the smell of new paint has faded into the smell of your own life, you’re handed a hammer and told to take it apart yourself. For what? Why? And a billion other questions that remain unanswered.

But let’s circle back to the past two days.

If you tell your wife you’re taking her out on a date, she probably needs more than 40 minutes just to pick an outfit and get ready. So how exactly are you supposed to contain a lifetime of memories and hard work into 40 minutes? How do you deal with that? What do you take? How do you decide, in a rushing, competing wave of feelings, what stays and what doesn’t? How do you choose what to carry out and what to leave behind forever?

And even if you somehow managed to grab as many objects as physically possible, how do you take the memories with you? The room where your kids slept. The tiles where your kid took their first steps. The first time they recognized themselves in the mirror. The first time on the potty. The first word. The first toy. The first bed. The dining table that held every gathering, every Eid, every Ramadan iftar. The couch that carried you through some of your worst nights, when no one else was around and it just held you anyway.

I tried to imagine this happening to me. I failed miserably, every single time.

Do I take my PC, the one I saved up for and paid way too much money for? My hard drives, with everything on them? My coffee makers, of which I admittedly have plenty? Where do I even start, and how?

What about my favorite coffee maker, the Chemex, the one I got years ago before it was even sold in this country, and had shipped all the way from the US? I keep it in its box, in a closed kitchen cabinet, on the highest shelf, where nobody can touch it, just to keep it safe. Every time I use it, I clean it right away and tuck it back into its snug little box and shut the cabinet. What am I supposed to do with it now? Just yank it out with everything else and pile it on the street until I can find a car to come pick it up, because there’s no way I can pack and think and grieve, all inside a tight window of 40 minutes?

And what about the drawing of my firstborn, the one made by a friend of my brother’s, drawn from inside a prison cell?

Where does that go? What box holds that?

Okay. Let’s say, somehow, against every odd, you did it. You beat the clock. You got everything out, or as much of “everything” as one human body can carry in 40 minutes while their hands are shaking and their brain is trying to do inventory and mourning at the same time. What happens next? Where do you even go?

Let’s say a cousin offers you a room. Or a friend says, come stay with us, we’ll figure it out. Fine. You and your family have a roof for the night. But what about everything you just dragged out onto the street? Where does all of that go?

Does it stay outside, piled up wherever you managed to dump it? Does it sit in the back of a truck, if you were lucky enough to find one on 40 minutes’ notice, parked outside somebody else’s house, waiting for you to figure out your next move while you’re also trying to figure out how to explain to your kids why they’re sleeping somewhere that isn’t their room?

Or does it come inside? Into your cousin’s house, which was not built to hold two households at once? Do you stack your dining table against their dining table? Do your kids’ toys end up in a corner of someone else’s kids’ room, a little island of “ours” inside a house that is entirely “theirs,” no matter how kind they are about it?

The TV. My wife wipes the dust off that thing like it owes her money, and the second the kids’ fingertips leave smudges on the screen, she’s back at it with a cloth before I even notice. Does that TV sit outside now? Does it sit in someone’s garage, wrapped in a bedsheet, waiting for a wall to be mounted on again, in a house that doesn’t exist yet?

What about the mattresses? Do they go on the floor of a relative’s spare room? What about the fridge, still humming, still doing its job, sitting outside somebody’s gate because there’s no kitchen to plug it into?

Do you sell what you can, at whatever price someone will offer you, because you don’t have anywhere to put it and you can’t carry the weight of “keeping everything” while also carrying the weight of everything else? Do you watch your own belongings become a burden, when twenty minutes ago they were just... your life?

And here’s the part nobody talks about. Even if the objects survive, even if the couch makes it and the coffee makers make it and somehow the Chemex makes it too, still wrapped in its box like nothing happened, they survive without a house to belong to. A couch in a garage isn’t a couch anymore. It’s just furniture. The thing that made it a couch is the living room it sat in, the way the afternoon sun landed on it every day at four, the sound of your kids’ feet running past it, all of that got demolished along with the walls. Maybe you can save the object, but never the place. And it turns out the place was doing most of the work all along.

