When I was a child, I used to wish the news would slow down. I imagined it announcing the killings in Gaza and the West Bank one at a time—just one today, and then one tomorrow—so we could say each name like a prayer. So that each life would have its moment, its weight. But even then, I knew there would be too many, and eventually we would run out of days.

In our family, the news was always more than headlines; it was a family affair, even when none of us kids were old enough to watch, let alone have our parents discuss it with us. When the scenes on Al Jazeera were horrific, beyond words, our parents sat in silence, letting the images speak for themselves—as if to prepare us for what we could one day encounter at school, while playing soccer, or walking in the streets of our neighborhood—as if a child could ever be ready for such a thing.

Sometimes we watched the news after dinner, or even during it when new reports kept breaking, the kitchen table pushed into the living room so we could gather around the television. On those nights, as the news anchors spoke and the horrific scenes rolled across the screen, my grandmother would often sit beside me on the sofa, her thumb rubbing olive oil into my hair and over my neck. Under the flicker of the TV, she’d whisper the names of streets, people, and families from her old neighborhood in Haifa that she and my grandfather, may his soul rest in peace, had left behind, stitching them into my ear.

While my dad flipped through the channels, some anchors said “unrest,” but my grandmother said “home.” Some counted bodies; she counted her siblings and cousins by name. Even as a child I felt the gap between what the TV said and what my grandmother whispered. I began to understand that the Palestine I carried lived mostly in my grandmother, in my parents, in my cousins, in my classmates, in my school, in our Hebron alleyways, in our stories, smells, and names—things that would never appear in the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Later, I learned to mute the television or to pause the frame of a video, to shut off the words, the commentary, the scrolling numbers, and look only at the image. In that quiet, without interpretation, you start to wonder differently: What is left out of the frame? What does the headline refuse to name? The smell of thyme or olives or zaatar, the gesture of a checkpoint soldier, the voice of my grandmother are all missing from the broadcast. The anthropologist Julie Peteet would later call this the violence of language, but my grandmother had already shown me how to read its silences.

When I turned the sound back on and flipped through channels, I could not find a single truth about Palestine, only a spectrum of narrations. The click of the remote became its own translation exercise: On Israeli state channels—terrorists, militants, Jew-haters,human animals, pallywood, self-defense. On liberal Western outlets—cycle of violence, flare-up, both sides. On Al Jazeera Arabic, our pain and plight were sliced and remixed into feeds and reels, looped 24/7, curated for Arab audiences and translated into our vocabularies. On Al Jazeera English, the register shifted: Palestine placed beside Mexico’s femicides or global climate catastrophes, balancing the narrative for global audiences. Each outlet tells its own version of Palestine to its audience—but never our version, no matter how close they get. On every screen, our lives appear only as interpretation—clipped, framed, edited, narrated—until the story of Palestine no longer belongs to us, the Palestinians, the ones living it.

Words are never neutral, Peteet writes. They are interventions—tools of power that shape what is seen, what is grieved, what is allowed. Security fence conceals apartheid wall. Checkpoint displaces imprisonment. Curfew eclipses occupation. Community or neighborhood or Yishuvim replaces illegal settlement. Clash implies symmetry where there is none. Cycle of violence erases the beginning. Militant replaces the name of a boy with a stone. Operation replaces massacre. Collateral damage replaces family. Words do not simply describe the world; they make it, and they unmake it. They decide whose grief is visible, whose death counts, whose name is said. I knew this long before I had the vocabulary for it, sitting with my grandmother’s thumb still oily in my hair.

Just as I had once listened to names whispered beside the flickering TV, I later found myself passing them on—reading aloud to my niece, on the balcony of my uncle’s house in Hebron, lists published by the Ministry of Health of entire Gazan families wiped out, as the news scrolled past. Sixty thousand dead so far. Hundreds more overnight. Bodies recovered, unnamed. No name survived inside those numbers. No name made it onto the screen.

My niece, still in elementary school, sat beside me with a marker, drawing small circles for each name she heard. The ink on her fingers had barely dried before I noticed how these names could vanish as easily as they were written. One moment a story lived in her circles; the next, the news would flatten it into numbers, blur it into a frame. The page soon filled, and she asked what to do when she ran out of space. I watched her thumb smudge the ink across the paper, a tiny black crescent staining her skin.I told her I’d buy her a new book and how I wished it were that simple.She looked up, eyes wide, and said, “Do the circles count if no one says their names?” Years later, at Oxford University, I would study Judith Butler’s concept of grievability—on how frames decide which deaths matter and which vanish—but my niece had already asked the question. She had already known, in her own way, what it meant for a life not to be grievable.

In that moment, as ink smudged across the page, I understood how remembrance passes from one generation to the next—how grief and memory are woven into life itself. How naming is itself an act of survival. This is why we name our children after the martyrs, after the dead. My cousin named his son Iyad for his uncle shot at a checkpoint. My niece bears the name Raneen for her cousin killed in an airstrike.Each name a link, a fate, a promise.Each name a breath returned, a small act of refusal—a way of saying: you tried to erase this person, but now every time a teacher calls their name at school, or we call them to dinner, we will speak that name again and again until it is answered.

When my cousin named his son Rasmi—after a handsome boy of four whose image went viral after he was killed by a drone in Gaza while playing under a pine tree—he placed a tiny pine branch above baby Rasmi’s crib, so the child would sleep beneath the same branch the absent boy once played under. The leaf curled and dried, but it still hung there, a green ghost above a new life, a lullaby, a vow, tying the newborn to the loss his name carries, to the soil, to the story,to the earth that still waits for him, and the rest of us.

And it wasn’t only in our cradles that we kept the names; they spilled out of the houses—onto our streets, into our neighborhoods, across our walls, into our schools. My own school in Hebron was called the School of Martyrs. Not its official name, but the one that fit, because so many of my schoolmates were killed, because so many desks sat empty, because their absence filled the rooms more than our voices ever could. The school belonged to them now. To go to school was to walk through a litany of the dead, and to learn their names was part of our alphabet.

And yet, moving through those streets and classrooms, surrounded by absent voices and empty desks, while still watching the screens, I began to sense how the story of our lives, of our Palestine, was never fully ours alone. Every name, every life carried in our neighborhoods and our families could be unseen, unremembered, flattened, and erased by the words of others.

Words have been building all kinds of walls around us, establishing boundaries without moving a single stone, fencing us out of our own story, of our own Palestine. Some lives become televised funerals, some body counts, some nothing at all, like my schoolmates. And so the violence of words—spoken or unspoken—runs alongside the violence of weapons. Both kill. Both bury. Both decide who will be remembered and who will be erased.

Naming isn’t just about survival—it is also an act of resistance. Memory must be carried in our hands, our names, our streets, our voices. Because what reaches the world through our screens is only a shadow of us and our Palestine, a fragment of life leaking elsewhere—not faces, not names, but distortions.

And yet, beyond the reach of any broadcast, we live our daily lives. We remember. We carry our nieces’ circles and notebooks, the names we carve under empty school desks, our grandmothers’ old houses in Haifa, the lemon trees in their backyards, and their murdered fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, sisters, and brothers. We bring to life a Palestine no caption can contain, no border can fence, no screen can hold—a Palestine with no name, no geography—a Palestine we keep breathing into being each time we speak it, each time we hold it in.

Somewhere, in the broken music of our words, we speak our Palestine—and through us, it speaks back. ■

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