I experience every one of your sentences, both individually and in the aggregate, as a gift. In addition to the ones you highlighted, I could add many more that moved me to tears from feelings I have trouble naming. Being present to truth/veritas/emet does that to/for me.
Still, I pull and highlight these sentences and paragraph as the truthiest truth of all:
"All of this is love. It will not have sounded like love, because you have been taught that love sounds like agreement. It does not. Ask anyone who has ever been loved by someone brave. I love this maddening, luminous double helix of peoples, the arguers, the mourners, the grandmothers on both sides of the wire who stuff the same eggplant and scold in the same cadences and bury their dead below the same sky. Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
And I, a Jew of a particular age living in a devastatingly complex time, receive your love--and offer you mine. Never stop writing the wake-up calls, Mo.
You write like the brother I never had and didn't even know I wished for until I read your words today. And I know families fight, challenge and contend with one another, so I expect not to agree with all that you say. Yet, such love resonates in your prose, even withal there is pain and anger there as well. As a Jew, daughter of survivors, I know you acknowledge my generational anguish. I wish all my contemporaries, Jews everywhere (if that's not too much to ask) could acknowledge yours, too. May we all live in peace and equality from the river to the sea.
Mo, this piece is such a gift. So much heart, intellect, honesty, compassion, courage, integrity, truth, insight — not to mention incredibly good writing. Finding a quote to use in sharing your letter was a challenge, since it’s all quotation-worthy and also because the piece demands to be read in its entirety.
FWIW, this is exactly where I've landed and you put it perfectly: "If you ask me, as people always ask, which map I am for—one state, two states, confederation, some federation of cantons not yet drawn—I will tell you the truth that disqualifies me more often than not: I do not care. The map is furniture. I have watched grown men fight over the floor plan of a burning house while the fire extinguishers sit close to hand unused. What I want fits in a single sentence and requires no cartographer: every person between the river and the sea, free, safe, equal, and answerable to the same law, with the same law answerable to them, regardless of name, blood, faith, or flag.
Whatever architecture delivers that, I will support, and gladly. Whatever architecture withholds it, I will refuse..."
But more often than my preference, people tend to ask me what is possible. And that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Oh, my heart. The way you manage – over and over and over again – to stare harsh truths in the face, hold them up to the light, examine them from every prismatic angle, and speak them with such fierce, compassionate, and poetic clarity … I am in awe. What a gift you are to humanity, Mo: Palestinian brother of my Jewish soul.
This is a supremely beautiful piece of writing. So exact, so careful, so comfortable and also so challenging. Thank you for the honesty, but above all for ending it in love - the only thing that still makes sense in this shifty world. May the peoples of this world finally give you the grace and recognition you deserve, without requiring anything from you to earn or deserve it. And may the pain, fear and suffering cease.
My heart breaks for the little boy who answered the question, only to be suddenly rendered invisible/inconsequential/unworthy. This condition must be similar to what Gazans are experiencing now. Buildings turned to rubble, tents instead of rooms, prevented from entering the tunnels to avoid getting blown up. You’ve essentially been manipulated like puppets to serve the Islamists who can’t fathom having Jewish neighbors. I don’t accept that you and your people signed on for this destructive lifestyle. You’ve never had a reasonable, effective leader who works FOR you, not the other way around. And I’m angry that your people have been strung along for 78 years, kept as refugees instead of having a solid foundation to build a better future. Several times over the years, your people have been offered to settle permanently on Gaza/West Bank, but your leaders declined.
I hope and pray for a better, peaceful, and loving future for all who live there. I have no idea what that will look like, but nothing else has worked so far.
Thank you for the heart in this, especially the first lines. I felt them. And because you offered me real feelings, I owe you real honesty back, which means telling you where we agree and where I cannot follow you.
Where we agree: my leaders. You will get no defense of them from me. I wrote it in the piece, and I will say it again here: men who rule decades past any mandate, prisons that swallow their own critics, lives spent like coins. Hamas chose massacre as a strategy, and my people are buried in the bill. Your anger at that is my anger. We are aligned there, fully.
Here is where I cannot follow you. When you say my people have been manipulated like puppets, I know you mean it kindly; you are trying to spare us blame. But listen to what the kindness removes: our minds. A people cannot be puppets and also be a people.
We have wanted the same ordinary thing since long before Hamas existed (Hamas was born in 1987; my family's exile dates to 1948; the longing is older than both): to live on our own land under our own roof. That desire was not implanted by Islamists. Calling it manipulation is, gently, the schoolmaster's move from the top of my essay: it makes us mistaken about ourselves.
