Soon after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, my father sent me a poem he wrote while in Gaza more than two decades ago. It could easily have been written today.
I arrived in Jerusalem at the beginning of 2002, not long after the Second Intifada began. We moved there after my dad secured a job at an international school in the city and ended up living there for nearly seven years. Soon after we arrived, I started photographing protests and rallies across Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, against the building of the Israeli separation wall and visits by President George W. Bush, marking Yasser Arafat’s death and opposing the constant reduction of the area of land under Palestinian control. I photographed protesters standing shoulder to shoulder at a rally in Ramallah on Nakba Day, which commemorates the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland during the founding of Israel in 1948. During one of the protests, at the Qalandia checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers fired rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas into a group of teenage boys (and us). The soldiers assured a news correspondent nearby that they had “no intention to harm the boys.” Only a few hours after they gave these assurances, they shot and killed a 14-year-old boy. Later, I found out that he was not the only one killed by soldiers that afternoon.
My dad’s poem from that time began:
The night is stacked in solid blocks
Black on black.
And over the cowering apartments,
Where children curl into their mother’s breasts
And warm bodies press one on another,
Orange flares spider-scribble in the sky
The unsteady marks of infants learning to write,
While grown men lie awake
With eyes as wide as planets
The 10th-century geographer al-Maqdisi once described Jerusalem as a golden basin filled with scorpions. This description of the heavily disputed “holiest of holy cities,” important to so many, has always stayed with me. Now, not for the first time, the city is shaking with hatred and fear.
I was born to an Afghan father and a Pakistani mother. Both were killed in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and I was adopted by a British family who worked first as missionaries and later teachers around the world.
Memories of my teenage years in Israel have become intensely magnified over recent months. I remember my first trip out after arriving in Jerusalem, heading to Eilat in the south of the country, at the tip of the Red Sea. I rolled down the window, and a sharp hot wind from the Sinai flooded across my face, dust whipping against my cheeks as I looked out at the distinctive blue-colored mountains of what many call the Holy Land.
The land shone brighter than the skies above. If I were religious, I would say it felt as if God were bursting out of the clouds. But this was land that was never holy to me.
Even so, it was impossible as a teenager not to fall victim to the country’s complicated divides and deeply religious underbelly. My parents also succumbed. Years after we left the country, I asked my mum why she and my dad, both former Christians, lost their religion in Israel. She never gave an answer, but I already knew; as al-Maqdisi had said, it was a city full of religious animosity, and God was lost in the politics.
I enrolled in an international school next to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood called Mea Shearim. People from dozens of nationalities attended the school; the teachers were a bunch of eccentrics from a mix of backgrounds and so were their students. Most had come with their parents, who were often evangelical Christians or, sometimes, messianic Jews — a sect of people who call themselves Jewish but believe Jesus is divine. Many of my peers were born and raised in Israel.
The Israelis who went to the school were not “typical” Israelis. Nor were the Palestinians. Their parents had chosen a school that was mixed. The school was supposed to be a community that embraced coexistence for Muslims, Christians and Jews. And in some ways I think it did, particularly for younger kids not yet hardened by the conflict. It was a shared space and functioned as such. But beneath the surface, it was impossible to ignore the complexities that the country was facing and the hurt that came with that.
My friends were mostly Palestinian, and we were a tight group. We went exploring all over the city, skipping class to hang out in the smoking area in a derelict building opposite the school where “Zion” was graffitied on the wall. Sometimes we lazed under the sunset smoking a joint atop the Mount of Olives. Those were “golden years,” in a way, though it’s hard to look back and simply enjoy the memories, because the years that followed would hurt us all.
A new cycle of violence was born during the Second Intifada, and thousands of civilians were killed — mainly Palestinians and many Israelis. Frustration that years of negotiation had failed to deliver a Palestinian state was intensified by the collapse of the Camp David summit in mid-2000. Two months later, against the backdrop of the failed peace process, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa compound, a Muslim holy site, sparking protests, riots and a surge in suicide attacks carried out by Palestinian assailants targeting mainly Israeli citizens.
