Omid Memarian, a journalist, analyst and recipient of Human Rights Watch's Human Rights Defender Award, is the Director of Communications at DAWN.
Discussions and debates about Israel and Palestine often fall into the trap of, It's complicated. But Selma Dabbagh sees things more clearly. "Israel-Palestine is notoriously seen in the West as being extraordinarily difficult to understand," the British-Palestinian writer and lawyer says. "I don't think it is."
"I think that there is a very systematic pattern going on here of less Palestinians on the land and more land being gained by the Israeli state," she tells Democracy in Exile in an extensive interview. "It's a settler-colonial project. I think that's the easiest way of understanding it."
Dabbagh is the author of the novel Out of It, which is set in Gaza during the Second Intifada. Earlier this year, The Guardian named it one of the five best books to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict. She is also the editor of We Wrote In Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, a lively compilation of 101 pieces by more than 70 authors of Arab heritage, including both classical and contemporary short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry. The Washington Post called it a "groundbreaking collection" and "the first of its kind in English."
Dabbagh grew up in a Palestinian family living between England, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Before she started writing fiction while living in Bahrain, she worked as a lawyer in human rights in Cairo, Jerusalem and London. In addition to her short fiction, which has been published by Granta, International PEN and others, Dabbagh also writes political essays for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books, where she has written regularly since October 7.
A contributor to Democracy in Exile, with her essays, book excerpts and fiction, Dabbagh recently spoke to the journal about her life as a writer, the links between fiction and non-fiction, and why, as a Palestinian writer, "you have to be constantly thinking about what you can and cannot say."
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
"Growing up, I never saw people like myself in literature available to an English language reader."
- Selma Dabbagh
How has your experience as a Palestinian British author shaped your understanding of this conflict?
The main thing is the novel that I spent about seven years writing, Out of It, which is mainly set in Gaza. Even though I'm not a Gazan, and I've never held myself out to being a Palestinian from Gaza, I've had a very different experience. My mother's English, my father's Palestinian, I've lived in about eight different countries. I've lived a lot in the Gulf. I inhabited Gaza for a very long period of time when I was working on this book.
I was living in Bahrain at the time, and I just decided that I would place this novel in Gaza. It was just around the time of the 2003 Iraq War. I wanted to portray characters who were somewhat out of place, like these young individuals who were a bit idealistic, a bit rebellious. They were kind of trapped between cultures, they were urbane, they were bilingual, they were highly educated. They wanted to put their energies into changing the society that they lived in. But actually, the avenues for them to do so were really limited.
But what I needed to do was to give it a location, even if it was a fictive one. And I decided on it being Gaza, because I thought Gazans are at the extremity of the Palestinian issue. It's also as a place where, as the Colombian president has said recently, what seems to be happening is almost like a rehearsal for the future. You've got this idea of a young, trapped, encaged population who are denied any kind of rights or mobility or access to the external world, and have come from a refugee heritage. It's about, in a way, a struggle of people against power, huge power.
I wasn't trying to write a socio-realistic novel. Look, there are Gazan writers who can do that much better than me, who can get the dialogue, who can get the discourse, the kind of jokes. They can describe the sense of place. That wasn't what I was trying to do. I was trying to get a big canvas, impressionistic vision as to the kind of pressures put on people in a situation like that. And particularly, one thing I was interested in, which continues to compel a lot of my writing, is this idea of what happens to your emotional space. What happens to you as an individual, what happens to your aspirations for self-actualization, self-realization, romantic connection—you know, just all of the other things to do with being human, if you live in an environment where huge pressure is put on you to engage politically, and to change these unbearable conditions that you're expected to live in.
But actually, there aren't very many options or opportunities for you to do that. How does that close in on that space? And how do you manage to try and keep it open in some way?
So I had this short story, which was about these trapped characters in Gaza. There is a young guy. He's a bit stoned, he's on a roof. There are fighter bombers above him. And then there's this girl with wild hair, and they're brother and sister and they're trying to find ways that they can… The girl really wants to engage politically, and the boy just wants to get the hell out of there. He's got a girlfriend in England, he wants to go and study. He might have been a musician in a different life. He's got other things that he would like to hang on to, and he wants to live somewhere or be somewhere where he can be valued as something more than just a part of a political struggle. It doesn't sit that comfortably with him.
Sometimes it feels slightly treasonous to say that, because Palestinians are expected to be engaged in the cause at a high level. And I actually think that it's a really unnatural state of being. Well, not unnatural, but it's like a minority number of people actually want to be engaged in political quests. Most people just want family and home and security and pleasures. Whereas this desire that you should be this political thing—he's not as good at it as his mother and his older brother and his sister.
