At twenty-two, I saw a film about Mahmoud Darwish at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. It opens with Darwish on Mount Nebo in Jordan, looking west toward Israel and Palestine. According to the Bible, this is the mountain from which Moses (Musa in Arabic) saw the Promised Land but did not enter it.
By then Darwish had long been the poet most closely identified with Palestine, a towering figure across the Arab world. In the film he reads to electrified audiences about the homeland he left, about childhood and landscape, about his native village of al-Birwa, destroyed in 1948 and rebuilt in language. I remember his voice and the charge in the crowd. I had never seen people respond to a poet that way. I was a twenty-two-year-old Jewish Israeli sitting in the dark, captivated by how alive the work felt, by its pain and its playfulness. His poetry did not describe a world. It brought one into being.
And yet I had no idea what he was talking about. I was reading his words in Hebrew subtitles, about a place I simply thought of as mine.
I listened as though the story had happened elsewhere, though I grew up in north Tel Aviv and studied at Tel Aviv University, which stands partly on the lands of Sheikh Munis, a Palestinian village whose residents were displaced in 1948. I learned that later. My parents were born in Tel Aviv; theirs came from Damascus and Cairo. No one told me about the Nakba, the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians during the war in which Israel was established. I began looking later, first in Hebrew and then in other languages.
Two years ago, a close friend was sitting in my kitchen in Berlin. His grandparents had come to France from Tunisia and Algeria; he was born in Jerusalem and later moved to Paris. He is, like me, an Arab Jew, from a family rooted in the Arab world. We were talking about what it means to be displaced, what a homeland is, what we inherit. I told him my conscience was clear: my family had arrived in Israel in 1949. They did not cause the Nakba.
He became angry and accused me of washing my hands of it. I was furious. The conversation ended when his father called him urgently to Paris to say goodbye to his dying Tunisian grandmother. But my own family story was too clean as well. I had heard once, almost in passing, that when my family arrived in Israel they lived for a while in a Palestinian house. We never spoke of it again.
Only later did I understand my mistake. I did not need to prove that my family had caused the Nakba. I needed to understand that I had been born into the world it made.
Citizenship and language already carried 1948 inside them. So did the map, the names of villages, and the houses that had disappeared. My innocence was possible because the Nakba had been defined as somebody else’s catastrophe.
The problem is not simply what Israelis know about 1948. Israel needs a new story about itself. The old one has become a trap. It knows how to tell Jewish stories of exile and return, but not Palestinian ones. It can imagine the land as a Jewish home while barely seeing the Palestinians who lost their homes there. And it has narrowed to the point where it can imagine survival almost only through force, borders, separation, and control.
This fall Israelis will go to the polls. The opposition promising to replace the current government has been shaped by years of protest over the courts, and later by the struggle around the hostages and the war. It talks about security and democracy, about October 7 and repairing state institutions. But Palestinians barely appear in the future it asks Israel to imagine. When they do, the language still tends to begin in 1967, with occupation, borders, and separation. The rupture I am concerned with begins earlier, in 1948.
I am writing about 1948 while Palestinians in Gaza are still living through mass death, displacement, and destruction. It is easy, at a moment like this, to say that the more distant past can wait. I believe the reverse: if we do not understand which past has been allowed into the Israeli story and which has been pushed outside it, we cannot understand the limits of what we are able to see in the present.
The state itself understands the power of story. In 2011 Israel amended its Budget Foundations Law so that public funding can be reduced to institutions that finance events marking the establishment of Israel as a day of mourning. There is no need to ban a word; pricing it teaches silence.
Eleven years earlier, in March 2000, Education Minister Yossi Sarid proposed adding poems by Darwish to an optional part of the high-school literature curriculum. The decision triggered no-confidence motions in the Knesset. They failed, but Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared that Israel was not yet ready for Darwish. All this over the prospect that Israeli students might read him.
Politics operates within the limits of what a society can imagine. Literature cannot replace power, law, or policy; it changes the material that political imagination works on. That is what I saw in Darwish without understanding it: he turned homeland, loss, and return from facts into a world one could inhabit.
Which brings me back to Hebrew. It is my mother tongue, the language I write in and cannot stand outside of. It is not innocent either. Hebrew has been used to govern and dispossess. It has silenced, and it has allowed us to remain silent. The Nakba is there in renamed places, in villages erased from maps, in houses called “abandoned,” in memories reduced to a whisper. The landscape is scarred, and words know how to plaster over a scar.
The Nakba has already been written in Hebrew. In 1949 S. Yizhar published Khirbet Khizeh, narrated by an Israeli soldier taking part in the expulsion of a Palestinian village’s residents. Anton Shammas did something different in his 1986 novel Arabesques, published in English in 1988: a Palestinian writer claimed Hebrew from within, not as a guest in the language but as someone entitled to change it and to challenge the idea that it belonged exclusively to Jews. Shammas also translated Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist into Hebrew, a novel that uses satire and grotesque comedy to write about the Nakba and Palestinian life after 1948.