In May of the following year, Israel used warplanes for the first time against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. A year later, it began its massive military assault on the West Bank. Then came the construction of the separation wall. And so it went, on and on.
My friends from that time went on to succeed at anything they put their hands to. They became filmmakers, architects, authors, professors, lawyers and journalists. Their accomplishments took them far from their homeland. Many of their parents had sacrificed a lot to send their kids to a school that made them internationally competitive and that would open doors for them to leave the country and conflict behind.
My memories of those years are a mash-up. I recall hanging out for hours in shisha bars, where we downed Smirnoff Ice while drunk Israeli soldiers sat opposite, guns slung over their shoulders. These are mixed with moments that happened in a split second — like when a suicide bomber’s head landed in the kindergarten of the school next to ours (I didn’t see it) or when the leg of a bomber landed on the windshield of a car in front of us. My dad told me not to look. I did anyway.
I remember when the Number 14 bus was blown up outside our school. My best friend at the time would have been on the bus had I not invited her over for banana muffins. It was when a bomb exploded at a market 10 minutes away that my mum and dad decided to not go to the market together anymore so that if something were to happen to one of my parents, the other would still be around to look after the family.
When the Iraq war broke out in 2003, most of my classmates left Israel. There was the perceived threat of an attack from Iraq, and the handful of us that remained carried gas masks with us everywhere we went, and kept our blood type marked on the box. We learned how to administer our own adrenaline shots and went through daily drills to the sealed bomb shelters, training to respond to a biological and chemical weapons attack. And just as I had done in earlier years, at any chance I got I would go and photograph the protests against the war.
In the background of it all, ordinary Palestinians, like my friends, were growing up caught in the conflict.
I remember going to the house of a Palestinian friend in Bethlehem. It had been badly damaged a few days earlier, caught in the crossfire between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants from the refugee camp located behind my friend’s house. The roof of their family furniture business was riddled with bullet holes. Months later, my friend’s family lost their home and land, including an olive grove that had been in the family for decades. The state of Israel had taken it all in one afternoon.
The complexities of the conflict affected many Palestinian students. One lost her brother, a graduate of our school, when a group of Palestinian assailants mistook him for a Jewish Israeli while he was out jogging in a Jewish neighborhood and fatally shot him. Rocket fire from an Israeli Apache helicopter three times hit the home of another student south of Jerusalem while he hid in the basement. He was 12 and playing computer games when suddenly everything went black. After the attack, Israeli soldiers took over his home and occupied it.
He had epilepsy and would often have seizures, but his mother couldn’t pick him up from school because her Palestinian Authority ID card did not allow her entry into Jerusalem. During the Second Intifada, Israel prevented Palestinian Authority ID card holders living in the West Bank from entering Jerusalem without special permits, which were nearly impossible to obtain.
On weekends, I would sometimes go to the home of my best friend for sleepovers. She is Palestinian and lived in a town in the West Bank. When we reconnected last year, she asked that I not name her, so I’m giving her the name of Dina.
Her home was an ornate old mansion on the fringe of the city. It was originally her grandmother’s house but became a family complex after a floor was added for her aunt, and then for my friend’s family. Her parents were a constant, loving presence in my life. They were the kind of parents who would always show up — the first to arrive for any school event, so proud of their kids.
Their home was where I had my first beer and also watched “The Exorcist” for the first time, her old dog squeezing between us. We would lie around on the top bunk, chain-smoking cigarettes and blasting out Slipknot and Korn, talking about boys. It was a kind of blind cheerful ignorance of the world outside.
Only now do I see just how caged her home was.
At the time, Israel was constructing the monster 450-mile separation wall that would soon fragment so many Palestinian communities, including hers. I could never know how this felt. I didn’t have to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to leave for school like she did, so that she would have enough time to navigate the maze of humiliating checkpoints. I didn’t find myself separated from my mum if the army blocked the road and I couldn’t go home.
She lived in a bustling industrial area, but once the wall was built, just 100 yards from her home, Dina’s relatives and those in the area moved somewhere else. Eventually, her family did too. They moved to East Jerusalem, when it became impossible for her to continue going to our school anymore.