And in your telling of Gaza, the buildings fall, the tents rise, and the only actors in the story are Islamists and failed Palestinian leaders. Someone is missing from that story. The blockade has an author. The settlements have an author. The bombs that turned those buildings to rubble were not dropped by Hamas. I hold my side's men of blood to account by name, and the account is not complete until the other ledger is opened too.
As for the offers, that story is tidier than the record. What was actually on those tables, and what never was, is a long conversation, and historians, including Israeli ones, have complicated it well past the version most of us were handed. I will say only this: no one has ever offered my people the thing your comment assumes that we refused. This, again, where we have been denied the primacy of The Gospel and our perspectives relegated to The Gloss.
But your last paragraph I accept entirely, without an asterisk. I do not know what the better future looks like either. I only know it has to hold everyone, yours and mine both, and that people hoping for it from opposite directions is probably how it starts. So thank you. Truly.
I apologize for my poor word choice. It’s never my intention to insult you, I have too much respect for you. Thank you for sharing your sentiments, these issues are important and need to be discussed.
You came with your heart first and your honest read of things second, and that's exactly the kind of comment I wrote the piece for.
We see some of it differently, and that's not a problem to be smoothed over, it's the whole point. Two people who respect each other comparing maps of the same heartbreak is the conversation, the one that almost never happens, and you showed up for it with grace.
Your perspective matters to me, profoundly and you're ALWAYS welcome under anything I write, anytime, agreeing or not.
You open your soul in a way that you only can. I hear your rage, but I also feel your love. I understand what it is to live on the margins, as a Jewish Lesbian married to a Latina. I think that sometimes you diminish your own influence. Your words are shared widely. I share them, especially with my cousins in Israel, because yours is a voice and perspective that they rarely hear.
“All of this is love. It will not have sounded like love, because you have been taught that love sounds like agreement. It does not. Ask anyone who has ever been loved by someone brave.”
This whole piece is just profound and beautiful and rings so true but this part really got me because I have been loved by someone brave. They helped me open my mind and heart in ways that still affect me daily 15 years after their passing. And, no, love doesn’t sound like constant agreement at all.
Thank you for sharing your heart and mind with us, blessings to you.
Keeping in mind that we'll probably eventually land together in the same place, I'd like to know more about what you mean with this sentence, "I finally stopped justifying my existence Oct 7, 2023." As a Jew, October 7 changed everything for me and, TBH, I'm not quite sure what anything means. Not being flippant; truly in a bardo state re: identity.
The smell of your controlled burn has traveled far, reaching my nose, still acrid and burning the little hairs within. So many images that stopped my mind in its tracks, but here are a few:
"Suffering has never yet vaccinated anyone against becoming what they survived."
"I just want you to understand that what I have written here about soil and harvests, I know from the inside. The crop grows in me too. It grows in us all. Watered by the same seventy-eight years, and the difference between the men I condemn and me is only that I am able to put the thought down before morning, while they have built a politics out of keeping it alive. [...]The vigilance I insist on in others in these pages is the vigilance I demand of myself first, at the only checkpoint I have ever agreed to stand at, the one on the inside."
"A man who can see only the bigotry aimed at one tribe has not taken a position against bigotry. He has joined a team and issued his conscience a jersey. I am not on a team. I am against the thing."
"Equity can land like loss on anyone who begins from primacy; that is gravity, and I hold the feeling of vertigo against no one. But check the instruments before you trust them. The floor is level. It only feels tilted from where you were standing."
"Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
So many quotes stand out for me so I am glad you have repeated some here. The entire letter bears repeating and unpacking again and again. In this moment, the following 3 of those you typed out are profound:
"Suffering has never yet vaccinated anyone against becoming what they survived.”
"A man who can see only the bigotry aimed at one tribe has not taken a position against bigotry. He has joined a team and issued his conscience a jersey. I am not on a team. I am against the thing.”
"Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
I'm grateful that Debra Shushan linked to this piece in one of her recent posts. Your writing is exquisite, your words hold so much power, and your truth is profound. It's a message that needs to be shared far and wide. Thank you.
I experience every one of your sentences, both individually and in the aggregate, as a gift. In addition to the ones you highlighted, I could add many more that moved me to tears from feelings I have trouble naming. Being present to truth/veritas/emet does that to/for me.
Still, I pull and highlight these sentences and paragraph as the truthiest truth of all:
"All of this is love. It will not have sounded like love, because you have been taught that love sounds like agreement. It does not. Ask anyone who has ever been loved by someone brave. I love this maddening, luminous double helix of peoples, the arguers, the mourners, the grandmothers on both sides of the wire who stuff the same eggplant and scold in the same cadences and bury their dead below the same sky. Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
And I, a Jew of a particular age living in a devastatingly complex time, receive your love--and offer you mine. Never stop writing the wake-up calls, Mo.
