Most of the people I know are hanging on by the skin of their teeth, as my mother would say. We watch protective positions and entire systems being dismantled, people losing their jobs in a sluggish employment market, lies and more lies. And it’s probably just as well my mom is gone; this current situation would surely have killed her.

We have a few family members who supported the maniac destroying our country. One of them is a longtime supporter of Palestine, and he has gone quiet about his political views recently. Well. He would, wouldn’t he?

There is trouble brewing all over the world; I regret that my country is become a cause rather than a late-comer solution, as we were in two World Wars. Since then, we have gone to war in tiny countries where others had already withdrawn in defeat. I’m thinking of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Others have been trying to take over Afghanistan for a thousand years. Most recently Russia and the United States. We might ask what we thought we were doing and why.

We might ask what happens when we encourage people to fight a totalitarian regime, as we did with the Kurdish people in northern Iraq, and then failed to provide backup.

The more recent betrayal is Ukraine.

Why would anyone trust us?

Three creative works illustrate what is happening in the middle east.

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“On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. [Despite his publisher’s promotion, that tweet was not the impetus for this book.]

“As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.”

“Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.”

Lemon Tree touched my heart long ago and Omar’s books—the best-selling novels American War and What Strange Paradise and this new work of nonfiction—are beautiful revelations. An Oscar-winner “Best Documentary” No Other Land is playing right around the corner, which is where my husband and I went to see it.