A land without people: reflections on The Book of Disappearance

It all starts with a premise that is chillingly relevant: the disappearance of the Palestinian people. It happens overnight, and nobody knows how or why. In the wake of this mystery, Israeli citizens feel unsettled (pun intended). They can't stop thinking about those who've gone missing. Their Palestinian neighbors, bus drivers, laborers, and friends might be absent, but this absence is felt so tangibly that they almost become more present than ever. People begin to theorize obsessively about what might have caused the disappearance, coming to their own conclusions based on their personal politics. As questions and theories about the disappearance occupy (pun also intended) the minds of Israel's remaining population, it becomes clear that the Palestinian people can't fully vanish. They can disappear physically, but they live on in memory. No one forgets them. The concept of a Palestine without Palestinians, it turns out, is an oxymoron -- as is Palestinians without a Palestine, though the latter is also our actual reality.

Nobody ever definitively solves the book's central mystery, but readers can choose to believe any of the theories presented by various characters: divine intervention by the Jewish God, an ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military, or the commencement of a grand terrorist attack that can occur at any moment. The answer you find most convincing probably says something about how you yourself have chosen to interpret the last hundred years of history in the region. Before I picked up this book, someone told me the premise, and I predicted, based on my own political leanings, that I'd be drawn to theories that revolved around an ethnic cleansing, not because I ever wanted that explanation to be true but because it's so similar to my understanding of reality: the Palestinian people are already facing annihilation. If I were to read about the IDF actually pulling it off, I sadly wouldn't have to suspend my disbelief all that much. Surprisingly, however, I was never convinced of that explanation. The story doesn't provide much evidence that the Israeli military is capable of executing a total overnight genocide followed by a perfect cover up. I freely admit that my need for more evidence probably exposes some of the Zionists biases I may want to unlearn. At the same time, I take comfort in the fact that I'm resistant to believing in the possibility of an utter annihilation of the Palestinian people. It means that despite its dark subject matter, this book still offers hope, a good reminder that it's not too late for me to do whatever I can to help the people of Palestine.

Though I find myself unable to believe that the disappearance in the story is a result of an ethnic cleansing, the explanation I am most drawn to is one that still requires suspension of disbelief: I think that the Palestinian people magically left Israel to go to Palestine. At the beginning of the book (before the disappearance), one Palestinian grandmother sees a version of Jaffa that is not there in reality: the Palestinian interpretation of the city. She sees Jaffa as it could have been. She sees Jaffa as it used to be. She alone, with help from her memories of a time before the Nakba, experiences the true, original, or Palestinian version of Jaffa overlaid with the colonized city. It's possible that all Palestinian people have figured out how to travel to this truer -- but fantastical -- version of Jaffa and Palestine. They therefore leave Israel, and they go to this alternate reality. It explains why diasporic Palestinian refugees and their descendants are still around, but as soon as they cross the Israeli border, they too disappear: because instead of entering Israel, they enter Palestine.

An alternative fantastical explanation is that the cultural and geopolitical erasure that has plagued all Palestinian people for almost a hundred years has manifested on a more literal level overnight. It's a sadder theory, but one that is equally compelling to me.

(I can't say why I like magical explanations for the disappearance. Perhaps I am simply a fan of magical realism.)

Your Jaffa resembles mine, but it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each other ... I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. We call both cities 'Jaffa.'

Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance

I also want to talk about the plot. It revolves around a liberal Israeli journalist named Ariel. Ariel wants to figure out what happened to Alaa, his Palestinian neighbor. In disbelief over the disappearance, Ariel breaks into Alaa's apartment (a microcosm of the events that culminated in the Nakba), finds an old journal, and begins to read the highly personal musings of life under the occupation. In Alaa's physical absence, his memories fall into someone else's hands. Alaa's thoughts are for Ariel to interpret, translate into Hebrew, and draft into a book that he wants to write (and sell) about the disappearance. In other words, an Israeli man ends up with power over a story that doesn't belong to him. He can (and does) misappropriate it as he sees fit. It is, of course, all a metaphor for what is already happening in Israel. While the Palestinian people haven't literally disappeared, Zionism has always clung to the myth of "a land without people for a people without land." When visiting or immigrating to this land, many Zionists failed to note that it wasn't actually empty. They perhaps ignored that the inhabitants also counted as people. In the eyes of these Zionists, the disappearance had already happened, and what followed was the Nakba. To this day, those original inhabitants and their descendants who are still living in Israel and Palestine exist on the margins of society, and they experience erasure, appropriation, statelessness, and the threat of an ethnic cleansing. The victors -- the Zionists -- control the narrative in the same way that Ariel has power over Alaa's journal.

The irony is that Ariel is not the only one with access to Alaa's memories. In the real world, anyone can read The Book of Disappearance, including the parts that focus on Alaa's journal. We can likewise read the parts of the book that focus on Ariel's perspective, meaning the Zionist side of the narrative is also out of the Israeli character's control. Arguably Ariel's chapters are written in the third-person perspective to make his side of the story seem more authoritative, but his authority is artificial. The whole book is really in the control of a Palestinian author and her readers. Ibtisam Azem has claimed or reclaimed authority or authorship. According to the translator's note, Azem deliberately ends the novel with Alaa's journal open on a nightstand, symbolizing how his memories remain accessible to the rest of the world. His counternarrative is preserved, and his thoughts cannot be eradicated completely. The book is already open; we just need to read it.

By claiming authority over the story, Azem manages to privilege the Palestinian narrative over the Zionist one. It's not subtle. The story is rife with ungenerous, disingenuous, and outright inaccurate portrayals of Israel and its Jewish citizens, and it's clear the book is not actively trying to dig into Zionist ideology. It conflates the Six Day War with the Yom Kippur War; it puts Mizrahi Jews on a pedestal, while assuming the European Ashkenazim are the real problem; it makes antisemitism seem limited to Eastern Europe; it acts as though Jewish people from Arab countries cannot also be Zionists; in the English translation at least, there are inaccurate transliterations of Hebrew words; the one time it allows a leftist Israeli to speak, his words are cut off just to symbolize how this segment of the population is dying out; people refuse to be open-minded when given the chance, disrupting any potential for good plot and character development, all to ensure the book can extend its central metaphor as far as it can possibly go.

Some readers might find it maddening, but if you are frustrated by it, just remember that it's precisely how Palestinian individuals regularly feel when Israel and its allies privilege the Zionist narrative. It's also not as though the book lacks nuance entirely. It acknowledges that Palestinian rage, while more than justified, does not solve anything. It also acknowledges that Jewish people, as victims of various historical ills, have a right to their fear. (I don't mean to conflate Judaism with Zionism, but in this story, most of the focus is on people who are both Israeli and Jewish.) When the book makes the effort to be so nuanced (arguably more than it needs to be), the problem starts to look intractable. How can anyone solve a conflict if both sides have a mix of good and bad points? Is the only solution one in which all Palestinian people magically disappear overnight with no explanation?

Of course, the book isn't advocating for this eventuality. It most certainly doesn't portray the new normal in a positive light, instead committing itself to a tone of intense disquiet the moment the disappearance occurs. Azem is simply explaining why things like genocide, expulsion, war crimes, and magical alternatives to such atrocities persist as disgusting fantasies for so many Israeli citizens and their Zionist allies. If such a pipe dream starts to look like the best solution, it means something has gone seriously and devastatingly wrong. It means something needs to change before more people with power consider it sincerely. It means everyone involved needs to examine what mistakes they might have made to get to this point. It means people need to start thinking of ways to rectify and undo those mistakes. No one expects the process of freeing Palestine to be easy from start to finish, but the tragic alternative that this novel proposes is too disturbing to tolerate.