Now think about the kids for a second, because I can’t stop thinking about them. What do you even tell an eight-year-old in minute number twelve of forty? Do you tell them the truth, that men with guns are about to knock our whole world down and we need to grab your toys right now? Do you watch their face try to process a sentence that big while their hands are still holding whatever stuffed animal they slept with the night before? Do you let them pick one toy, just one, because there’s no room and no time for more, and then spend the rest of your life remembering the look on their face when they had to choose between the truck and the teddy bear? Kids don’t understand “temporary.” They understand “my room” and “not my room.” So what happens to an eight-year-old who wakes up in a cousin’s spare room for the fortieth night in a row, still asking when we’re going home, and you don’t have an answer that doesn’t break something in both of you?

And what about the neighbors? Because they’re not exempt from this either. They’re standing there too, in the street, watching, some of them filming on their phones because that’s the only weapon they have left, a camera and a hope that someone somewhere will care. Some of them are quietly doing the math on their own house, on whether their turn is next, on whether the order that just got read out to their neighbor has their address on a future page somewhere in some office they’ve never seen. Grief, when it happens on your street, is never just yours. Everyone standing there absorbs a little piece of it, and everyone standing there quietly wonders if they’re rehearsing their own future in real time.

And then, weeks later, once the news cycle has moved past it, once the rubble has been sitting there long enough that people stop stopping to look at it, what actually happens to that family? Do they find a new place eventually? Do they rebuild, knowing the same order could come again? Do they spend years in someone else’s spare room, becoming permanent houseguests in their own lives, grateful and exhausted in equal measure, watching their kids grow up asking why we don’t have our own room yet? Does the father ever walk past the empty lot where his house used to be? Does he stop? Does he not let himself stop, because stopping means feeling it, and feeling it every single day is not something a person can survive?

I don’t have an ending for this one. That’s the truth of it. There isn’t a neat closing thought, because the people in Jenin don’t get one either. They just get a jeep, a knock, a clock, and then, if they’re “lucky,” a truck, a cousin’s garage, a couch that used to mean something, and a kid in the back seat asking when we’re going home, with nobody in the car able to answer him.

I’ve always compared translation to mathematics, which is funny given the fact that math and I have never actually been friends. But every so often, after staring at an equation way too long, something would click and the whole thing would suddenly make sense. I still remember that little braingasm. That rush of satisfaction over solving something that had been refusing to cooperate five minutes earlier. Translation gives me the exact same hit. It’s a puzzle. An equation, except instead of numbers, you’re figuring out people.

Most people think translation means finding the equivalent word in another language. It isn’t, not if you’re doing it properly. You don’t translate words, you translate meaning, and that difference is bigger than it sounds. I rarely go word for word unless a client specifically insists on it. Otherwise I read a sentence until I understand what it’s actually trying to say, and only then do I write it in English. Sometimes the result looks almost identical to the Arabic. Sometimes it looks nothing like it. But if both versions land the same way for the reader, I’ve done my job. That’s the whole philosophy. I could write another full piece arguing with translators who disagree with me, but I’ll spare myself.

Do this for a report on health taxes or an annual report, and it’s challenging in a clean, contained way. It’s meh. It’s fine. It’s classy, even elegant. You solve the sentence, move to the next one, submit the file, go make dinner.

Do it for a transcript of a Gazan woman describing the genocide, and it’s an entirely different animal. Because you’re not just moving words from one column to another anymore. You’re trying to carry someone else’s gruesome reality across into another language without dropping any of it along the way.

Here’s the thing about scrolling past a post on Instagram or X about Gaza. You spend thirty seconds with it. Maybe a full minute if it’s especially hard to look away from. You read the caption, look at the photo, maybe you comment, maybe you send it to a friend, maybe you close the app because it’s too much. I’m not judging anyone for that, I do it too. There’s only so much horror a brain can sit with before it starts protecting itself. Whatever that interaction looks like for you, it’s mild. It doesn’t ask much of you.

Translation doesn’t let you off that easy. You can’t skim a paragraph because you’re in a rush. You can’t let your eyes glaze over because you’re uncomfortable. You don’t get to think “yeah, I get the idea” and move on. Every sentence demands your full attention, because you can’t write it in another language until you’ve actually understood what it means in this one. And understanding, in this context, is not a comfortable thing to do to yourself.

For the past two years or so, I’ve done translation work with Female Chimeras. Founded in 2018 by the Palestinian journalist and storyteller Tala al-Sharif, it’s a project of short films and hand-drawn, line-animated testimonies that tries to show Palestinian women as more than what happens to them. Not statistics, not symbols, just full lives. Some of the testimonies are animated specifically because the woman telling her story doesn’t want her face or her name shown, and the animation lets her keep both her privacy and her voice. Since the genocide against Gaza, the project has understandably pivoted hard toward documenting exactly that. They interview women, mostly in Gaza and occasionally in the West Bank, transcribe those conversations, and send them to me so the stories can reach readers beyond Arabic.
Every now and then one of those transcripts lands in my inbox. I open the document, make myself a coffee like it’s just another workday, and start reading. It never is just another workday.

