In Fassouta

My sleep is broken by a terrifying thud. I leap out of bed to the sound of another one. The sirens wail. I fling open the door to my room and bolt out, calling for my father. He is hurrying from his study to the shelter. I yank open the door and we scramble inside. We strain to listen. A third rocket hits. It’s a sickening sound, difficult to describe. The sound of impact between a rocket and the earth. A boom that sometimes feels like it’s down the road. The people in Gaza, I think, have no warning and nowhere to hide.

The shelter is also my brother’s bedroom. He stirs in his sleep, oblivious to our presence. The thick walls are built of reinforced concrete. When the small window is closed, sounds from the outside are heavily muffled. Perhaps the shelters were designed to provide psychological relief as well as physical protection, I think. The shelter, built with government subsidies, is required by the planning laws: I know of nowhere else that this is the case.

Older houses, built before the state of Israel was established on our land, have no shelters. There are several community shelters around the village, but, as a neighbour remarked, ‘if rockets are falling, am I any safer running down the street to get to the shelter?’

Safety is an illusion. The shelters were built decades ago for protection from the small Katyusha rockets fired from South Lebanon. Times have changed, and now even the Iron Dome defence system doesn’t offer complete protection, especially from drones.

Fassouta, my village in the Upper Galilee, is three kilometres from the Lebanese border. We watch the rockets fly in both directions. Clouds of smoke fill the sky. Fighter planes roar overhead, and drones whirr for days on end. There is artillery fire all around. This has been our life since 7 October 2023, when Hamas carried out its attack outside Gaza and the Israeli counter-attack began. Hizbullah began to fire into Israel the next day.

Most of the nearby Jewish communities, especially in the north-east ‘finger of the Galilee’, such as Metula and Kiryat Shmona, have been evacuated. ‘In 1948,’ my father pointed out, ‘the Jewish militias drove many Palestinians out of this region and brought in the Jews. Today, Hizbullah has driven so many of them out and we have stayed.’

We have stayed, in part, out of fear of losing our homes to another Nakba. ‘Leave where?’ asked one my neighbours, a young mother of two. ‘How do we know they won’t come in and take our homes?’

‘I’ll stay and die in my home,’ her mother-in-law affirmed.

I wondered if perhaps we were being too dramatic. But my neighbour shook her head.

The local council conducted a poll asking people if they wanted to leave. The overwhelming answer was no. The village has not sustained any direct hits, so far. If that changes, people’s determination to stay may change, too. We are Israeli citizens but the government has so far failed to give us the same financial support it has given to Jewish communities to relocate. The people in Gaza, meanwhile, have nowhere to go and no homes to return to.

I don’t venture far from the village. A couple of months into the war, I ran some errands in Nahariya, about half an hour away. As I was driving home, a rocket fell near Shlomi. At first I didn’t identify the sound and thought I had a flat tyre. I slowed down but the car seemed fine. Then I heard another loud boom, and the cars around me began to speed up. I gripped the steering wheel and put my foot down. A third, louder boom shook the ground. It took about fifteen minutes to reach Tarshiha, a Palestinian village near mine, where I had to stop, hands clammy with sweat. Life has begun to feel like a series of near misses.

When friends ask me how things are and I try to explain, I always add: ‘But it doesn’t compare to Gaza.’ Nothing does. Everything we do makes us think of Gaza. Eating, drinking water, taking a shower or turning on the light is a reminder that our people, only three hours away, are deprived of the basic necessities of life. Many of us struggle with grief and helplessness, a feeling that we will never, as a people, get past this.

The threat of an all-out war with Lebanon is escalating, and, with it, the fear of a regional war. To describe our situation as bizarre is an understatement. As Palestinian citizens of Israel, we watch as it wages its genocidal war on Gaza, its campaign of settler and army violence in the West Bank, and its attacks on South Lebanon. People talk in hushed tones about Gaza but many are afraid to speak openly.