Back then, it felt like a pressure cooker waiting to burst. Now, I feel like it has.
As if prescient, on Oct. 7 Dina texted me, “This will hurt whatever cause we had. No one will care for the plight of Palestinians now. I fear what’s coming will be the worst yet.”
I called her back sometime later. I knew she was feeling down and struggling to process her emotions. Her family had gone through so many rounds of displacement, from the Old City in Jerusalem, to a refugee camp in Jordan, to a refugee camp in Jericho. When they returned to Jerusalem, they found that their grandfather’s home had been taken by Israelis. They moved to the West Bank until the wall was built and they could no longer live there, returning to Jerusalem. Now she wants her parents to leave the country.
For months now, millions of people across the world have seen the photographs and videos of limbs streaming out of the rubble — bodies molded together, deformed. I have archived thousands of photos and videos by journalists in Gaza since Oct. 7. We have seen grandmothers older than the state of Israel itself blown to pieces in homes they had built with their own hands; images of children grayed with dust, wide-eyed and staring, unblinking, at the lavender sky above; overcrowded hospitals without electricity, fuel and basic medical supplies, where doctors are forced to choose which lives to save. Around them, children line the floor, alone, speechless and shaking; children now labeled “WCNSF” — Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Others have “unknown” scrawled across their backs while exhausted staff break down beside them.
We all saw the besieged hospitals, the dismembered bodies left half-buried, and watched homes ablaze from rocket fire, the images shared every day by Gazan journalists — many of whom are in their early 20s, and many of whom have since lost their lives — live-streaming directly to our phones.
After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, I started calling up my other Jerusalem friends, now located around the world. But it took me three weeks to work up the courage to pick up the phone. It didn’t matter that I had conducted hundreds of interviews before, with people in various locations in the most dire of situations. This time, it was personal. It felt surprisingly paralyzing. I knew that reconnecting would bring up a time that I had long forgotten, and a country where I always felt alienated. Since leaving Israel after high school, I have had no interest in returning. And I knew that while much time had passed, the pain, anger and confusion we had felt growing up hadn’t.
Maybe this is why I feel compelled to write about what’s happening now, to resist the impulse to distance myself from a place that I had found so harmful and loaded with animosity while growing up. Now, with everything so fragile, so explosive, I find that I rarely discuss this war, even with colleagues. I avoid questions about my upbringing in Jerusalem, I think because of the guilt that it’s not my story.
But I wanted to know how my Palestinian friends felt, something I would never be able to understand myself. These were friends who had watched their homes disappear under the increasing Israeli control over their land long before Israel’s significant bombardments of Gaza from 2008 onward.
Everyone in our small school is now grappling with the suffering, trying to understand their own feelings about a conflict in which they have been emotionally and personally embroiled for years.
One such friend, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, now finds himself in a difficult predicament. In October, his brother-in-law, an Israeli army reservist, joined Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza. Several of our schoolmates joined the Israeli army after high school, mostly American Christians. For those non-Jews born in Israel who struggled with their own identity, it was one of the ways to feel accepted within Israeli society. One of them is now a sniper in Gaza.
I fear that we are living in a time in which we have no room for one another’s suffering, no room for shades of gray in a world increasingly framed in binary terms. Maybe we don’t want to recognize the nuances for fear of diluting our own cause. Or perhaps it’s just not possible, and we will see only what we want to see and believe what we want to believe.
Despite his growing up with Palestinians in his class and school, I have learned that for my schoolmate, as for many other Israeli soldiers, history started on Oct. 7.
A Jewish Israeli in the school told me during a phone call in November that “right now, in the battle for the narrative, and truth, there is a lot of confusion.” He said that he sees the mainstream Palestinian narrative “as sort of a misinterpretation of history” or even as “revisionist history.”
“I can recognize that they would say the same about me,” he said. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that there isn’t a factual truth.”
A few weeks after Oct. 7, he brought a gun — for his protection, he told me.
Another schoolmate, a British Israeli, told me that this was a necessary war and that he supported the ground incursion. He told me that Israel was doing the best job possible to avoid killing civilians but reiterated that the military was in an impossible situation “if Hamas are hiding behind civilians, hiding under hospitals and refugee camps.”