A woman doesn’t tell you her leg was amputated. She walks you through waking up and realizing it was gone. Who was standing next to her. What she thought had happened. The first thing she tried to do with a leg that wasn’t there anymore.

Another woman waited fifteen years to get pregnant. Her only child. She describes, in detail, watching an Israeli tank drive over her son’s small body. The sound. The blood. Bones cracking under something that heavy. She doesn’t summarize it for you. She was there, and now you are too, whether you wanted to be or not.

A wife describes her husband getting sniped in the neck from a distance while he was sitting at the dinner table. I could keep listing these and we’d be here all day, so I won’t, but you get the idea.

This is why I laugh a little when people tell me AI is going to replace translators. It’ll replace plenty of translation. Restaurant menus? Sure. Product descriptions? Most likely. Annual reports are getting scarily good, I’ll admit it. But testimony is a different beast.

Not because a machine can’t understand language, it’s getting good at that too. It’s because testimony demands judgment, not just fluency. It asks you to know when an awkward sentence should stay awkward, because grief is awkward and smoothing it out is a kind of lie. It asks you to notice when repetition isn’t bad writing, it’s someone trying to convince themselves that what they’re describing actually happened to them.

Sometimes the Arabic is fragmented because the woman speaking couldn’t finish the thought. Do I clean that up in English, or leave the fracture exactly where she left it? Sometimes someone laughs in the middle of describing something horrific. Do I explain that laugh, or just let it sit there and let the reader feel as confused by it as I did? None of these decisions show up on the final page. If I did my job right, you won’t notice a single one of them. You’ll just read the story as if it had always existed in English.

That’s the strange part of this work. The better you get at it, the more invisible you become. I’m not writing this for applause, God knows there are professions far more deserving of it than mine. I’m writing it because I wanted someone to know that before some of these stories reach you, somebody sat with them, sentence by sentence, alone, carrying another person’s worst memory into a language its owner may never even read.

It’s heavy work. It’s necessary work. And some days, after I hit send on the file and lean back in my chair, I realize I’ve been holding my breath in front of the computer for the last three hours.

1. Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat

Barakat starts this autobiography with herself as a teenager, stopped at a checkpoint on her way to check a PO box she keeps to write to pen pals scattered around the world, and from there it folds back into a childhood she’s spent years trying not to remember. Its follow-up, Balcony on the Moon, picks up the thread and carries it into her teenage years.

I think about this book every time I sit down to write about my own childhood. There’s a version of every Palestinian’s story that gets told in dates and casualty numbers, and then there’s the version Barakat writes, which is a girl falling in love with a single letter of the alphabet in the middle of everything falling apart around her. That’s the part that undoes me. Not the war, the girl. I keep coming back to the idea that language can be the one thing occupation can’t touch, that a child can lose her home and her shoe and still find something whole in a word. I’ve tried to write my own childhood memories with that same instinct, to let the small, specific thing carry the weight instead of the big historical one, and every time I do it, I think of her.

2. Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

This novel follows one family across generations, starting from a single afternoon in 1948 that reroutes everything that comes after it, a moment so sudden and so total that the rest of the book is really just its aftershocks, playing out in different countries, different decades, different versions of the same grief.

This is the book I’d hand to someone who thinks Palestine started in the news cycle they happened to catch. It didn’t. Abulhawa writes generational memory the way it actually moves through a family, not as a lecture but as inheritance, showing up in a gesture, a fear, a way of loving someone too tightly because you’re scared of losing them too. I recognize that in my own family. I recognize it in how my mother worries, in how land gets talked about at our dinner table like it’s a person we’re still waiting to hear from. Fiction gets to do something nonfiction can’t always manage: it can compress four generations of loss into a shape you can actually hold, and I think that’s the book’s real value, not as history, but as a kind of mirror.

3. Dreams of Freedom by Aisha Odeh,

This is the hardest book on this list. In it, Aisha Odeh recounts her arrest by Israeli Occupation Forces, the interrogation that followed, the torture she endured, the rape she was subjected to, and the years of imprisonment that came after.