Love you, sister! For this and many other reasons, besides :)
You write like the brother I never had and didn't even know I wished for until I read your words today. And I know families fight, challenge and contend with one another, so I expect not to agree with all that you say. Yet, such love resonates in your prose, even withal there is pain and anger there as well. As a Jew, daughter of survivors, I know you acknowledge my generational anguish. I wish all my contemporaries, Jews everywhere (if that's not too much to ask) could acknowledge yours, too. May we all live in peace and equality from the river to the sea.
Mo, this piece is such a gift. So much heart, intellect, honesty, compassion, courage, integrity, truth, insight — not to mention incredibly good writing. Finding a quote to use in sharing your letter was a challenge, since it’s all quotation-worthy and also because the piece demands to be read in its entirety.
FWIW, this is exactly where I've landed and you put it perfectly: "If you ask me, as people always ask, which map I am for—one state, two states, confederation, some federation of cantons not yet drawn—I will tell you the truth that disqualifies me more often than not: I do not care. The map is furniture. I have watched grown men fight over the floor plan of a burning house while the fire extinguishers sit close to hand unused. What I want fits in a single sentence and requires no cartographer: every person between the river and the sea, free, safe, equal, and answerable to the same law, with the same law answerable to them, regardless of name, blood, faith, or flag.
Whatever architecture delivers that, I will support, and gladly. Whatever architecture withholds it, I will refuse..."
But more often than my preference, people tend to ask me what is possible. And that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Sending love.
Same, Debra.
🙏❤️🙏❤️🙏
Oh, my heart. The way you manage – over and over and over again – to stare harsh truths in the face, hold them up to the light, examine them from every prismatic angle, and speak them with such fierce, compassionate, and poetic clarity … I am in awe. What a gift you are to humanity, Mo: Palestinian brother of my Jewish soul.
This is a supremely beautiful piece of writing. So exact, so careful, so comfortable and also so challenging. Thank you for the honesty, but above all for ending it in love - the only thing that still makes sense in this shifty world. May the peoples of this world finally give you the grace and recognition you deserve, without requiring anything from you to earn or deserve it. And may the pain, fear and suffering cease.
Dear Mo I wept throughout. Thank you for your honesty and your staying on the page, in the page, in the fight for justice with love.
I have missed seeing you and glad to find you here.
This: “ If I did not love you, I would not wake you.” Thank you for being brave enough to keep knocking at the door, OUR door, waking us up.
May the vision of peace among us as cousins be a reality soon, in our time. No more babies hurt.
My heart breaks for the little boy who answered the question, only to be suddenly rendered invisible/inconsequential/unworthy. This condition must be similar to what Gazans are experiencing now. Buildings turned to rubble, tents instead of rooms, prevented from entering the tunnels to avoid getting blown up. You’ve essentially been manipulated like puppets to serve the Islamists who can’t fathom having Jewish neighbors. I don’t accept that you and your people signed on for this destructive lifestyle. You’ve never had a reasonable, effective leader who works FOR you, not the other way around. And I’m angry that your people have been strung along for 78 years, kept as refugees instead of having a solid foundation to build a better future. Several times over the years, your people have been offered to settle permanently on Gaza/West Bank, but your leaders declined.
I hope and pray for a better, peaceful, and loving future for all who live there. I have no idea what that will look like, but nothing else has worked so far.
💜🫂💜
Thank you for the heart in this, especially the first lines. I felt them. And because you offered me real feelings, I owe you real honesty back, which means telling you where we agree and where I cannot follow you.
Where we agree: my leaders. You will get no defense of them from me. I wrote it in the piece, and I will say it again here: men who rule decades past any mandate, prisons that swallow their own critics, lives spent like coins. Hamas chose massacre as a strategy, and my people are buried in the bill. Your anger at that is my anger. We are aligned there, fully.
Here is where I cannot follow you. When you say my people have been manipulated like puppets, I know you mean it kindly; you are trying to spare us blame. But listen to what the kindness removes: our minds. A people cannot be puppets and also be a people.
We have wanted the same ordinary thing since long before Hamas existed (Hamas was born in 1987; my family's exile dates to 1948; the longing is older than both): to live on our own land under our own roof. That desire was not implanted by Islamists. Calling it manipulation is, gently, the schoolmaster's move from the top of my essay: it makes us mistaken about ourselves.
And in your telling of Gaza, the buildings fall, the tents rise, and the only actors in the story are Islamists and failed Palestinian leaders. Someone is missing from that story. The blockade has an author. The settlements have an author. The bombs that turned those buildings to rubble were not dropped by Hamas. I hold my side's men of blood to account by name, and the account is not complete until the other ledger is opened too.