We have to live, work and study alongside the hostile majority. The fragile pretence of coexistence quickly broke. ‘We can’t even look at each other,’ my neighbours have said of their Jewish colleagues. ‘We go about the day avoiding each other. How can you work like that?’

I worked in Karmiel, a Jewish town in the north, in 2000-1, at the start of the Second Intifada. Whole days could go by without any of my colleagues speaking to me. We sat in the same room and avoided each other.

My cousin, who works in a hospital in the north, is careful not to get into any discussion of the war. ‘It comes flying at you: you’re antisemitic, you support terror, you’re with Hamas, go to Gaza!’ Few Israelis seem to know or care about the realities of the occupation, or the situation in the Occupied Territories before 7 October, and those who do are largely ignored. ‘There’s no space even to try to explain,’ my cousin tells me. ‘Before you start, they violently cut you off.’

We are so used to the animosity that it can throw us off when we experience anything different. A few months ago, I accompanied my uncle to a hospital appointment. A young Jewish nurse asked us: ‘What do you think will happen with this mess?’

My uncle smiled and said: ‘Well, things are very complicated.’ A careful answer, to test the water.

She nodded. ‘Everything is a mess. It’s been months of this already. Do you think there will be another war with Lebanon?’

I left the talking to my uncle. He spoke to the nurse about the situation as he saw it. She asked us about life in our village, before speaking of her own economic hardship. I tried to tell her about Gaza, wondering how to convey even a glimpse of it. She nodded wearily and said: ‘There is no end to all of this.’

There is an end, I wanted to tell her, but the Israeli state will not pursue it.

This was a civil, if terse, exchange, but friends have told me about a complete breakdown of relationships with their Jewish colleagues and friends. ‘Suddenly, we’re back to the basics, and all the issues we’ve spent our whole lives circling around come back in our face.’

The Arab Centre for Applied Social Research in Haifa recently published a report by Mtanes Shihadeh, ‘Fragile Citizenship: Racism and Oppression against Arab Citizens in Israel during the War on Gaza’. As always, I am amazed at the diligence with which Israel oppresses its non-Jews.

Expressing sympathy for the victims of the genocide in Gaza is labelled by the Israeli state as ‘supporting terror’. People have been arrested and threatened. Others have lost their jobs or are afraid to go to work. Demonstrations have been prevented or forcibly broken up. Media outlets such as al-Jazeera and al-Mayadeen have been banned for ‘pro-terror content’. Under new emergency laws, professionals in many sectors, including university lecturers and heads of hospital departments, have been dismissed for posting messages or sharing photos of Gaza on social media. Several students in Fassouta were arrested for posting messages of opposition to the war. But anti-Arab racism is allowed to proliferate unchecked.

We are living alongside an increasingly militarised Jewish population. Since October, the government has approved thousands of applications for personal firearms. At the supermarket, in the mall, on the streets, I see more and more Jewish civilians with guns slung over their shoulders or pistols on their hips.

In my book Stranger in My Own Land, I wrote about the experience of being a Palestinian citizen of Israel, made to feel like outcasts in our own country. We know that we are perceived as the enemy and the state wishes to be rid of us.

Israeli flags are everywhere, with the slogan: ‘Together we shall win!’ It’s always about winning, crushing, obliterating, wiping from the face of the earth. The overall strategy for the ‘day after’ is unchanged: control, fragment, expel, kill, drive out. Yet the reality on the ground tells a different story: the country has fallen into a political impasse, economic crisis and social disarray, while its international reputation has plummeted as the Palestinian cause has seen an unprecedented wave of support.

When I slip out for a walk, sometimes the only way to keep sane, I look at the idyllic countryside and am struck again by the stark difference between the peaceful scene and the horrific war to the south, which has raged for more than nine months and taken tens of thousands of lives. When an army vehicle approaches, I tense up and wait for it to pass. I hear the missiles flying overhead into South Lebanon and my stomach clenches. When will it end? I ask myself. How will Gaza go on? What is the fate of the West Bank? What will happen to us, as Palestinian citizens of Israel? What is the plan to bring about a definitive end to the war and suffering?