I couldn’t put together a reading list about Palestine and leave this one out. Too often, Palestine reaches international audiences through stories that are easier to digest, while the ones that expose the occupation at its most brutal remain at the margins. Odeh spent more than three decades before she was able to write this memoir. That, to me, says everything about trauma: surviving it is one thing; finding the language to revisit it is another. This is not an easy read, nor should it be. It is painful, deeply personal, and, because it is, it becomes one of the most powerful testimonies to what generations of Palestinian political prisoners have endured under Israeli imprisonment.

4. Does the Land Remember Me? by Aziz Shihab

This book follows a man returning to his village after decades away in America, called back by a dying mother, to find a small piece of land he still owns and a life that moved on without him in ways both funny and unbearable.

Of everything on this list, this is the one that scares me the most, in a quiet way, because it’s about the specific grief of the person who left. Not the grief of staying under occupation, which gets written about often, but the grief of building a whole life somewhere else and then coming back to find the land has kept moving without you, has its own opinions about whether you still belong to it. I think about this every time I think about Juthoor, about building something rooted in a place I still live in, but also about all the Palestinians I know who carry the land with them from a distance, who ask the same question Shihab asks in his title. Does it remember us? I don’t have an answer. I don’t think he does either, and I trust the book more because of that.

5. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry

This book is based on real diaries and emails written over more than twenty years, and somehow manages to be genuinely funny about a period of her life that included a military siege, a curfew, and an elderly mother-in-law who will not stop worrying about her wardrobe while soldiers close in on the block.

This is the one I’d recommend first to anyone who’s never read anything about Palestine, because it doesn’t ask you to already carry the history to feel it. What I love about it is the permission it gives itself to be funny. There’s an instinct, especially in how Palestinians are expected to write about themselves, to only be allowed grief, to perform suffering in a register other people find respectable. Amiry refuses that. She lets the absurd sit right next to the unbearable, a dog with better papers than its owner, an old woman fussing over a dress while an army approaches, and somehow that honesty about the ridiculous parts of survival makes the whole thing hit harder, not softer. I think humor might be one of the most underrated forms of resilience there is.

Six books, six very different doors into the same house. If you only read one, let it be whichever one finds you first. There isn’t a correct place to begin. Some will introduce you to Palestine through memory, others through history, imprisonment, exile, family, or the quiet routines of everyday life. Together, they remind us that Palestine cannot be understood through headlines alone. It lives in ordinary conversations, in kitchens and prison cells, in interrupted childhoods, in the stories people carry long after they’ve left or long after they’ve been forced to stay. I hope at least one of these books stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page. They certainly stayed with me.

That’s a longer introduction than I’d anticipated, so let’s get right into it. At the time, my father was working near Salfit; he and his friends had rented an apartment after the Intifada broke out because going back and forth was not only dangerous but nearly impossible. I still remember him telling us stories about how they would cross the mountains at night, moving from one city to the next on foot. They had no choice. That meant one thing: if they made it to their apartment alive, it would take them months to return.

We stayed home for a while, and my father would come for a couple of days every three months or so. We never really understood what was happening; we were told there were soldiers everywhere, and that’s all we needed to know. Being so young, my siblings and I just invented games out of nothing. We talked until we were all beaten by sleep. We fought over our favorite colors; in the end, mine was green, my younger brother took blue, and my younger sister took yellow. Our youngest sister would have been an infant back then.

One night, the rain was so heavy it felt like it was fighting for its very life. The three of us stood on the indoor balcony with the largest window in the house, overlooking a giant lemon tree in our front yard. In a split second, the sky turned orange in a burst of sound that sent us trembling to the ground; it might have been lightning for all I know. Then we heard something hit our concrete front yard and ricochet in different directions. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t think much of it at the time. All I remember is thinking about how I could take care of my siblings and how I could make my mother less worried.

My mother told us to go to bed and said we’d investigate in the morning. She told us everything was going to be fine, put us to bed, and then went outside to see what had happened. I followed her; she wasn’t happy about it, but she didn’t send me back either. She must’ve been terrified. We couldn’t see much in the rain and dark, but we made sure there wasn’t a massive rocket head sitting in our front yard. How I slept that night is still beyond me.

Read more

I started writing this piece with one simple yet astounding thought, or question if you will. Compared to the huge events, do the minor ones lose effect? In the realm of death, starvation, and full-on genocide, does discomfort, fear, or pain cease to exist?