“I don’t think you can justify the death of innocent people,” he continued. “I also think it’s wrong to say that you’re targeting the civilians, because the target isn’t the civilians, the target is whatever terror infrastructure or enemy target that is deliberately hiding behind civilians … and civilians are going to die as a result.”
While he spoke, I remembered a line from another of my dad’s poems: “It is not a matter of proportion or intention if it is your child in the body bag.”
I found much of what my schoolmate was telling me difficult to listen to. And yet I tried to remind myself that I had a distinct lack of understanding of his reality; that beyond the chaos and compounded trauma in Gaza that we watched every day, there was also fear, and emotions ran high in Israeli cities. Some of my friends now find themselves caught up in the conflict in new ways and have been forced to embrace uncomfortable feelings and questions at a time when it is most vital for them to embrace their humanity.
I wept for my friends. But it doesn’t help.
In the 16 years since I left Jerusalem, I have been deprogramming from the city. I stopped speaking to people I knew from school there, and I actively steered clear of conversations about the country — an attempt to rid my memory of that time.
I told myself so many times that I would not return, but then I ended up flying into the country in January, four months after the October attack. After enduring hours of questioning by Israeli authorities at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, a process I used to go through every three months in my youth, I was finally on my way to Jerusalem. The highway was adorned with Israeli flags, and in between the flagpoles were posters of the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7. In the distance, lights streamed out of new settlements neatly crammed into pockets of the mountainsides.
Over the years, friends had told me how the country had changed with the rapid increase of settlements and the shrinking, purposely depopulated Arab villages in between. I soon learned that it was far worse than I had anticipated.
Inside the city, the streets were quiet and unnerving. I drove past my old haunts, the pet shop where I got my guinea pig, the shisha bar where I spent my lunch hours, and my old bedroom, a domed room in my former school. Downtown, new glass towers protruded from the low-rise stone Jerusalem shops and homes, which once told a tale of the city’s age and history. A few Israelis, hardly out of their teens, walked past with guns hung from their shoulders. The city felt loaded, eerie and isolating.
For another school friend, a Palestinian whom I’ll call Ayah, a young professional now living in Europe, it had felt the same when she returned to her home in East Jerusalem for Christmas, two months after Oct. 7.
She, like me, found it deeply uncomfortable to be back.
“I love going home; it’s everything I need. The TLC of my parents’ house … but when I went home this time, I absolutely hated it,” she told me over the phone. “It was the first time that I couldn’t wait to leave. It was just so super tense and really ugly. … Everything has gone so much more extreme.
“Like to just go out and watch a movie is like something you think twice about now,” Ayah said. “It’s not like 2008, 2014, 2021 … this time is different. I don’t speak Arabic on the street anymore; that’s how uncomfortable it’s become there now.”
Ayah is also struggling mentally with the daily flood of images and news coming from Gaza and the West Bank.
“Right now I find everything very difficult to manage,” she said. “It’s just so hard to keep myself above water.”
She has blocked all social media and tries to steer away from conversations about what is happening
“But it doesn’t work because if I do that, I feel guilty,” she said. “You can’t win. There’s guilt; there’s anger. And there’s just no escape. Honestly, the guilt thing is real. And it’s probably because I am privileged.”
The toll the decades-long conflict took on the younger population over years is apparent in my friends today. Ayah told me of the pressure and responsibility she felt as a Palestinian teenager in our school.
“If I could go back to my 12-year-old self today, I’d tell myself to take that burden off your shoulders and enjoy your childhood,” Ayah said. “I felt like I spent my childhood reading up about the Nakba and the current conflict, learning about the Second Intifada and the wall and all the stuff in between, you know, just trying to like better structure my arguments to explain to other kids.”
She remembers feeling frustrated that they were unable to absorb any of the Palestinian narrative despite many of them having lived in Israel their whole life. “It was so obvious to me that what was happening and what had happened was so inhumane, to say the least. But I was surrounded by people that just defied it, and that was really difficult and I was like, what can these people not see?” She is exasperated now. I can tell — I know her well. She was looking for me to feel as she does, and I do.
