In the mid-1990s, among the various unrelated jobs I took up, there was one that involved teaching video-making workshops to schoolchildren. One such workshop was to take place at an all-girls elementary school in the old city of Jerusalem. The number of attendees was set at twenty. A couple of weeks before our sessions were scheduled to begin, the school informed me that around 130 girls had registered. To select the participants, I therefore proposed that we ask every pupil to submit a short story. Their task would be to narrate an event that occurred on their way to school. Places in the workshop would be granted based on merit.

Within a week or so I received close to 130 stories. The majority of them, more than a hundred, repeated the same narrative. One after another described how, in the morning on her way to school, the writer saw an elderly blind man whom she helped to cross the street. The only conclusion that seemed reasonable to me was that one schoolgirl had come up with this story and the rest had copied her—or, worse, that this was a story they’d learned at school, told to them by a teacher who wished to instruct them on how to act with care toward those in need. In other words, I concluded that this was an easy, clichéd narrative of the kind children are tempted to repeat.

In the end, I didn’t offer most of the girls who’d written this type of story a place in the workshop, except for a few, perhaps four or five, who’d narrated it in a way that appeared to me exceptional. The fact that the rest of the girls were denied a place didn’t seem unfair to me.

One morning, a few weeks into the workshop with some twenty-five brilliant girls, I headed to the school to drop off the equipment we needed for filming later that day. Just before I reached the main gate, I saw a crowd of about a hundred girls surrounding an old man with a cane, his eyes concealed behind dark glasses. They were shouting among themselves and jumping with excitement. I stopped and followed the scene with my eyes: the scene of many schoolgirls trying to help an elderly blind man cross the street.

As I watched, I saw how unfairly I had treated the more than a hundred girls who had narrated an incident very similar to this one. What I had dismissed as cliché, even plagiarism, could in reality be a recurring experience that touched many of them deeply. I also began to grasp the limits of my ability to judge what is genuine and what is false. I had not trusted their stories merely because they read to me as repeating one another. All the while, the girls had trusted that they would find a caring reader.

Moreover, by excluding them from the workshop—and thus from creating works inspired by their lives and their world—I had contributed to restricting the scope of storytelling and, worse, the scope of what might be perceived as original or unoriginal, true or untrue. Watching the schoolgirls that morning trying to find a way to collectively help the elderly blind man, I wondered how, rather than treating repetition in narration as granting permission to doubt and ignore, we could allow it to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise.

I often find myself returning to this incident as I think about how to avoid being limited by what is typically deemed worthy and credible and what’s not, even in fiction. Such limitations tend to affect our ability to listen and read. We allow ourselves without hesitation to tire of repeated stories; we start to ignore them, cast doubt on them, and unhear them. Among the repeated stories that tire us most are stories of pain. Their ongoingness, their inescapable repetition, makes us increasingly indifferent to them, to their protagonists and likewise to their tellers. This indifference sooner or later inaugurates a transition from not listening to not believing.

For many, this is the case with stories reaching us from Palestine today. These are stories we’ve been hearing for decades with hardly any variation other than the increasing number of victims. And if we don’t hear any stories from Palestine, despite more than a hundred years of colonization, military occupation, and subjugation, followed by an acceleration in the process of annihilation over the last few years, that unhearing doesn’t trouble us. It doesn’t make us anxious, nor does it make us stop to wonder why such stories have disappeared, even when we haven’t heard about any actual steps being taken to overturn the conditions that have given rise to them. They are stories that have been eclipsed, disappeared, by an aversion to knowing.

When considering this disappearance, it is necessary to examine the fate of many of those who once brought us this knowledge and now no longer do. According to the International Federation of Journalists, the Israeli military has killed or assassinated at least 262 Palestinian journalists reporting from Gaza in the last two and a half years; as of February 2024 the Palestinian Ministry of Culture has also reported the killing of at least forty-five writers, poets, and artists. This, in part, attests to how knowledge about Palestine and from Palestine is being erased, bit by bit, as the ones who share it and the ones whom it concerns have been erased, until it is abandoned and eventually forgotten.

Forgotten. This was a word I read on a journey to Berlin last year. My eyes wandered while I was in my seat, and I noticed a passenger a few rows ahead of me reading a German newspaper. He flipped the pages until he stopped for a few seconds at an article with a photo of a child leaning on the body of an adult lying on the ground. I had just enough time to read the headline, which was written in bold black letters: “Hopeless and Soon to Be Forgotten.” I recognized that the photo was of a child in Gaza crying over the body of his murdered father, who had been seeking food from a US–Israeli aid delivery station when Israeli snipers shot him dead, as they did more than 2,600 Palestinians within a period of less than five months in 2025. These were Palestinians, like the father in the photo, who had tried to get food to fend off certain death by hunger, due to the Israeli-designed and Israeli-implemented famine in Gaza, only to face death by Israeli bullets.