To satisfy this philosophical dilemma, I’ll share an event with you in search of a conclusion, if there could be one at all. Who knows?

A few weeks ago, I decided to take my 8-year-old son, Aws, on a small hike around our village, to get him away from the screen or from the walled-up prison we call our house. Kids need to see the outer world, but where do you go if the Israeli Occupation Forces suddenly decide to invade the place? The stakes are high almost every day, so to keep the kids safe, most of their time is spent indoors.

We put on our hiking boots, and I grabbed my hiking stick, which he’d admired on the hike. We walked. We talked. Well, mostly he did, with such excitement. I listened.

Minutes later, we arrived at a spot I’ve known by heart since I was a kid, as we would go there as kids, with friends, with family, and sometimes alone. This spot overlooked the village, it showed half the city of Nablus, and it showed beautiful mountains opposite our village. Magical!

Aws was enjoying himself, just letting himself be submerged, almost subdued by nature. He was walking on soil, not asphalt, his shoes were dealing with grass, not gum in the school yard, his eyes gazing at every detail he saw, how far we were from home, how the village looked, how the sun was rising. Fields up front, red roses, yellow ones, purple ones. He touched them, smelled them, and even picked a few.

While he was playing around, I was scanning the area in fear in a way I’ve never done before. A thousand questions crossed my mind. Will the IOF invade the village now? If they did, how do we get home? Do I have my ID with me? Will they understand English? Because the only phrase I knew in Hebrew was how to say “I don’t speak Hebrew, do you speak English”? What if the Zionist colonizers, so-called settlers, attacked us? They’re far more radical. Will we be beaten up? Can I protect my son? What if they had guns? So many other questions popped into my head, and I tried not to entertain them, not to let fear get the best of me. I failed miserably.

Aws saved me in that moment. I don’t think he knew what I was thinking, but he probably could tell I was in a state of uneasiness. He started firing questions at me: “What’s this, what’s that, why is this, and why is that?” Answering him with gratitude, I found myself not thinking much about worst-case scenarios.

Half an hour later, my instinct urged me to decide to go back home, but when I saw how happy Aws was, I had to come up with a solution that could satisfy both conflicts, keeping my son safe while also letting him enjoy nature. I decided to go home, not following the regular shortcut road we came from, but around the village. That way, we’d at least still be moving, and he could enjoy the walk, the views, the random cars, and all that nature could visually provide. We all know kids are simple and can enjoy the littlest of things, and Aws was not different. He was ecstatic that I let him walk with the hiking stick.

On our way back, he saw a fish market and asked if we could buy some. I obliged; my friend owned the store. We sat down with him, and he started explaining fish to Aws. He was happy he was talking to one of his father’s friends. He asked me, “When did you become friends? Was it at school?” When I affirmed his take, he told me that he was happy and that he would make friends at school. He must’ve thought we were from different worlds, that the way he does things is different from how his father did when he was his age, but that probably consoled him.

A few minutes after leaving the fish place, we started hearing the ice-cream truck melody known to mankind anywhere in the world. Aws said, “I would love some ice cream, but I know it might make me sick or hurt my teeth.” I told him it was fine as long as he brushed his teeth and ate it slowly. I think this might have been the happiest day for him. And for me too. I couldn’t believe how grown he is, and it felt like I was walking with a friend. He was my friend. My companion.

We got home. My phone connected to Wi-Fi. Everything shifted. The happiness pulsing inside me turned into regret and suffocating fear. When I grabbed my phone, I saw that the IOF had invaded the city about an hour ago. That would’ve been when we were at the fish place. They’d shot a few people and killed a young man. They were at best 300 meters away from us. How did I not listen carefully? Was it the loud fridges at the fish place? Did my senses fail me? How did I not hear shots fired?

I stopped myself there. When I realized that we had made it home safely, none of that mattered. That’s what I convinced myself of. I made a cup of coffee, went up on the roof, lit a cigarette to blow off some steam and clear my head. I wish I hadn’t, though, because the minute I stepped on the roof, I could see the spot we were at earlier, and it was filled with colonizers, police cars, and IOF military jeeps. I opened my phone to check the WhatsApp group for our village, where news is exchanged.

It appears that two Palestinians from our village were at that same spot we were at, maybe 15 minutes after we had left, when the colonizers attacked them. One was able to escape, but the other was kidnapped. It took the IOF a few days to get a hold of him, do some background checks, and release him.