We talked about the dehumanization of Palestinians among our own peers. Ayah told me that their views didn’t stem from a lack of knowledge.
“It was more kind of like dogmatic views that were based on religion,” she said. “There was this thinking that this land was promised to the Jews. So everything is justifiable. And it was a lack of empathy that came with that view that still sticks with me till this day. And you know, I’m a Palestinian Christian, but that experience put me off religion in general but particularly Christianity.”
Ayah described our school as a hostile environment, a feeling that resonates with me. It was an experience that we both ran away from. She and I had both joined the school at the same time and both found our time there traumatic. I realize now that it was for the same reason; we didn’t feel we belonged. Both of us craved a support system and community.
Some of those around us — our teachers, people in positions of authority — were Zionist. I don’t think I fully realized this until my last years of high school, when I started looking them up on social media. But to my friend it was always obvious.
While she was back home at Christmas, Ayah went to see her grandmother in Nazareth. The two of them sat down and watched the news of Gaza together; streams of people forced from their homes, walking from the north to the south, carrying all the belongings they could on their backs. Ayah recalled to me how her grandmother told her: “Oh, that’s the Nakba,” and Ayah had to tell her that it was not footage from over 75 years ago but a current, unfolding event. That’s when Ayah realized that she was living a part of her grandmother’s history.
All of Ayah’s great-grandparents lost their own homes in the Nakba.
“I always knew about our family trauma,” she said, “but now we’re going through that again. History is repeating itself.”
When we were in school, Ayah assumed she would go abroad, but only to study and maybe work for a couple of years before returning home for good. But all that has changed now. “After October, I suddenly felt like now I am actually homeless.”
Palestine is not going to be the same and her longing for home is now met by a new realization that the home she knows is gone. This deterioration quickly spread to her inner being as she battled a mix of feelings, from anger to the guilt of being away from home to loneliness. She now finds herself between anger and depression, unable to “bear the hypocrisy” of world leaders who say that this inhumane atrocity is “complicated.”
“To me it’s obvious, the most inhumane and greatest atrocity is happening during our time and it is being supported.”
So many of my friends, now far from their families, are longing for home.
“Ironically, the city where I feel I most belong is the one place that can never function as my home again,” another Palestinian friend, whom I’ll call Rasha, wrote a few months ago.
She is in academia, watching the protests unfold across her city in America. Professors are being fired, others resigning. “It’s all very dystopian. It’s been really weird to be in this space where all of a sudden you feel like your identity is so present and heard and that’s been amazing, but on the other hand there’s been a silencing,” she told me over the phone in March.
The encampments in universities across the U.S. and the world had not yet begun, but the students were speaking out about the war in Gaza and the U.S. support for it.
She told me that she feels people are looking at her, as a minority, to engage.
“It’s so weird to be from a place that everyone has an opinion about. It was always such a taboo conversation before. Even just expressing my identity is not something I felt comfortable doing,” she said. “Now, everyone wants to ask me about Palestine.”
It’s a complicated space to occupy and one that for Rasha also involves an identity crisis to some degree. She is a U.S. citizen deciding who to vote for in the presidential election in November, and like many Palestinians, Muslims and others, she is assessing the candidates’ stances toward Gaza and Palestinians. “To be a Palestinian American right now is so complicated.”
For now, her outlet to talk about this openly is mostly her family and close friends, people who are familiar with the situation, who understand the history and who have known her for a long time. One of the people she connected with most deeply was an Israeli colleague from her university.
“Right after Oct. 7 I saw her for the first time. She just started crying and I started crying … . We just started meeting up and walking around campus and talking about things one on one,” she said. “I realized that we can both have grief. We can both express our sorrow and we can be vulnerable, but this is something that takes a certain kind of common understanding of humanity to be able to do.”
She said that it had also been surprising to see others trying to make room for a conversation that is not inflammatory, some talking to her about how the conflict had changed their outlook on Palestine and Israel.
Like so many Palestinians, Rasha has found herself caught between powerful feelings — grief and sorrow alongside frustration with the media as Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints are shared with no nuance.