As for the offers, that story is tidier than the record. What was actually on those tables, and what never was, is a long conversation, and historians, including Israeli ones, have complicated it well past the version most of us were handed. I will say only this: no one has ever offered my people the thing your comment assumes that we refused. This, again, where we have been denied the primacy of The Gospel and our perspectives relegated to The Gloss.
But your last paragraph I accept entirely, without an asterisk. I do not know what the better future looks like either. I only know it has to hold everyone, yours and mine both, and that people hoping for it from opposite directions is probably how it starts. So thank you. Truly.
Sending you all the love.
Thank you for elaborating fully and clearly.
I apologize for my poor word choice. It’s never my intention to insult you, I have too much respect for you. Thank you for sharing your sentiments, these issues are important and need to be discussed.
Be well.
💜
Please don't apologize, truly.
I didn't take a single word of it as an insult.
You came with your heart first and your honest read of things second, and that's exactly the kind of comment I wrote the piece for.
We see some of it differently, and that's not a problem to be smoothed over, it's the whole point. Two people who respect each other comparing maps of the same heartbreak is the conversation, the one that almost never happens, and you showed up for it with grace.
Your perspective matters to me, profoundly and you're ALWAYS welcome under anything I write, anytime, agreeing or not.
Be well right back.
Mo,
You open your soul in a way that you only can. I hear your rage, but I also feel your love. I understand what it is to live on the margins, as a Jewish Lesbian married to a Latina. I think that sometimes you diminish your own influence. Your words are shared widely. I share them, especially with my cousins in Israel, because yours is a voice and perspective that they rarely hear.
You are very kind to me! Thank you! :)
Beautifully written. This reached my heart.❤️
This is the best writing I've read in a while. Thank you, many times over. Peace be with us all.
“All of this is love. It will not have sounded like love, because you have been taught that love sounds like agreement. It does not. Ask anyone who has ever been loved by someone brave.”
This whole piece is just profound and beautiful and rings so true but this part really got me because I have been loved by someone brave. They helped me open my mind and heart in ways that still affect me daily 15 years after their passing. And, no, love doesn’t sound like constant agreement at all.
Thank you for sharing your heart and mind with us, blessings to you.
Sending you love and much gratitude for your kind words!
I understand. As a Jewish woman, I finally stopped justifying my existence Oct 7, 2023.
Keeping in mind that we'll probably eventually land together in the same place, I'd like to know more about what you mean with this sentence, "I finally stopped justifying my existence Oct 7, 2023." As a Jew, October 7 changed everything for me and, TBH, I'm not quite sure what anything means. Not being flippant; truly in a bardo state re: identity.
The smell of your controlled burn has traveled far, reaching my nose, still acrid and burning the little hairs within. So many images that stopped my mind in its tracks, but here are a few:
"Suffering has never yet vaccinated anyone against becoming what they survived."
"I just want you to understand that what I have written here about soil and harvests, I know from the inside. The crop grows in me too. It grows in us all. Watered by the same seventy-eight years, and the difference between the men I condemn and me is only that I am able to put the thought down before morning, while they have built a politics out of keeping it alive. [...]The vigilance I insist on in others in these pages is the vigilance I demand of myself first, at the only checkpoint I have ever agreed to stand at, the one on the inside."
"A man who can see only the bigotry aimed at one tribe has not taken a position against bigotry. He has joined a team and issued his conscience a jersey. I am not on a team. I am against the thing."
"Equity can land like loss on anyone who begins from primacy; that is gravity, and I hold the feeling of vertigo against no one. But check the instruments before you trust them. The floor is level. It only feels tilted from where you were standing."
"Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
Thank you, Mo.
Thank you for reading it, sister. Genuinely grateful for the gift of your time and attention. Much love!
So many quotes stand out for me so I am glad you have repeated some here. The entire letter bears repeating and unpacking again and again. In this moment, the following 3 of those you typed out are profound:
"Suffering has never yet vaccinated anyone against becoming what they survived.”
"A man who can see only the bigotry aimed at one tribe has not taken a position against bigotry. He has joined a team and issued his conscience a jersey. I am not on a team. I am against the thing.”
"Rage that has been held this long, examined this closely, and has still refused to curdle into hatred, is what love sounds like after seventy-eight years in the waiting room. If I did not love you, I would not wake you."
This is a beautiful essay. I have felt every word of it all my life.
Nadia, thank you, sister. Genuinely grateful that it connected with you. Much love.
This is a beautiful piece. It made me cry and I wish I could give you a hug.
You are very kind, sister. Thank you
I'm grateful that Debra Shushan linked to this piece in one of her recent posts. Your writing is exquisite, your words hold so much power, and your truth is profound. It's a message that needs to be shared far and wide. Thank you.