The passenger quickly moved to another page, then another, and another, until he stopped at one showing several photos of e-bikes, once again with bold black letters in German, this time stating: “All included.” It might have been an ad or a study of the pros and cons of e-bikes. The passenger stayed on that newspaper page for some time.

Here a question rings out like destiny: By whom will they be forgotten? Before this question could even be raised, however, a process of “forgetting” had already begun, by which words have been made to vanish even before those saying them were forced into silence.

To bring us nearer to a possible understanding of this process by which words vanish, I’ll digress and turn to the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which details the types of land that could not be subject to individual or private ownership. Among the types of land listed are ones deemed public property, a concept established several centuries earlier and known by the name mushaa’. This word, mushaa’, which originates in Arabic, refers to a place—be it a building, a field, a piazza, or a street—the owners of which are unspecified, unidentified, and undifferentiated, and which is shared commonly and equally by all. It might be said that our relation to truth can be understood by adopting the concept of mushaa’; truth is what we consider to belong to us in an undifferentiated manner, as we share it equally and trust it commonly, each and every one of us having access to it and the possibility of benefiting from it. No one can claim truth as something that belongs to them alone or as a private entity that excludes others.

In Arabic the root of the word mushaa’ is the verb sha’a, which is often used when describing the circulation of news, as in: sha’a al-khabaru (the news spread). For “news” to be the subject of the sentence implies that it can spread on its own, unhindered and unassisted, and hence cannot be manipulated. It is as if the news, since it conveys truth, has what can be regarded as agency and is able to act independently. When one speaks in Arabic of “spreading the news,” when “news” is the object and not the subject, it becomes asha’aal-khabara. This shift, from sha’a to asha’a, immediately insinuates the spreading of false news, such as rumors.

The logic of the Arabic syntax suggests that news is perceived to be verified only if it acts as a subject and not an object; when news becomes an object, it shifts from being verified to being a rumor, which is the vernacular form of propaganda. In the latter case, the news is somehow being forced on the ear of others. The true form of news can thus be said to refuse any attempts to spread it by force, and equally to refuse attempts to forcibly stop it from spreading. This is how we must perceive today the killing of journalists in Palestine and beyond: it is a method to try and stop news from the ground from spreading, marking a step toward the birth of untruths.

To stay a little longer with the Ottoman Land Code: it refers to lands that are neither public nor under the private possession of a dweller as Arazi Mevat. This term originates from the Arabic Aradhi Muwat, which translates as “dead lands.” Arazi Mevat would begin at the point where a person shouting from the closest inhabited location could not be heard. In other words, it is the inability to hear a human shout that demarcates this type of land. In this sense, “dead lands” are places where voices and words die out.

This also suggests that when we no longer hear someone’s words or shouts, it doesn’t mean that their words and shouts are dead. Rather, we who are not capable of hearing them are confined to a dead place, a place where nothing is expected to thrive. This is perhaps where we are today, in dead lands, when it comes to hearing words uttered in Gaza or Palestine. These are words that form a painful knowledge that has been violently and intentionally disappeared, prevented from reaching our ears with the murder of many of their tellers.

But when we unhear painful knowledge, it doesn’t mean that this knowledge ceases to exist; instead, it means that the ones bearing the brunt of it, experiencing it, are left alone, and as a result become silent. Each time they are not heard, silence besieges them. It is a type of silence that grows as their experiences cease to shock us or even move us, because their news is no longer new; it is repetition, news we have already heard, and we don’t expect to gain anything by hearing it again.

With this evasion we create a condition that the philosopher Jill Stauffer has called “ethical loneliness,” the double experience of being abandoned by humanity only to then not be heard—truly heard—when speaking about what happened. An ethically lonely person is thus made to feel alienated; their alienation is all the more embedded in their days because no one is listening to them, and they are beset by indifference.

It is not difficult to realize that this indifference toward painful knowledge is paired with an indifference toward those who seek to share it, many of whom the Israeli military has killed over the past years; this indifference is one and the same as the indifference to the continued killing of Palestinians as a whole.

The number of murdered journalists, writers, and artists in Gaza surpasses the number of stories in The Thousand and One Nights. Over the course of these nights Shahrazad told close to three hundred stories in an attempt to fend off death with words. If they were still alive, those journalists and writers would be able to tell us stories every night for thousands of nights to come, trusting in storytelling as she did. Yet unlike Shahrazad they were punished by death, often at night. So what do their not-to-be-heard stories and erased voices mean to us today, as we linger in dead lands? Do their unheard stories and hushed voices mark the end of truth, truth reaching its limits, the death of truth?

It is clear that what we share and own in common in these dead lands is an absence of their words. This absence surrounds us and prevents us from articulating many truths. More and more, we are deprived of words with which we might narrate otherwise, all the while continuing to feel that we are listening and hearing everything, and enjoying every freedom to narrate.

