[Syracuse University Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon
Vast, empty land signifying endless potential is core to the settler colonial imagination. There are no natives—no culture or tradition of note: only a blank canvas to mold and conquer. That is, until the indigenous population forces acknowledgement of their presence, becoming a nuisance and eventually an existential threat that must be neutralized at all costs. We know by now the high price of colonial wish fulfillment, given that history is full of dark lessons. The violence that inevitably results from the vacuous, romantic fantasy of a vanquished landscape has reshaped our world and continues to do so, as seen by the numerous convulsions currently happening throughout the SWANA region. The ongoing genocide in Gaza—and now, what appears to be a genocidal war in Sudan—are ugly reminders of just how far certain nations will go to wipe out another entity to ascertain control, wealth, and material comfort. Or, in the complicated specificity of Israel’s history, an elusive desire for safety that may never materialize.
Ibtisam Azem’s haunting novel The Book of Disappearance is an audacious work of speculative fiction that explores what happens when the colonizer’s wish to vanish indigenous peoples comes true. One quiet, unremarkable day, Palestinian-Israeli citizens—as well as Palestinians living in nearby Gaza and the West Bank—suddenly disappear without a trace. The people forming much of Israel’s reliable workforce, the psychological foil against which mores and cultural norms are measured, have left without a whisper of discontent. Palestinians—even those who possess Israeli citizenship—have long functioned under a cloak of invisibility. Their thoughts, feelings, and historical attachment to the land are willfully ignored, and their existence poses an aggravation for most Jewish-Israelis, if not a total menace. But now, once they’re truly gone in the novel’s universe, they leave Jewish-Israeli society deeply unsettled. With this mysterious occurrence, the story raises several questions that dissect the nature of the settler colonial project.
The Book of Disappearance was published in Arabic in 2014 by Dar al-Jamal in Beirut and translated into English by Iraqi poet and novelist Sinan Antoon in 2019. The author’s second book (the first being The Sleep Thief, published in 2011), this novel feels more prescient than ever given the real-time attempt to obliterate Palestinians, which the world has unfortunately witnessed for more than a year. Through evocative prose and incisive characterization, Azem has performed a small miracle: a short novel that powerfully scrutinizes every element of contemporary Israeli society, and the illusory narratives driving the endeavor.
While many characters briefly infiltrate the pages of The Book of Disappearance, two male protagonists anchor its central premise: Alaa and Ariel. Alaa is a Palestinian-Israeli freelance cameraman living in Tel Aviv, haunted by the stories his grandmother shared with him of the 1948 Nakba. Ariel is a Jewish-Israeli journalist who also lives in Tel Aviv, the son of ardent liberal zionists. While both are friends—or, at least, friendly—there’s a palpable undercurrent of tension driving their interactions. After Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel finds himself obsessed with understanding where he has gone, his search forming the disturbing nucleus of the story.
Right before the disappearance occurs—or, as news media depicted in the novel calls it, “the ‘cleanest’ campaign of ethnic cleansing” the world has ever seen—Alaa is obsessed with Jaffa, remembering his grandmother Tata’s stories of her displacement and becoming a refugee. Jaffa was once the central hub of historic Palestine, but it was gradually annexed into Tel Aviv after the 1948 Nakba. The renaming of streets and towns from Arabic to Hebrew is one of the novel’s central motifs, illustrating the state’s need to eradicate any signifiers of Palestinian identity. However, the novel also points to the absurd nature of that enterprise. There’s a passage early on wherein Alaa remembers his family’s disdain for the name “Tel Aviv,” which is Hebrew for “The Hill of Spring,” even though there are no hills in that particular part of the country. The attempt at erasure is equal parts brutal and darkly comedic, given that the new naming conventions were spearheaded by people who lacked familiarity with the land. The fight over language is just one of the things Palestinian-Israelis must navigate. The other is the inability to heal; the past is a hot iron rod flicked over the skin of collective memory time and again. As one character puts it, “You wait your whole life and keep talking about the past. But the past grows bigger and devours you.”
The story seamlessly jumps from different viewpoints: Alaa, who goes through his own process of decolonization; his mirror image, Ariel, whose denial about the nature of the state of Israel becomes harder to face; and finally, various elements of Israeli society contending with the disappearance and its meaning. We soon learn that Alaa was keeping his thoughts on Palestine and Tata in a red notebook, which Ariel finds shortly after he decides to stay in his friend’s apartment in an effort to help solve the mystery. Alaa’s observations on contemporary Israeli society every so often puncture Ariel’s confidence in the morality of the state project, but not enough for him to disavow it completely.
In short, lyrical chapters, Azem gives voice to the diverse perspectives animating Israeli culture. There’s the farm owner who expresses disgust and then overwhelming anxiety when he realizes that the Palestinian laborers operating the farm are not, in fact, on strike. There’s a nod to the tragedy of Jews of Arab origin (now largely referred to as Mizrahi Jews) who have had to eradicate any trace of their Arab identity in order to assimilate into Israeli society, which held their “Arabness” in contempt. Then, in a few fascinating passages, Azem imagines how the disappearance of the Palestinians would be covered by the media. First, there’s the overwhelming paranoia and chauvinism which undergirds everything in Israeli society. The political establishment is convinced that the disappearance is the start of a massive terrorist operation, or, a nefarious plot from one of Israel’s many enemies to convict the country of genocide. Amidst the confusion, there are glimmers of a barely suppressed elation, a feeling that finally, no one has to answer the Palestinian question, that Israelis have achieved their long quest for security.