I decided to set it in Gaza, because Gaza has got this population which is 70 percent refugees or their descendants. It's got a land, sea and air blockade. The level of unemployment is really high, the ability for people to leave or to enter is very restricted. Siege is quite useful as a novel device as well in terms of tension on the characters. I set it there for a mixture of political and literary reasons and my own curiosities. I had to research it very heavily from the outside—documentaries, memoirs, other novels, whatever I could find. I've been there a couple of times, briefly. I don't hold myself out as being a Gazan writer. I was trying to do something more impressionistic, from the outside.
The novel came out. And then I was asked back to Gaza with the Palestine Festival of Literature, which is an extraordinary festival. Most literary festivals you set yourself in a location, you wait for your audience to come to you. But because Palestinians can't travel, particularly in the West Bank, they're very much confined to their locality by a very oppressive system of checkpoints, permits, vehicle license plates. You can't really move. If you're from Ramallah, you can't go to Jenin. If you're in Jenin, you can't go to Jerusalem. So instead of that, the Palestine Festival of Literature travels in the West Bank, and we traveled into Gaza, from Egypt.
It was a really remarkable time when we went because it was 2012. The Egyptian revolution was at its high point. There was a really celebratory, semi-victorious feeling from the Egyptian participants who made up the majority of the visit. I experienced Gaza then with them. Being there, it was curious, because I kept worrying that I would have got things wrong [in my novel], that I wouldn't have captured certain elements of it. When I was there, I had a mental checklist on things, like are there guys here who wear their hair in ponytails? Is it possible to have X and Y jobs, like some of my characters do? I found that most of that I got right. But what I sometimes felt I hadn't quite got was the tone. There were times where it felt much darker, much worse, with far less hope.
I want to stress the courage, ingenuity, innovativeness, the desire for community, for hope, for love, for mutual support, the tightness of Gazan society—Palestinian society as a whole—but particularly Gazan. Everybody knows everybody else's family. Even if they don't know them, they'll know of them. So that's what makes attacks like this feel so personal to Palestinians all over the world. Because if they don't know the individual, they'll know the family name.
You touched on this a little, but how do your personal and family histories influence the themes and narratives you explore in your novels?
I write a mixture of novels and short stories. How the way that I've lived affects them is, I think, to do with the positionality—where I place myself as having most use and most credibility as a writer. I am often interested in themes because I am English or Palestinian; I'm sort of mixed heritage and diasporic. I've lived in a variety of places. I'm quite interested in people who have a bit of a sense of being out of place, not quite belonging. They're looking in on a scene from the outside. There's a particular freshness to that viewpoint sometimes. It's a bit like being a tourist. But it also means you can see beauty that people who may have been there for a longer period of time might not recognize.
The themes that recur when I first started writing short stories were of people who felt that they'd failed the revolution, or the revolution failed them. I started writing when I was living in the Gulf, in quite a comfortable, sort of corporate, wifey existence. Before that, I'd been more of an activist. I trained as a lawyer. I'd worked with human rights organizations in Palestine and Egypt, and in London. I missed my milieu. I missed my friends. I missed being in an environment where my ideas mattered. I think, particularly after having children, there's an expectation that what women think is just not really important anymore. They are kind of an appendage to a buggy or a baby. You are not asked your opinion on anything further than your caring duties. And I was determined to save my brain and keep myself thinking and trying to connect back into these issues.
A lot of my work at the time was trying to recreate those worlds and what I loved about them, as well as what I've seen and what I felt that more people should see. I thought that the level of misunderstanding of what it meant to be Palestinian, or to be from the Arab world in general, was just so misplaced. It was so misrepresentative. It was so distorted and negating. We're constantly seen as a national identity which has seemed to be sort of synonymous with terrorism.
I was also writing a lot for my friends. Growing up, I never saw people like myself in literature available to an English language reader. I think that there's a slight reluctance in the canon of English literature at the moment, or up until recent years, to put the political into literature. People kind of see that it can negate the aesthetic—that it can be preachy, that it can be propagandist. That as soon as you are seen to be giving a message, the artistic value of your work has seemed to be depreciated.
I don't agree with that, because I think that all literature—all art, in a way—is political. Because you're always choosing one example over other examples in terms of how you choose your characters. You're always saying that this is a set of values over another set of values that I have chosen. So it's just where upon the spectrum you can comfortably place yourself. In British literature, we have people like George Orwell who clearly stated that art can be political, that all art is political. There was a big need for him, beyond things like the ego and the aesthetic, as to why he wrote—because he wanted to show the world what he had seen, and he wanted to change the world in some way, in a better way.
But it's a question of balancing those things against trying to make the story enjoyable and trying to allow people to see themselves in those books. I think that there will be a change. I think it's already happening in terms of the palatability to the English language reader—the need for the English language reader to find some kind of political commentary in their work, because the world is getting more dangerous. It's more important for people to engage than it ever was before.