I stumbled once upon a joke in a book by Slavoj Žižek that occurs to me now. I retell this joke here, but like any other storyteller, I will probably not tell it exactly the way Žižek did. So a young man wanted to go and live in a country that was ruled by an authoritarian regime. His father, concerned for his son’s safety, and aware he was a rebellious young spirit, vehemently opposed the idea. The son, though, insisted on his wish, if only to see for himself what was going on in that country, until the father gave up and agreed, on one condition. He told the son that if he found himself in trouble, he should write the father a letter—but without revealing any details, since outgoing letters were monitored and any information unfavorable to the regime might endanger the son’s life. All he had to do was write the letter in red ink, and the father would immediately come and rescue him. After agreeing to this condition, the son left. One month had passed when the father received a letter from him, in which he described how wonderful it was to be in that land. People felt happy, there were no limits whatsoever on free speech, and the country enjoyed an abundance of everything good. The only thing they didn’t have was red ink.

More and more, a language for articulation is being pulled away from us. It happens every time we are deprived of a story or voice, while we continue to feel that we are free to use all the words available, unaware of the ones that have been removed from our lexicon entirely.

As Saleh al-Khalidi, a young poet from Gaza, writes:

Don’t search for me in silence,
I was the silence
you never heard.

What are we to do with the silence we never heard, the absence of red ink, and the words we’ll never read or know? How can we, writers and readers, proceed from this death of words? What are we to write in the aftermath of this absence, and what are we to read from it?

As writers, it’s imperative for us to seek paths that may allow us to navigate this linguistic erasure rather than maintain it. For red ink not to vanish before our eyes entirely, we must not abandon our confidence in literature at a time when journalists and writers are being murdered and those who write in defiance are being persecuted. We must continue writing and repeating stories as long as literature permits us to reach beyond the limits of what is usually granted the status of truth. For how much truth remains in the news we read about Gaza when so many of Gaza’s messengers have been assassinated? And how much truth can we learn about the history of Gaza after so many of Gaza’s historians have been killed, and its archives, libraries, and universities have been bombed?

What remains for us as writers in these morbid times is to investigate language in a way that opens it up to the meanings and stories of which it’s being deprived. This is what John Berger calls other ways of telling. In Risalat al-Ghufran, The Epistle of Forgiveness, written around the beginning of the eleventh century, the great poet Abu al-A’laa al-Ma’arri claims that what differentiates a sinful writer or poet from a non-sinful one is the latter’s ability to allow language new possibilities, even to invent new words and create new syntax.

With this urge, I recount yet more stories that might guide us when faced with linguistic absence and disappeared knowledge. One is a story I was told as a child. It speaks of a group of hungry people who gathered somewhere one night with hardly anything to eat except for a loaf of bread. They decided to blow out the candle and be in the dark, to allow the hungriest among them to eat freely without feeling they were being watched, or being embarrassed about eating more than the rest. As soon as the candle was blown out and darkness engulfed the group, there came the sounds of chewing and swallowing, until, after some time, one of them said they were full, then a second expressed a similar satisfaction, a third, a fourth, and so on until the last. When they lit the candle again, they discovered that the loaf of bread had not been touched. Each one of them had pretended to be eating, assuming the others were hungrier, leaving the meager food for the rest.

There are narratives that only absence or darkness can allow to emerge. These possible narratives could be sought in the fictional and the imaginative, with literature acting as a guide toward a different type of ethics. The story I just retold follows the ethics of the hungry and not the ones who have eaten well and never known hunger; it’s not a narrative written by the ones who make food and words disappear, nor in the grammar they dictate. In literature there’s a place for the infinite retelling of such narratives with infinite variations; there is a place for the stories that have never been heard, even when they read like a repetition of what we already know.

A final story about the Palestinian thinker and educator Khalil al-Sakakini brings us closer to what literature can do in the face of adversity and death. In the fall of 1917 the Ottoman police in Jerusalem discovered that al-Sakakini had given refuge to someone on the run. Both men were arrested and taken to be tried for possible execution in Damascus. While al-Sakakini was being held in prison, an old teacher of his came to visit him. The elderly man was shocked to encounter his former pupil in such a state. Seeing his teacher speechless, al-Sakakini started to recite the first half of a line of poetry. The teacher used to say the same words in class to initiate a call-and-response, which the pupils would complete by reciting the second half. Upon hearing the words, from the other side of the bars, the old teacher rushed to recite the second half of the line.

The girls from that elementary school in Jerusalem would probably be ready and willing to do the same. They would repeat a line of poetry a hundred times without hesitation—an act that poetry, as a form, embraces. In hindsight their insistence on telling their story regardless of how often it had been repeated should instruct and inspire us today. They trusted fiercely in the telling of their story and wrote fearlessly. This is the least we can do in the face of linguistic erasure and annihilation: to have no fear of writing and when writing, and of repeating, even if we are allowed neither words nor ink.