For The Baffler, Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza publishes a series of dispatches and vignettes sparked by the Hamas attacks on October 7. The piece includes snippets of conversations with her father and other family members in Gaza in the first week following the attacks on Israel, and weaves in raw, compassionate, and powerful reflections.
In the kitchen, my Jewish partner stands soberly over the stove, making food we will not taste. My father sighs. We flounder in complex grief.
It is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words. One wide enough to acknowledge Jewish pain, both recent and historical. As a Palestinian, I refuse to mimic the oppressor by denying the humanity of the deceased. But this sadness sits inside the crater of certainty that the world will still refuse ours. It is a chasm carved by decades of discourse in which only certain bodies bleed. Inside this consensus, there is no violent dispossession of our land, no acceptable form in which we may resist our many slow and instant deaths. It refuses the fact that for decades we have buried hundreds of slain for every one Israeli killed. In this selective, Western gaze, there is only our barbarism, which must be brutally contained.
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