How do you believe that literature, particularly novels, can help readers understand and process this ongoing tragedy?
In terms of how I think novels can help people with the situation in Gaza, at the moment I think it's quite a difficult question, because what's happening is so urgent. We've got 40,000 people dead; 17,000 children who have no adult to look after them. You have the displacement of 1.3 million people to the south. You have no safe areas. The areas which they say are slightly safer are so exorbitantly expensive for most Gazans to go to, even if they can access them. This tiny, tiny strip of territory, which is 365 square kilometers, has been caught in the middle and is being heavily policed by an army behaving in a way, which seems by the accounts that soldiers themselves post on social media, to be vicious, cruel and arbitrary in who it targets. We've all seen pictures of Palestinians being stripped down and humiliated, shot with white flags in their hand, fleeing vehicles attacked by missiles.
We're all kind of haunted by this nightmarish, apocalyptic vision as to just how cruel a powerful nation can be to a very young, encaged population, who are pretty much defenseless at this point. People are starving. The U.N. has said that there's a crime of starvation. The International Court of Justice is looking at the Genocide Convention and saying that there's a plausible risk of genocide, and the Israelis should effectively stop now. You've got calls for a cease-fire across the world.
The response has to be urgent, and that's not something a novel can communicate, because novels for me, they take seven years, 10 years. It's a long process of gestation. I hope that there are people who might have read Palestinian literature set somewhere like Gaza, just by chance, that has maybe given them enough to make them feel more comfortable going to a demonstration, signing a petition, writing to their MP. It's the entry point. At the moment, we need really drastic action, immediate action—humanitarian relief, legal intervention, political change.
But the novel, I see it as like the first hook to get somebody's interest, to get the outsider in, in a comfortable setting—an amusing, entertaining story, which can also inform, and from that you go to nonfiction to answer all the questions you may have. Fiction might make it a little bit more accessible to you. I don't see it as a be-all and end-all. I don't value writers as being the bastion of all sort of justice in the world. I'm not that arrogant about any one profession. We need to work together on this. We need lawyers, we need politicians, and we really need the change of political will, reining in the arms manufacturers who seem to be driving a lot of this vicious, bloody assault.
"As a Palestinian writer, you're constantly having to be aware of issues of self-censorship. You have to be constantly thinking about what you can and cannot say."
- Selma Dabbagh
There's a lot of dehumanization. People cannot see Palestinians, or even those Israeli families who suffered on October 7. How can literature help with humanization, to inform people and have them better understand the situation and act on their consciousness?
I think the novel has a really unique and special role, compared to any other art form. It takes an individual anywhere in the world, and it's just you as a writer communicating directly with that reader. What that reader is able to do is to take their own lived reality, their own experience, their own personal relationships and imbue them into those characters who are really just bare bones. You've got no sort of physical representations of people. A reader imbues them with their own experience, emotions and needs. They become a sort of hybrid character, something that the reader has formed, and they can slip into their skin and feel them in a proximity to themselves.
What you can do with the novel is speak to the reader in a quiet space. I think it's the most intensely personal method of communicating with others all over the world. And I love that about it.
I think the most satisfying thing being a writer is when you meet a reader who's read your work, and they found something in it which they can respond to. Even with my book set in Gaza, I met Americans who said, "I got it because I moved a lot as a kid, and I could feel these characters, this constant sense of displacement." Or, "I got it because I'm Kashmiri, and we have the same kind of issues." Or, "I'm Pakistani and we have an Islamist movement here that we can't associate with socially." These kind of things. I think that's very rewarding.
In terms of now, and in terms of humanization, we cannot talk about Gaza without really praising the extraordinary articulacy and bravery of Palestinian journalists, citizen journalists, journalists on the ground. This is the worst assault on journalists ever, ever documented since records began by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists in the early '90s. There has never been a year where so many journalists have been killed. One in 10 journalists in Gaza has been assassinated and targeted.
There was a systematic targeting of journalists before October 7. I actually worked on a case which went to the International Criminal Court and one of the journalists we included was Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the back of her head in Jenin. The other journalists were two in Gaza and two in the West Bank who had been shot at.
But now the numbers, depending on the sources, are between 100 to 140 journalists. Some killed sleeping in their tents, some killed while they were working. Sometimes their families have been targeted as well. It's a very vengeful desire to literally shoot us in the eye so that we can't see. But it's also a desire to make sure that the world can't see us. These people—be they Instagrammers or on Twitter or on Tik Tok, and lot of them so young—they are an inspiration for the youth of the world, to my mind. They are able to communicate fast-moving events with clarity, with detail, with a calmness of voice, with a sense of outrage, which they are entirely deserving to feel, while their families are under threat. I can't think of more inspiring individuals at the moment. And so I wouldn't want to compare anything I do as a writer, in my comfortable London flat, to what these extraordinary young journalists are doing in Gaza.