To think that this happened minutes after we left scared every bone in my body. It could’ve been us who got shot, it could’ve been us who got attacked, it could’ve been us who got kidnapped. But we weren’t, and for that I’m beyond grateful. While I stopped this from cornering me on a daily basis, it still gets to me. Every once in a while, I find myself drowning in “what ifs.” What makes it harder is that I could see that spot from the roof, the balcony, the living room, and the bedroom. It looks me in the face wherever I’m looking. The place is still there, we just can’t reach it anymore, and there’s a particular kind of grief in being separated from a place so close you can still see.

What makes it worse is that Aws asked me where I got the hiking stick. I told him it was from his grandfather, my father-in-law, who’s a tour guide. That same week, Aws went to his grandfather’s house with his mother and told him about our adventure, minus the fear, of course, and asked if he could have one too. And his grandfather gave him one of his own collection. His own hiking stick.

Aws waits impatiently for the next hike. He imagines where we’ll go, what we’ll see, what we’ll find. He doesn’t know yet that we can’t go back to that spot. He doesn’t know that the place where his grandfather’s tradition was supposed to continue, where three generations were supposed to walk together, has been taken from us. And I don’t know how to tell him.

I keep going back to the question I started with. Compared to the huge events, do the minor ones lose effect? I still don’t know.

A part of me feels guilty for even writing about this. People are starving. Parents are burying their children. Entire families are erased. What place does my fear on a hike have among all of that? And yet, it happened. I felt it. It was real. Maybe that’s the answer. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe human beings were never meant to measure pain against pain. Maybe fear refuses comparison. Maybe grief doesn’t care that someone else is grieving more. I don’t know.

I only know that every time I look out from my roof, I still see that hill. I still imagine Aws running ahead of me with my hiking stick in his hand. And, despite everything that has happened since, a part of me is still standing there, wondering how close we came to becoming someone else’s news.

How a camera, a homeland on the news, and the need to be seen beyond headlines became Juthoor.

Following my father’s path, a full-time carpenter and a photographer in his free time, I picked up a camera at sixteen, almost fifteen years ago. I carried it everywhere. I photographed people and places without thinking much about what I was capturing.

Over the years, without me planning it, the photos started taking their own shape. They got better and were worthy of sharing. So that’s what I did and started posting them online for friends and family to see.

Deep down, I always felt these photos carried more than the colors that made them up. They were beautiful, I think, and worthy of being hung on a wall or printed on a notebook. I had also been a storyteller without realizing it, until I did. I always wanted to tell the stories behind each photo.

When the news stopped showing what I knew

During the genocide against my people, my homeland, the place I lived in and photographed for years, started showing up on the news. Not the way I had seen it through my lens, but in blood and massive destruction. That coverage is real, and it needs to be seen. But it isn’t the whole place. I wanted people to see the place I call home for its beauty, too, through my own eyes.

That’s when Juthoor started. I chose the name because it resonates with Palestinians everywhere.

How Juthoor actually started

It began with a small digital camera, then later a DSLR. I photographed landscapes, markets, ruins, and the quiet moments in between. At the time, it did not feel like anything beyond habit, but looking back, it was already becoming a way of seeing.

Those photos weren’t meant to stay on a screen or be archived on a hard drive in my drawer. I wanted people to hold them, so postcards came first. Small enough to carry, with a story written on the back, so each one held a voice and not just an image.

From postcards to a visual archive

From there, it grew on its own. Postcards led to wall art and canvas prints, then stationery, then collections built around place, around tatreez, around the cities we come from. It wasn’t a pivot. It was the same root growing more branches. Every piece still follows the same rule: image first, story always, meaning underneath all of it.

I started Juthoor because some things felt too fragile to lose without a fight. Because distance shouldn’t mean losing a sense of belonging. If Juthoor can sit on someone’s wall or desk, then Palestine travels with them, even if they’re far from it.

It’s less about selling art and more about turning memory into something you can actually hold.

What Juthoor is today

Today Juthoor sits somewhere between photography and storytelling, between art and documentation, between a memory that’s mine and an identity a lot of people share. The tone hasn’t moved: raw, emotional, grounded in real places.

This Substack is where I’ll keep writing the parts that don’t fit on a product page, the research behind a symbol, the small wins and the failures, the bigger questions about building a Palestinian heritage brand in a moment like this one. If that sounds like something you want to follow, I’m glad you’re here.

Juthoor