While The Book of Disappearance does refer to the extremist settlers whose expansionist dreams are being fulfilled by this seismic event, they are depicted as little more than fringe outliers on the political scene. This tactic allows for a more complicated and nuanced argument to take shape: the rot animating the current makeup of Israeli society can be traced to the lies behind its founding, and to the neoliberals who turn a blind eye to its many abuses.
People like Ariel revel in the sultry, humid nights of easy going Tel Aviv. Deep down, they are aware of something awry underneath the patina surface, but refuse to ask too many questions. The contradictions at the heart of the state’s founding—anachronistically colonizing land just as other countries began the process of decolonization—illustrate the fissures coloring the society’s perspectives, as well as Ariel’s state of denial. One instance later in the novel reveals his hemming and hawing over the Jaffa oranges Palestinians hold so dear. He thinks:
It’s true the Jaffans had developed the shamouti oranges eighty years before, and that Jaffa oranges were a registered trademark before Herzl thought of zionism. His grandfather never denied that, but the knowhow brought by the men and women who came from established empires is what developed the country. He’s not a colonizer.
He continues this line of thought for a bit longer, mulling over his family history in relation to Israel and its indigenous population. Like most liberal Zionists, he should know better, but he cannot bring himself to admit that the Israeli state in its current iteration does not work. Ariel’s moral ambiguity is the book’s most curious magic trick: Azem doesn’t villainize him, but his ability to understand the fallacy of Israel’s myths while bullishly ignoring them raises important questions about the flimsiness of the country’s founding ideology. It is morally porous, but Ariel—like other Israelis born and raised in the country—is unable to dismantle the propagandist stories he’s been told. To do so, as he allows himself to admit at one point, would mean to leave the country in disgust, or imagine an entirely different future not led by nationalistic dreams of eliminating the “other” —neither of which he’s prepared to do.
In contrast, Alaa’s musings (as they appear in his diary), contend with painful histories through a slightly different lens: “Maybe when we are born in such a place, on a cradle of disasters, we always search for riveting stories about surviving life and death. Because “normal” stories don’t resemble us. We no longer see ourselves in our stories.” The stories of displacement cannot be erased by the relentless propagandizing performed by the Israeli state. But the efforts to bury them and twist their meanings magnify the all-consuming pain experienced by the indigenous people.
Besides the material disappearance of the Palestinian population, there are other forms of disappearance alluded to in the novel. There’s the erasure of the Palestinians’s long history in the land, the continued attempt to push their perspective out of the frame. They have been excluded from the history books, belittled at the negotiating table, their olive trees burned to the ground and their homes reoccupied by strangers. The extreme lengths to which the state goes to render them invisible is far reaching but ultimately ineffective. For that reason, their disappearance in the book is not an event that robs them of their autonomy. On the contrary, Palestinians cast a long and powerful shadow that Israelis find remarkably difficult to shake. Azem eloquently says as much in an interview she gave to ArabLit in September 2024:
There is another dimension in terms of liberating the Palestinian body. There is a power in the sudden act of disappearance in the novel, which takes place without a single drop of blood being shed. It is a power that gives the Palestinians control over space . . . This disappearance, which should relieve the Israelis, becomes a greater source of fear and anxiety for them. It also gives space for the Palestinians to reconstruct their bodies in relationship with the motherland, Palestine.
Many of Israel’s ardent defenders will say that all the country wants is security. A happy ending to the traumas suffered by European Jews, a sense of tranquility. But what is the price for that desire, and can it ever be achieved without a genuine reckoning with history, without acknowledging the humanity of the Palestinians? At the moment, it seems that the Israeli military apparatus, its moneyed backers in the West, and the majority of Israelis somehow think this is possible.
But as The Book of Disappearance illustrates, that wishful thinking relies on half-truths and outright lies. In the midst of their jubilation—the relief that they may never need to worry about diplomatic solutions or the politics of occupation again—there is the paranoid fear that the Palestinians may come back, like ghosts with unfinished business. So much of Israeli national identity is built as an oppositional stance: They’re markedly different than their backward Arab neighbors; they’re defenders of Western ideals in an inhospitable region, alluded to as the “only democracy in the Middle East” or “the villa in the jungle,” as former prime minister Ehud Barak once said, etc. But, once the people you’ve measured your entire existence against are gone, who are you?
The novel ends on an eerie note—there are no easy resolutions, no sweeping epiphanies. The Israelis may have won their long battle against the Palestinians, but the rote mythologies holding the state together are marked by their frailty, their hollowness. The overwhelming sense of loss, of ruptured memory that afflicts Palestinians will now glom onto the Israelis. A haunted prize if ever there was one.
Yasmin Desouki is an audiovisual archivist, writer, and curator.
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