An Excerpt from “The Hollow Half” by Sarah Aziza
Author’s note: This excerpt includes references to my grandmother’s village of ‘Ibdis, which was ethnically cleansed by Zionist armies in the Nakba of 1948. My father glimpsed the rubble of ʿIbdis once before, when he was able to cross over from the Gaza Strip with his mother in the 1970s. However, ongoing erasure threatens even these remains.
In 2012, I spent the summer of my sophomore year volunteering at a Palestinian charity in the West Bank city of Nablus. My previous visits to Palestine had been heady, headlong and painfully brief—but this time, I would be settled in one place for several spacious months. The long, almost mundane hours were a revelation. Palestine emerging, returning from the obscurity of symbols, entering my body as routine.
The organization provided lodging in a villa at the top of one of Nablus’s many hills, which I shared with a rotating cast of foreign volunteers. The house was grand and crumbling beautifully, full of evening wind. I slept on the second floor, in a room with wide stone tiles and an unscreened window that opened to a quiet street. Across from me slept a French Egyptian woman who made long bilingual phone calls. In the morning, I boiled Turkish coffee in the tiny second kitchen down the hall. Waiting for the steam, I pulled aside a fraying curtain to watch the slopes and buildings blooming pink.
My mornings brimmed, rich in children. I arrived early each day to greet dozens, ages three through eight. For the next several hours, I helped local teachers orchestrate art projects and games. Once shy around children, in Nablus I learned to kneel to their level, look them in the eyes. There, I glimpsed multitudes wide as any adult’s, each one a shifting pattern of desires, questions, and moods. Emerging miracles, each one with their own terms.
My Arabic tongue loosened, my throat filling with remembered, or inherited, words.
This job was the first time since my own childhood that I moved fully in Arabic. While I had returned to the language years before, this had come in the form of classes or sporadic conversations. Those Nablus mornings, there was no classroom formality, no sense of scrutiny. Any stumbles in grammar or conjugation dissolved into the bright chaos, and the children’s replies did not miss a beat. Khaltu! they called to me. Auntie, look! They waved fingerpainted pages, glitter on their elbows, in their hair. My Arabic tongue loosened, my throat filling with remembered, or inherited, words. I smiled for hours straight.
On my way home, I crossed the city center, past the fruit market, bakeries, and knafeh shops. I made the rounds often, filling bags with tomatoes, mint, pomegranates, and a few pieces of pita, their bellies still full of steam. I stopped for the thick, syrupy cheese pastry last. Knafeh was an indulgence I’d eat only partially, tucking the rest away in its wax for a later that might never come. Each bite was a delight so rich I’d wonder how it made me feel so innocent. I slipped my slice inside a pita, East Nabulsi style, laughing back at the shopkeepers who delighted at my taste. Nabulsiya! Many became friends, introducing me to their children and wives, hosting me for Friday meals. They claimed me, calling me bint Ziyad, though they’d never met my father. A signal of my honor, their respect.
Evenings, I sat with fellow volunteers on the stone balcony that wrapped around the second floor. As the hot air cooled to a marble breeze, I watched the hills drop into darkness. A moment later, they blinked back to life with the lights of nearby towns and refugee camps. In some, I could track headlights, their glow sliding along roads and slopes. Framed by the still dusk, it all felt close enough to hear the hum of these engines, the murmur of those neighborhoods.
But in the night, there was no way to know what web of obstacles lay between me and each glittering hill. Flying checkpoints, or the gun of a vengeful soldier, or an armed settler with bloodthirst.
I spent several afternoons each week outside the city teaching in Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. There, I saw the evidence of Balata’s famed fierce resistance—posters of martyrs, faded and new, layered on bullet-ridden walls. The streets were narrow, poor, and overcast with its heavy history—decades of battle with Zionist forces, whose state-of-the-art weaponry has only intensified the rebellion in hearts and limbs.1
Back in Nablus, my Palestinian friends warned me to stay near home after dark. Raids were common in Balata, but Israeli soldiers might also enter Nablus by night, bursting into family homes. Boys and men often disappeared in this way, detained for months or years without recourse or charge. Nicknamed Jabal an-Nar2 for its own ardent history of insurgency, Nablus could at times feel autonomous, but as all Palestinian cities, it remained circumscribed. Above us, the sky sometimes ripped with Israeli F-16s. They dove low enough to chatter our teeth, fast enough to break the sound barrier, just to thunder a reminder of their lurking might.
On the outskirts of the city, new settlement outposts were appearing atop hills, driving Palestinian families off their farms. Each encroachment created new frontiers for violence. Palestinians enroute to school or work risked the dogs and bullets of settlers, and the soldiers who amassed to defend the illegal seizure of land. The safety I felt in Nablus was only as large as the space between human hearts.
Late that summer, I took a car west. After a few winding, road-choked hours, I approached the boundary between the West Bank and ’483. I felt my body rolling up like a scroll. A thousand microclenches, the press of my back against the seat. My inner music, which had grown so free, dropped to static. I pushed my thoughts inside this silence, ejecting Nablus and Balata, erasing friends’ faces, burying my family name. As if thoughts alone might reveal me, the truth wafting off me like a scent.4
The checkpoint came into sight. My veins burned like ice. As an American citizen, my presence in the West Bank was not illegal, but it would raise suspicion. Israeli forces often targeted foreigners suspected of solidarity with Palestinians. Just a few weeks before, one of my fellow volunteers, an Australian, had been detained, interrogated, and deported with a lifetime ban.
Some debasement seemed unavoidable, compromise built into the mechanisms that allowed me to be in Palestine at all.
