The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

“Go to Gaza,” the right-wing Israelis say to Palestinians inside Israel’s 1948 territories who protest Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. It is meant as a threat, of course, and yet to Palestinian ears, “Go to Gaza” is not only this. Separated from its speaker, it can feel like an entreaty. If only we could go to Gaza, if only we could have gone to Gaza, this year of siege and war, these seventeen years of blockade, these decades of closure.

Palestinians are chased by specific formations of settler-colonial violence according to their legal status and geographic location in southwest Asia and North Africa: the missile strike, the ground invasion, the arrest raid, the protest killing, the settler attack, the police shooting. In our mental maps of possible violence, we have long known that none of these formations is isolated to a particular geography: they can leap across borders and quasi-borders.

Indeed, all Palestinians living under Israeli control—whether as citizens of Israel, permanent residents in Jerusalem, or subjects of military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza—look to refugees outside of historic Palestine knowing that expulsion haunts them all. As I have explored elsewhere (Bishara 2022), not only the violence itself but also the differences in forms of violence, as well as the differences in forms of legal restriction and constrictions on mobility, have obstructed Palestinians’ liberation movement for decades.

In the last year, these formations of violence have not only escalated but also merged into each other. Israeli leaders speak even more loudly of carrying out another Nakba (Rapoport 2024; Beinart 2023). Tulkarem and Jenin camps in the West Bank have become “mini Gazas” in incursion after incursion. The places where Palestinian protest had flourished despite threats, as in universities and certain cities, have been all but extinguished. Lawless settler violence can happen anywhere now, from the West Bank to prisons in Israel; the logics of lawless settler violence rampage in the war zone itself.

How can Palestinians manage to resist fragmentation in these times of capricious and deadly escalation? The humble Palestinian practice of fostering connection, al-tawasul, by checking up on people and drawing close to those who are struggling works on the level of kin and friend networks. Al-tawasul is a practice of sustenance and also an incipient political act of reimagining sovereignty.

During trips to Palestine in March and August, 2024, I visited loved ones and conducted research in the West Bank. I spoke to a handful of Palestinians with West Bank identity cards—all of whom are refugees dispossessed of their family homes inside what is now Israel—who had gone to Gaza in recent years.

A social worker for Qader for Community Development had been conducting trainings for an organization in Gaza, the Sisters of Mother Teresa Missions of Charity, that was home to children with severe disabilities. She traveled to Gaza every two to three months until August 2023. Raghda Al-Azza came to treasure her relationships with people and with the place itself. Each time she went, she brought home clothes for her young daughters so they could feel the connection she experienced. She had dined on the shores of Gaza City during that last trip: “My friends were determined that we needed to go out to eat together in a special place. They knew I loved the beach, so they said, here is a new restaurant on the shore. We had a beautiful, beautiful day.”

Disabled people and their communities have suffered especially profoundly during this genocide (Mahdi 2024). Their experiences must amplify calls for immediate ceasefire and Palestinian liberation (Loh 2024; Sargent and Friedner 2024). By March 2023, when I spoke to Raghda, Israeli shelling had killed one of the staff members in Gaza and damaged the facilities that served these vulnerable children. Two of their young clients had died due to lack of medicine, food, and water. Families had become separated from their children. Israeli attacks destroyed the homes of most of the staff members.

What, I asked, can she do for her friends in these circumstances, from her own community circumstances of closure, threats of invasion and incarceration, and economic suffocation? She calls as often as she can. Sometimes when there is no way for people to communicate directly from the north to the south of Gaza, she passes on messages from one friend to another. She adds funds to the phone credit of her friends.

When I visited loved ones in the Galilee, I witnessed the same striving to connection from Palestinians there who hold Israeli citizenship. One woman drove hours to the West Bank to donate money to support a child she had known for many years in Gaza. Ghousoon Bisharat, the Palestinian editor of the +972 news outlet spoke recently of her daily practice of witness through her work, listening to and publishing the accounts of journalists in Gaza (Allan and Bishara, in press). They do this in the shadow of intensified racism from the state and society around them.

In the Galilee, looking out over the mountains that roll seamlessly into Lebanon, watching and feeling explosions, we heard the rockets speeding out and exploding; we saw smoke on the horizon. My relatives could tell which side of the border each hit fell, but I often could not. A video from 1967 of the Lebanese superstar Fairuz singing the song “Tik tik tik” to a chorus of school children played on television. It was at once a scene of extraordinary nostalgia, with Fairuz’s immense almond eyes and the children’s braids and school uniforms, and a reminder—with that backdrop of rockets and explosions—of how long Palestinians in the Galilee have felt the war in their chests and stomachs: the booms, the grief over what it means to in any way be affiliated with the state enacting this violence.

Now Palestinians in the northern Galilee live with the growing risk that all this could, after decades, also (again) threaten their Palestinian villages. Even the fear can induce guilt, as they know that the destruction they see from afar in Lebanon has been much more intense than in the Galilee and that the destruction in Gaza that they see on their phones and televisions has been unfathomably worse.

What would it mean for Palestinians to connect across that border, to reclaim the Galilee as a single geographical region (Khayyat 2022)? What would it mean to practice al-tawassul not only with other Palestinians but with Lebanese people whose villages we have looked out upon our entire lives but have been forbidden from visiting, to challenge Israeli militarism and ideologies of nationalism that divide and destroy this region? The fragmentation of Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island happened also through displacement, isolation, and land theft, and it impacted not only how specific tribes were threatened but also how tribes and nations related to each other across the continent.

Part of Palestinian liberation will be the reconstitution of these bonds among Palestinians and between Palestinians and our neighbors. A continual reconstitution is another way of thinking of “ongoing return” (Barakat, this collection) and the “repetition of return” (Hammami, this collection) today—not only a geographic return but an ongoing return to collectivity and relation.

Postscript

The Israeli destruction of Lebanon has escalated tremendously since this piece was first written, with over 1,900 people killed in recent weeks and more than 2,500 killed since October 7, 2023. At least 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon, as starvation and siege intensify today in northern Gaza. Tarshiha, pictured above, has been hit by rocket fire several times in recent weeks, including on October 7, 2024, and October 29, 2024, the seventy-sixth anniversary of Tarshiha’s occupation by Israeli forces. As of October 29, 32 people in Israel’s 1948 territories, among them one person in Tarshisha, have been killed by missile and rocket fire from Lebanon since the beginning of the war and up to 70,000 displaced.