‘Our role is to hold on’: Palestinian artists in Israel after October 7
Israeli police arrest and blindfold Palestinian woman in Karmiel, northern Israel, 3 July 2024
Tamer Nafar writes in +972 on 21 July 2026:
Sometime in the 1980s, when I was just a kid, my aunt took me to Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv. Coming from the run-down “mixed city” of Lyd (known in Hebrew as Lod), it was the first shopping mall I had ever seen. At the entrance, before we reached the lights, the stores, the escalators, and everything else that seemed to be from another planet, my aunt bent down and told me in a loud whisper: “Don’t speak Arabic.”
She said this in Hebrew — as though the warning itself had already passed a security check.
I went inside. I did not speak. I bought a transparent pencil case filled with water and colorful paper fish that appeared to swim inside it, along with pencils and erasers that somehow looked like they had come from Tel Aviv, which at the time also seemed like another planet compared with my hometown. We returned to Lyd. I finished school. The fish died. I survived.
I grew up. I was no longer a small child being dragged into a mall under the shadow of the sentence, “Don’t speak Arabic.” Over time, I looked that monstrous sentence in the eye, shrank it down to the size of a worm, and buried it. I did not know that one day I would take out the shovel and dig it back up — not as a corpse, but as a living creature that had only grown bigger in that dark pit.
“If Jewish kids make comments, or try to start a conversation about the situation, say: ‘I don’t know.’” That’s what I told my children the first time they left the house after October 7.
I placed that sentence before their small bodies just as my aunt had placed it before mine. Except this time, I saw it not through the eyes of a child, but through the eyes of a father. It no longer looked like a monster to me; it looked like a friend. A friend who would help us survive not only Dizengoff Center but Tel Aviv, Lyd, this whole place, and the “lords of the land” who had set their sights on Palestinians everywhere, including the 2 million of us who are citizens of Israel.