“You’re consistently being tossed between one of these,” she said. “I don’t know which battle to pick. It’s like you’re just getting punched in the head in seven different directions.”
At the same time, there was an awakening in her, of her identity, buoyed by seeing Palestinian flags all over the United States. “I was in Boston recently, and I looked down at my feet and I started seeing names written in chalk on the pavement and it went on for blocks and blocks and blocks. It was the names of all of the Palestinian children that have been killed since Oct. 7.”
My friend Rasha grew up in East Jerusalem but hasn’t been home now for four years. While I sympathize with her, I can’t help but be glad that she is not back there now. The golden city will not welcome her and it will never be her home again, as it was before.
She always wanted to leave. “I wanted to get out and do things with my life away from this kind of fucked-up situation but also because I wasn’t being a normal teenager that was carefree because there was a weight you carry as a Palestinian teenager and you don’t notice that you’re carrying it.”
When she arrived in America, she found it difficult to connect with other Palestinians and even actively tried to stay away from them. She said it was particularly hard to talk with members of the Palestinian diaspora, who felt a strong sense of affiliation with her but didn’t have any of the same lived experience. But it was not so easy to divest herself of her Palestinian identity.
“It’s only recently that I started to bring my identity back in and in ways that are both abstract and in some cases pretty explicit,” she said. “‘It’s taken me this many years to realize how my upbringing has influenced my outlook in ways that are not immediately reflected.”
Since Oct. 7, Israel has escalated raids across the occupied West Bank, seeking out and arresting hundreds of suspected members of armed groups in so-called search operations. Hundreds of others have been injured, with dozens killed during the raids. Residents of the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem are witnessing an intensified Israeli police and settler presence in the area, an increase in raids, residents being evicted from their homes and further restrictions on their movements via new checkpoints surrounding the village.
Rasha is now watching the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, her first home, on the news. “These evictions have been happening for years and if I was still living there, we would have been evicted from our house,” she said.
She remembers how all of this was so normalized.
“You actually feel grateful when you are relieved of things that are oppressing you,” she said. “Like, for example, when they would move a checkpoint to a different place and we could actually get to a grocery store much more quickly. And we used to celebrate it. Or Israel deciding when to allow electricity and water to flow into Gaza and people being so grateful. So, it’s just very melancholy. It’s very morbid.”
Rasha recalled watching the country change as she grew up.
“On my way to school every morning, we watched the settlements being built. We saw the roads around us change to give access to them and we had to change our route to school because of it. So, we were watching the infrastructure literally change in front of our own eyes.”
She told me that her grandfather, who was born and grew up in Jerusalem, refused to ever go on the main highway, Route 60, which runs from Jerusalem all through the West Bank and which separated the settlement of Maale Adumim from Beit Hanina, where she lived. “He knew it was the fastest way from our house in Beit Hanina to my grandparents’ house. But he would always make my mum take the longer route and that’s when things became very obvious to us, as children.”
The new Jerusalem was even more divided than the one I had left behind 16 years ago. It was confronting in ways I hadn’t anticipated. But maybe that’s why it was important that I returned.
Watching people in the city go about their daily lives and watching the world’s callous indifference to the onslaught in Gaza, just miles away, it was as if time had not moved at all. We had seen this before.
It was a reminder that the gulf between my views and those of others seems almost too wide to cross. For me, the only healing was through my friends who shared in the history of the place. Almost everyone I know is struggling, asking not to be judged but listened to as a human. There isn’t a single friend who isn’t desperate for peace.
I told my friend Dina that I would go see her parents and pay a visit to the dog we all loved, buried in the garden of their old home. It is now the only place where our memories are preserved in blissful innocence. But I couldn’t bring myself to go, for fear I would instead see what is lost.
I left Jerusalem as quickly as possible and headed to the West Bank through the Qalandia checkpoint, where I used to photograph the protests. Above me, heavy charcoal-gray clouds loomed, threatening to burst.
Become a member today to receive access to all our paywalled essays and the best of New Lines delivered to your inbox through our newsletters.