feature image photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images
In January 2024, I woke every morning as I had for the previous two months with only one priority: to scroll. For hours, I sat in bed or on the couch or in a café or on the subway and scrolled, hoping to zoom past good news on what was happening in Gaza and greater Palestine. It didn’t matter if I was sitting at a dinner table with loved ones, either. My attention was rarely on them; it was always on my phone and the never-ending stream of terrible news. Every night, I would fall asleep to the same prayer: Please let there be a ceasefire in Palestine tomorrow. Please, please protect every person in Gaza. Please let them live in health and safety and bring the Palestinian people justice. It was the kind of obsessive prayer I used to murmur to myself as a child: Please keep my family safe, specifically my mom and dad and also my two brothers — my older and younger — and my big sister, and my cousins, all of my cousins — my first, second, and third cousins — and my grandparents, all four of them. I was so nervous that if I did not name the people I was praying for, God would forget them, or worse, do something to hurt them.
And so, in the days and weeks following Israel’s relentless genocidal campaign, I prayed with specificity for a ceasefire, for justice, for safety, health, and protection for all the Palestinian people living through this latest bombardment.
In the slim moment between my alarm going off and me already beginning to rouse for the morning, right before I grabbed my phone to resume my scrolling, I would take a deep breath and continue the prayer I had fallen asleep to. If I didn’t yet see the news, the possibility that everything changed overnight could exist. My prayers might have worked and a gap of hopeful, desperate, reality would bloom. As my magical thinking took hold, I felt what I believed it would feel like to receive the news that a true and lasting ceasefire was in place. It was a version of elation. It was a version of joy. Mostly, it was some kind of relief that the careless murdering of children, healthcare workers, volunteers, parents, teenagers, (I could go on, you see — who have I not named? Too many.) would end and a version of justice would be served.
Of course, for well over a year, this half-waking dream never came true. During the “pause” in November 2023 which happened to coincide with America’s Thanksgiving, a glimmer of relief came as I watched eloquent Palestinian children vlog about waking up without the hum of Israeli surveillance overhead: “There are no sounds of planes. Can you guys hear? It’s a truce…but this truce is temporary, only four days…I swear life is beautiful like this, without the sounds of drones. I got so happy, I swear I got so happy.”
The moment the truce ended, the thrum of those drones and warplanes and blasts continued and for months I thought about this little boy thanking God for a four-day moment of peace and I wondered where he was and if he was still, somehow, finding moments to smile.
A year later, after establishing some boundaries with my scrolling habits, I received a handful of text messages from friends checking in to see how I was feeling with the latest news that Israel had finally agreed to a ceasefire.
“This is a loaded question” friends would begin, “but I hope you feel relief.”
I didn’t respond to these messages for a day or two, mainly because I didn’t know what I was feeling and I felt ashamed for this lack of knowing. I still do. It had been 467 days. 467 days of witnessing children carry the limbs of their loved ones. 467 days of watching “up-and-coming” Palestinian chefs teach us how they feed the hundreds of starving refugees with only a few cans of food or how they manage to clean water from the very mud on which they have been sleeping. 467 days of watching healthcare workers plead with the West that they were running out of time, out of human capacity, out of hope.
On the day the ceasefire was announced, I celebrated my Lebanese friend’s 34th birthday. In a room full of primarily Arabs in the diaspora with families hailing from Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, we sat cross-legged on the floor and the couch enjoying takeout Thai food and each other’s company. Everyone was in good spirits. We spoke about Syria’s liberation and Lebanon’s induction of a new President, but the topic of Gaza and the ceasefire seemed tactfully avoided.
Toward the end of the night, when conversation had trickled off, I voiced what we had carefully edged around: “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel about this ceasefire. What’s going on?”
“We just don’t know if it will stick. Or what happens next,” one of them said. That was all that was said. It was all that really could be said. And the simplicity of this fact scared me.
As Arabs in the diaspora growing up in the States, especially after 9/11, we’ve become far too familiar with watching our homelands face one atrocious political hardship after the other. I know merely watching is nothing compared to living through these upheavals. I know. I know. I know. And yet, I don’t know.
What I know for certain is that no one feels comfortable with genuine optimism. Not right now, not after 467 days, and especially not after watching Israel continue to violate ceasefire agreements in both Palestine and Lebanon time and time again. While Palestinian allies may find relief in the idea of this ceasefire, unfortunately, I think we know better.
Over 560,000 Palestinians have returned to northern occupied Gaza since the announcement of the ceasefire and, yet, on February 3, authorities in Gaza claimed Israel has been stalling entry of certain aid. 60,000 caravans and 20,000 temporary tents were meant to be brought in per the ceasefire deal — how pathetic that after murdering civilians and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals Israel was meant to assist their victims with tents in replacement of proper facilities, but that’s beside the point.
All the while, Israel has continued their “offensive” efforts across the northern occupied West Bank where thousands of Palestinian families outside of Gaza have now been displaced from their homes. Mohammad Hureini, an activist in the West Bank, said “Israeli settlers launched a violent attack on the village of Susya in my community Masafer Yatta, vandalizing property, destroying vehicles and water tanks. Daily life in the West Bank has become living hell under these escalating assaults.” Within only five weeks of this calendar year, Israel has killed 70 Palestinians in the West Bank.
In a press conference on February 4, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump announced a plan for the United States to take over occupied Gaza. Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave Gaza, he said. When I watched the press conference my first reaction was to laugh at the audacity and clarity of the new President’s vision — this is ethnic cleansing.
But is this a ceasefire? No. It’s the illusion before the next wave of horror.
assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu ✊🏼