I’m standing in line to buy a radio. I already bought flashlights, batteries, a generator, and whatever else my wife wrote on our “war shopping list.” But if Israel goes to war with Iran, and the internet gets cut off, then I must have a radio to stay connected with the outside world.
The line in the store is long and somber. Everyone wears their fear and anxiety on their faces. We look like extras in one of those apocalyptic movies about the end of the world.
“Israel is fighting for its very existence — otherwise there will be a new Holocaust.” This is the sentiment I hear in the conversations taking place around me in the line. If there is one thing my therapist taught me, it is to try to understand people’s fear without judgment. But their existential dread belies the fact that Israel maintains one of the strongest militaries in the world. And whereas on the eve of the Holocaust, the United States turned away the MS St. Louis, full of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, today the United States arms Israel to the teeth.
In my gut, I feel a different fear from those around me. Maybe I’m too cynical, maybe I’m in denial, or maybe I just belong to the generation that thinks major regional wars belong only in history textbooks. But my fear is something else, which the Jewish Israelis standing in line cannot understand: not war so much as the calm that follows; not the roar of the fighter planes, but the silence they leave in their wake; not Iran, Hezbollah, or the two combined, but what Israel will be like on the “day after.”
After the current genocide ends — if it ever ends — we Palestinian citizens of Israel will be living in a society full of young people who spent the past year fighting in Gaza, where there are no restrictions or regulations on what they can do to Palestinians. We are to live beside the people who sexually abused Palestinian prisoners in the notorious Sde Teiman prison without punishment; beside the right-wing extremists who called them heroes and rallied to their defense; and beside the cowardly “leftists” who simply prefer that they don’t do such things “while the Hague is watching.”
We will be forced to live alongside hundreds of thousands of newly armed civilians, with M-16s slung over their shoulders and pistols tucked into their waistbands thanks to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s expansion of gun licenses. History tells us they won’t hesitate to open fire on anyone who vaguely “arouses their suspicion” — certainly Palestinians, but also Ethiopians, asylum seekers, and Mizrahim.
That was already the situation long before October 7, when Israeli settlers shot dead my neighbor Musa Hassuna, a 31-year-old father of two, during the events of May 2021 in Lod/Lydd. Those responsible were never even investigated, despite the fact that the killers of Yigal Yehoshua, a 56-year-old Jewish-Israeli murdered by Palestinians that same day, were charged with terrorism. So we will continue to live in a society where the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been revised to “Thou shalt not kill Jews.”
And forget the Palestinians (as usual): the men who are currently slaughtering Gazans for sport will surely bring that violence back home, abusing women and children, and fighting in bars or over parking spots.
One night back in May 2021, I got a text message from the authorities informing me: “There is a curfew in the city, stay home.” I was out driving to the shop to pick up the items on my wife’s Armageddon shopping list. On the way, I came across an armed Jewish settler, so I put on my Yankees cap and approached him with my best New York accent (thank you, hip-hop, for that gift).
“What’s up man – I heard there’s a curfew,” I said to him. “Nah man, it’s not for us, we’re safe,” he responded, failing to see through my disguise.
I drove home and just minutes later, dozens of armed settlers flooded my neighborhood, screaming “Death to Arabs.” If they approached our home, I wouldn’t be able to defend myself, my wife and two children: the only weapons I own are the pen, paper, and microphone.
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I called the police — the same police funded by my taxes, and who I could see from my window were protecting the setters calling for my death — not to ask for help, but to document the call. After I explained that there were armed men roaming around the city and violating the curfew, all while under police protection, they hung up on me, as if to say “Deal with it yourself.”
Nowadays, I need my therapist to help guide me through these dark times, and to advise me how to handle my fears without invalidating the fears of the people who are standing in line with me. But even though we are together in fear, we are not in the same boat.
“The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. The girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their hero father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.” — Mahmoud Darwish