Still, it was my Americanness that I would rely on when I reached the soldiers. Here, for once, I was grateful for my blond hair, the native English on my tongue. It was not uncommon for an IDF soldier to flirt with me, and if I managed a smile, I was occasionally waved through. Such interactions made me sick, as did every mercy my passport afforded me. Yet some debasement seemed unavoidable, compromise built into the mechanisms that allowed me to be in Palestine at all.5
This time, I was lucky. Nearing sunset, the soldiers looked drowsy, bored as they stood around the small station where I submitted my bag to be searched. I waited somewhere outside my body as they scanned my documents. I tried to look un-Palestinian, to mimic their slack, entitled stance as I leaned on one leg, hip cocked. I passed through. On the other side, I sank into a soup of adrenaline. As I felt the prickling wash of relief, I spoke to my driver—we’d both been mostly silent, as if afraid to disturb the gods before rolling our dice.
I was so nervous . . .
I know. But don’t be afraid.
But what if they kick me out, ban me?
Yes, they can do anything they want. But one has to try one’s best. This is your وطن. Don’t be afraid.
My father and brother greeted me in Jerusalem. We hugged, the grit of worry slowly shedding from our foreheads. It had been an anxious day, the three of us facing the Israeli border separately—they’d come through the Jordanian crossing shortly before I entered from the north. My brother, two years younger than me, now taller, sat beside me on the bed. This felt like a miracle, as it did whenever one of us made it across a border created, first and foremost, to exclude us. We went to bed early. The next morning, we would search for ʿIbdis.
The trip had been my father’s idea. It was rare for him to peer so intently toward the past—even in our first visit to Palestine together, it was the present he pointed to. But with his son interning with him in Saudi Arabia and his eldest daughter stationed, however briefly, in the West Bank, his imagination began to turn. That summer, we practiced a different life, glimpsed a hologram world. One in which we had not bound ourselves to Amreeka. One in which our bodies slept on this land.
I agreed to this search, but ʿIbdis was a word so unknown to me, even my curiosity was vague. On the two-hour drive south from Jerusalem, I watched the landscape shift from rich green to arid plains. Off and on, our route skimmed along the hulking separation wall that cleaved through the West Bank. Beyond, Jewish settlements, whole towns and cities of them, perched on Palestinian hills. My father sighed periodically, shaking his head and muttering angry appeals to Allah. Astaghfur . . . I felt the mixture of fury and impotence that had become familiar. Beside me, my brother said nothing.
I was dozing when our car moved off the highway and onto a rattling dirt road. I sat up to see a parched brown field. In the distance, a line of electrical towers partitioned the sky. Emerging from the parked car, my father squinted, scraping the landscape for clues. A few printed pages of directions, gathered from a crowdsourced Palestinian database, fluttered in his hand. It’s changed . . . he murmured. Brittle, bleached grass clutched the razed earth. Pale watermelons dotted the dirt.6 Silence blistered our skin.
My father fixed his sights on a massive, shimmering sycamore tree in the middle distance. He began to walk, my brother and I following, watching as he bent to pick up a stick. He flicked it left and right, the low wind carrying his murmured memories: My mother would have walked this way, back and forth to the field . . . My father’s words summoned crops, ripples of green and gold from the cracked earth. We were sweating as we reached the tree. This was our jamayza . . . Unripe figs lay scattered at our feet. We bit into them and puckered at the starchy sour. I swallowed anyway, suddenly desperate to put this place inside me.
Most of the shattered houses my father had seen in the 1970s had disappeared—but only his eyes could measure this loss.
Most of the shattered houses my father had seen in the 1970s had disappeared—but only his eyes could measure this loss. We found a few overgrown, ruined walls. My brother climbed onto a scattering of stone slabs, his face quiet, studying. Understanding accreted, pearling into view. Our grandmother was young once. Hers, ours, was an origin of fullness, from which we might have grown. We stood next to an intact stone well, its throat dark and dry. My father repeated the story his mother had told him while standing at its edge: They bought this pipe from their Jewish neighbors—see the Hebrew on the side? The village had a party when the well was finished. The Nakba came the next day.
And then my understanding began to stagger, disintegrate. It was not tears but tremble that filled me. Too much, too much to be ghosts this way, haunting what we will never see. My grandmother, by then, was dead, buried over a year. When she died, after a bitter bout with cancer, my father had to fight to obtain a grave. The cemetery where her husband was buried had since been declared Saudi Only. Palestinian bodies, stateless even in death, were to be sent to a separate site. Ziyad spent the first hours of his bereavement calling in favors from every influential Saudi he knew. As an exception, she was permitted to lie beside Musa, in a graveyard named after Eve.
In ʿIbdis, we searched for the shattered cemetery my father had seen on his last visit, but no trace now remained. Perhaps bulldozers had returned to finish what earlier invaders had begun. Perhaps the graves had been swallowed under new layers of soil. I stepped as lightly as I could. Somewhere, near or beneath my feet, my great-grandfather slept. Alongside him, generations, their bones stacking deep into the past. Family lines cut to sudden, ragged edges after 1948. Already, members of ʿIbdis had been buried in Deir al-Balah, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; the living were even farther flung. I looked at my brother—where would our bodies rest?
We spent hours in the baking heat, though it felt like far less. We scattered, tracing separate aimless shapes inside the village grounds. There was nothing to do. There was nothing to say. And yet we lingered, knowing this moment was a glitch in empire that might not repeat.
The sun was retreating as we found each other back at the well. Bending over its stone edge, I felt the air shuffle, shift. Floating toward us, a white, round face. A pair of bottomless black eyes. I turned to stone. Its wings appeared, pumping once, twice, and the owl was over us. For an instant, her pale body was larger than the sun.
From The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza. Copyright Sarah Aziza, 2025. Reprinted by permission of Catapult.