How do you feel as an author speaking about one of the most politicized issues of our time? How do you think interpretations of antisemitism have changed or been used in the past eight months, and how have they impacted freedom of speech?
As a Palestinian writer, you're constantly having to be aware of issues of self-censorship. You have to be constantly thinking about what you can and cannot say. What is worth taking a risk on and is not worth taking a risk on. There are some issues that I know that I would not be free to write about. One gets accused of being antisemitic very easily, to the point where I think that the term is almost getting voided of its use.
In terms of how the interpretations of antisemitism have been used in recent months, I think it's a problem that has been going on for longer than that. There's been a long-term strategy or desire from the pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobby to have a definition of antisemitism that is so broad that it involves and includes any criticism of Israel. This has taken the form predominantly with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, which has two definition clauses and then several examples which refer to criticism of Israel. [Seven of the 11 "contemporary examples of antisemitism" included in the IHRA's definition of antisemitism refer to Israel—for example, "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination; e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" and "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation."] It has been pushed for adoption across most of the West, in Europe and the U.S., with varying degrees of success. This is extraordinarily problematic. I just did a PhD. If my university had adopted this definition of antisemitism, I would not have been able to, because I was looking into literature on Israel-Palestine.
My stance is that I'm anti-Zionist. I'm vehemently not antisemitic. I'm not anti-Jewish. I totally separate these two things, as do a lot of Jewish thinkers and writers. The two things should not be conflated. To be critical of Zionism has been upheld in this country recently by an employment tribunal. This was a small but significant victory. It's a philosophical belief. If you are anti-Zionist, you are opposed to a particular political ideology. It doesn't mean that you're opposed to people, a group of people, just because of their race, religion or ethnicity. It's something different.
What would help people to understand this situation better? What should they read? What do you recommend people do to understand this conflict and the history of this conflict and these people better?
Israel-Palestine is notoriously seen in the West as being extraordinarily difficult to understand. I don't think it is. I think that there is a very systematic pattern going on here of less Palestinians on the land and more land being gained by the Israelis state. It's less land for one group of people who aren't Jewish, and more land for Jewish people, whether they've emigrated there or converted, or however they've come to Israel. It's a settler-colonial project. I think that's the easiest way of understanding it.
In terms of the resources, I would group them in different ways. To start with literature, I would say read Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks, which is set in Ramallah, and won the Orwell Prize. It's a good understanding of the landscape and the history through a series of walks that he takes. It's very accessible—an easy read, and a good one for anyone who enjoys walking. There's also another book called Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry, which is set when the Israeli army went into Ramallah as well, a sort of diary. It's very funny, very light. There's also a historic novel, The Parisian, by Isabella Hammad. She's also written Enter Ghost, about a Hamlet play being put on in the West Bank.
I've recently read a fantastic series of essays by a young British-Palestinian writer, N.S. Nuseibeh, called Namesake. It's about being Palestinian, being mixed, being from East Jerusalem, from an old Jerusalem family. It's about your identity as an Arab, as a feminist. I also loved a really short book by Heba Hayek called Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, which was set when she was in her early 20s in the Tuffah area of Gaza, which sadly since has been mainly destroyed.
For Gazan writers, there's also Ahmed Masoud and Atef Abu Saif—Atef Abu Saif for an understanding of recent events. They've just managed to publish a series of his diary entries. He sent voice notes to his publisher in Manchester. It's a book called Don't Look Left, and it covers a period from October 7 to the end of the year. He managed to capture images and realities, and what happens to his family, and you follow him on that journey.
So those are fictive mainly, and memoir. There's a lot of Palestinian memoir. In terms of nonfiction books, I think a really interesting book I just read, which ties in to this idea of being in our echo chambers, and not dehumanizing, is a book by historian Avi Shlaim, called Three Worlds. He grew up in Iraq. There were Jews in Iraq for 3,000 years; it was a very established culture. They had to move to Israel when he was young. It's a really touching and beautiful memoir as to how difficult that move was for him, and how much he as an Arab Jew was discriminated against within Israel, and how much he was brainwashed into not seeing the Palestinians. For me, it was an eye-opener, because I've never read a book set in Israel which doesn't have the Palestinians on the periphery at least. I realized how blind Israeli society can be, particularly at that time, to our very existence, which I found shocking. But it also explained a lot to me as to how things have unfolded. Because they really were told that we just simply weren't there.
I think the Palestinian film industry is really taking off, both documentary and feature films—especially Farha, on Netflix, which is set in the Nakba. Also any films that you can get a hold of by Annemarie Jacir, Azza El-Hassan or Hany Abu-Assad. They're all great films. Some of them are thrillers. Some of them are romantic. Some are more meditative about what it means to return.
