They Wept Before the City Knew

This Fourth of July, as the United States turns toward its founding promises, I find myself thinking of the dead who are made difficult to name. I have lived here more than twenty years, long enough to know that remembrance is a sacred labor, and that you can read a country by whom it permits its people to grieve. When Palestinians are buried beneath official speech, the words that might help us mourn them honestly—genocide, extermination, even the plain word murder—are treated as provocations, as though the name of the wound were more dangerous than the wound.

I was a teenager in Cairo when a family friend studied me with an amused smile and said I was like a Jewish intellectual. I took it as praise. Even then, I felt a kinship with that tradition, its reverence for study and the sense that words could carry judgment as well as mercy.

Moses reached me early. I loved that the man who stuttered before other men could speak with God. In Islam, he is Kalimullah, the one to whom God spoke directly, and a frail human voice answered by God gave me courage. It made room for my own hesitations.

In my twenties and thirties, I wrote speeches at the United Nations office in Cairo, still believing language might move policy toward justice. I was naive.

Raised Muslim, I was taught to honor all the prophets. The Qur’an says that we make no distinction between any of them. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad: each entrusted with a light for his time and his people, so that reverence for one never asked rejection of the others. As a young man, I found this plural inheritance spacious, a single moral voice returning across history whenever we strayed too far. It still seems so. What drew me was not doctrine but inner bearing, the willingness of these figures—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or somewhere between—to be at odds with their own communities for the sake of something that could not be nationalized.

What drew me to the prophets was their refusal of the agreed-upon lie. They did not speak after the event, once the danger had passed and everyone had learned the proper words. They stood at the gates of cities while the city still laughed at them, and they wept before others knew what was being lost. The twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the prophet a person who feels fiercely, on whose soul God has thrust a burden. Their loyalty left them exposed, which is why they remain dangerous.

My grandfather Yahya, for whom I am named, belonged to that order of fidelity, though he held no pulpit and prophesied nothing. He refused to move Palestine Radio from Jerusalem when safety was being offered elsewhere; he died in 1943, before the city fell. My grandmother Rabiha went on speaking in exile, on the air wherever she could find it. Something of her refusal reached me through the family air. I came to understand that to keep faith with a sacred thing can be its own kind of stubbornness, the kind that leaves a transmitter in a burning city when safety keeps arriving with better terms.

For a long time, I imagined institutions might honor such fidelity. In my twenties and thirties, I wrote speeches at the United Nations office in Cairo, still believing language might move policy toward justice. I was naive. The rooms were full of honorable phrases, and the sentences were smoothed and made safe.

My education in institutional fear deepened later. After months of work on a manuscript about Palestine with an editor I admired, the publisher decided it could not proceed if words like genocide or extermination remained, for fear of offending. My editor wrote to apologize, saying the press had proved unworthy of the work and had failed the very Palestinians whose suffering it was trying to name. I was grateful for the honesty. It clarified what I had felt all along: not to name a crime is one way of helping it continue.

Reading journalist Peter Beinart on what it means to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza, I recognized something intimate in his argument with himself. He wrote from within a tradition I do not belong to, but what moved me was less the critique of the state than the recovery of the prophetic voice: the voice that warns and refuses to serve nationalism, that returns faith to mourning and mourning to resistance. It reminded me that conscience speaks across the lines we are told divide us, and that solidarity is a kind of discipline.

The prophets I revere rarely flattered power. To write about Palestine now is to approach that inheritance with fear and trembling.

When Israel’s assault on Gaza began, I turned first to poems, hoping a line might hold some fragment of prayer. Then Gaza outran the line. Simone Weil’s terrible image returned to me: the afflicted as one whose tongue has been cut out, the lips still moving before a world that hears nothing. When a song is taken from the throat, prose may remain as a rougher instrument, closer to testimony than to art.

I have always belonged more to contemplation than to politics. Yet, under certain pressures, inwardness must answer outwardly, and the contemplative is drawn from prayer into witness because the wound has become impossible to leave unnamed. The prophets I revere rarely flattered power. To write about Palestine now is to approach that inheritance with fear and trembling. I think of Darwish, who bore Palestine the way one bears a wound that cannot be laid down, of Refaat Alareer, killed while writing, and of Shireen Abu Akleh, gunned down while reporting, her funeral attacked by those who had already silenced her. I think of them as everyday saints, secretaries of the invisible.

This Fourth of July, I cannot celebrate simply. I think of how easily the language of sacrifice can be turned away from grief and toward permission, how remembrance of the honored dead can be used to soften us for new ruin. You can read a republic by whose dead it asks us not to see.

I have always been drawn to those prophets who stood at thresholds. Job, torn between lament and defiance. Muhammad, alone in the cave, trembling before the revelation that would become his burden. What holds them together is surrender: all too human, they questioned and shook, and still they answered. It is that trembling obedience I find myself seeking now, a faith forged in the crucible of conscience rather than inherited intact.

Tribal allegiance cannot be the measure of conscience. Beneath tribe and passport, the questions stay intimate. What will your silence protect? What will you risk when you speak from the heart of your own tradition, especially when that tradition is being used to bless cruelty? To name a thing is sometimes the only mercy left, and the prophets I was raised to honor did not wait for history to settle before they wept. The city was still laughing.