But those cracks did not become a climate. The Nakba has appeared in Hebrew literature as an event, a wound, something to be looked at. What remained rare was literature that simply assumed it, the way it assumes the sea, the army, the language itself. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison showed how what she called the “Africanist presence” shaped white American literature even when Black characters seemed absent. Absence itself organizes what characters see and what they never think to ask. In A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 novella Facing the Forests, an Israeli forest conceals the ruins of a Palestinian village until a fire exposes what the landscape had hidden. The Nakba does not need to enter the Hebrew imagination. It is already at work inside it.
Years before I knew the word Nakba, I was already making stories inside that gravitational field. One summer I worked at a university day camp with four-year-olds and made up stories for them. Once I told them about green people who had to leave their home. I do not remember what happened to them afterward, or where the story came from. At the time I regularly passed the Green House at the edge of the campus, a stone house among the trees that had always been there. I knew its name and never asked where it came from. I did not know it was a remnant of Sheikh Munis; I did not know the village’s name. My green people had to leave a house that did not exist. A short distance away stood a real house, a remnant of a village whose residents had been displaced. The two things did not touch in my mind. In my imagination, perhaps, they already had.
Not long ago, while looking something up in the digital edition of one of my novels, I noticed that other readers had highlighted a passage. In it, a character based on my grandmother recalls that when the family arrived they stayed for a while in a house that had belonged to Arabs, and that she pressed them to move to a new building in north Tel Aviv, where my father would grow up. I had heard the story from her, remembered it, and set it down. The Nakba was in that sentence. I did not see it.
So this is what I want from Hebrew literature, my own included. Not simply more novels “about the Nakba,” but literature in which it turns up in a marriage, an inheritance, a lease. Literature that cannot leave it alone, not a civics lesson. If the Nakba belongs to life, it should not appear only in rituals of mourning.
I am writing this in Berlin, in a Hebrew that left Israel with me. Distance does not give me clearer sight. It keeps the Israeli story from being the only one I hear. Here my Hebrew lives alongside German, English, and Arabic. This matters at a time when Israel is increasingly closing in on itself, imagining Palestinians as a permanent threat that can never be resolved, the Arab world as an eternal enemy, and the outside world as a hostile audience whose gaze can simply be dismissed.
A state may demand loyalty to land. Literature is loyal to story.
Palestinians do not need Hebrew literature to give form to their loss or longing. In Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in 1949 is not left behind as history; it goes on shaping a woman’s movements decades later. Tamer Nafar, the Palestinian rapper from Lyd (Lod in Hebrew) and a founder of the pioneering hip-hop group DAM, has a first book, 3Gs: An Imaginary Memoir, due in English in December 2026. His imagined daughter Shaden returns to Lyd to rescue objects and memories and carry them into a “Palestine in the cloud.” Saint Levant’s 2024 album Deira takes its name from the hotel his father built on the Gaza coast, destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in late 2023. He imagines himself and his father walking into a rebuilt Deira to perform there, in a liberated Palestine. He has described this vision as a kind of science fiction inspired by Afrofuturism. In both works, art moves return into the future tense.
Since I discovered Saint Levant’s songs, I have kept going back to them. They move me, but they also give me pleasure. They make me dance. They carry me toward an Arab world I never lived in and yet partly recognize, from my family’s Damascus and Cairo and from the place where I was born. I was born in the Middle East and taught to think of the Arab world as somewhere outside.
We know something about longing for a lost home. For centuries Jews kept an absent place alive through prayer and poetry, through memory, building in words the hope of return. One of Zionism’s terrible ironies is that Jews returned to the place they had longed for and turned others into people forbidden to return. Palestinians do not need Jewish memory to tell them what they miss. Their longing forces us to confront what we did to galut, bayit, shivah — exile, home, return — when we made them rights reserved for us alone.
For the Israeli imagination, the hardest test of the new story is return. This is not an abstract possibility I am asking literature to invent. Palestinians have been making the claim for nearly eighty years, in international institutions and courts, in politics, and in proposals about property, compensation, citizenship, and return to places transformed beyond recognition. Palestinian refugees themselves have imagined its realization in different forms. What is almost entirely missing from the Israeli imagination is the ability to encounter all this without translating return immediately into one picture: they come back, we disappear.
In Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella Returning to Haifa, a couple returns after 1967 to the home they left in 1948. There they meet the Jewish woman who raised their son, now an Israeli soldier. Two contradictory histories enter the same house, and no one resolves them. Literature can break the monopoly of the single picture. Instead of “they return, therefore we disappear,” it can bring people and lives into the imagination — houses, neighbors, property, languages, children, quarrels. Not to decide what return should look like, but to stop the word from meaning catastrophe before the argument has even begun.
The election this fall will ask who governs Israel. It will not decide what story Israel can tell about itself. No change of government will be enough if we go on living inside the same story about ourselves, the Palestinians, and the land.
At twenty-two I sat in the dark at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque reading Darwish’s words in Hebrew. I thought he was speaking about another place, though it was the place I thought of as mine. Years later, in a Berlin kitchen, I was still trying to prove that this catastrophe belonged to someone else. The place I had called “mine” did not stop being mine. What changed was what belonging to it could mean.
For years I thought the missing word was Nakba. I had not understood that I could write the history down and still fail to see it.
Israel can no longer tell its own story as though the Nakba happened somewhere outside it.
Israel needs different policies, but the old story keeps narrowing what Israel can imagine. Before the country can change course, it will have to change the story it tells about itself.
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