May 17 2023

Kaleem Hawa went to Tel Aviv in 2019. No, that’s not quite right. “In the spring of 2019, I visited Palestine to see friends and family,” Hawa writes. “I grew up in Canada and spent summers in Beirut, where my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins live. I decided I would travel to what we refer to as ‘1948 Palestine,’ to finally see my grandparents’ old homes in Haifa, Jaffa and Akka. I knew the trip would include Tel Aviv.” Tel Aviv is quiet and green, an urban anomaly “built on several depopulated Palestinian towns and villages.” Hawa makes out with a boy in a bar and visits the house his great-grandfather rented at the time of the Nakba. Hawa sees the money flowing from America and passes by The Sackler Faculty of Medicine, where the bodies of murdered Palestinians are held, out of reach, away from their families. Hawa’s fantastic essay is as calm as it is angry: “While the fanatical settler foot soldiers that roam the frontier are perhaps the most visible parts of the Israeli project, a quieter enemy remains at work — the state’s bureaucratic violences, dressed as system planners and administrators.”