On Hope

How do you hold onto hope when the world has gone mad?

I have a confession to make. I’m a New Year’s junkie—even if I know that 365 is just an arbitrary unit of measurement, something about a new beginning gets me every time.

This year? This year I feel fucking exhausted, and I’m trying to figure out why, but deep down, I know. While everyone posts their “ins and outs,” their wins and resolutions, I’m stuck wondering why I feel like I’ve been hit by a train, even when life—my life—is alright, in the grand scheme of things.

But when I sit down, and think about it—it makes sense. This year has been fucking exhausting, and it feels like far more than a year ago that I was ruminating on what the “word of the year” should be for 2024 and…in a fit of slightly troubling optimism…quietly decided that it would be “hope.”

I didn’t tell anyone. It felt a bit risky. At the time, I was covering daily news updates about Gaza for Mondoweiss, a daily reminder of exactly how much the world was not only turning a blind eye, but supporting such enormous cruelty in Gaza. Still, I felt hopeful. I felt hopeful that it was so absurd that people would have no choice but to support Palestine and Palestinians, that there would be a ceasefire and that my job as a journalist chronicling these kinds of disasters would no longer be relevant.

As the year went on, it felt like my choice was mocking me. What was I thinking? It wasn’t just that the war was ongoing—although that is a huge part of it—it was the way the truth was being obscured. Who thought of these headlines? “30,000 dead in Gaza.” From what? Did they just drop dead? Ordinarily, journalists write about war as it happens, but the reluctance to name Israel as a perpetrator felt like constant gaslighting, on top of the anger and the sadness. Students spoke out against the genocide across the United States, giving Palestinians in Gaza hope for the first time in months. They were eloquent in how they spoke to the media, targeted in their activism. They were careful to target US support to Israel, rather than Israel itself, aware of the role they played in the larger puzzle, where the pressure points were for change.

Still, they were smeared as antisemites and terrorism sympathizers. It shouldn’t be brave to come out against a genocide—and yet, we live in a world where it is. I hoped they didn’t give up hope. I hoped they didn’t give up on speaking out—still, how do you hold onto hope when the world has gone mad?

I was in Marseille when Israel started invading Lebanon. I went for a coffee, hoping that I might escape my addiction to refreshing the news, only to find that it was the top story on France24. I cursed the fact that I spoke French. I missed the days when my college roommate told her parents that she had a Lebanese roommate and they asked her if I had a girlfriend. (I wish, but that’s besides the point!)

People were texting me. I’m thinking of you…but I’d been sad for months. Why was I supposed to feel sad now? Us Mediterranean peoples are bizarrely and profoundly connected to each other. We eat variations of the same food. Our relatives are dysfunctional in familiar ways. If one of us is hurting, the other is too.

For this reason, being next to the Mediterranean made me feel better. Something about watching the sunset over the same sea that I’d watched from Lebanon made my heartbeat a little bit slower, imagining that the water molecules touching my feet have also touched Lebanon, touched Palestine. There’s a beautiful connectedness to the Mediterranean that is hard to explain, seemingly unrelated places like Marseille and Beirut suddenly mirroring one another, evoking the deepest feelings of comfort when you need it the most.

When I got back to London, it was pouring rain. It felt nothing like the Mediterranean. The trains weren’t working, and I was wondering how I’m going to get home form the airport. I see another girl who is also trying to figure out her way into the city. “Do you want to split an Uber?” I ask her. She eagerly accepts, and tells me that her name is Najla.

“Um..not to be that person. But…are you of some kind of Arab origin.”

She’s Lebanese-American. I’m Lebanese-American. She’s thirty-four. I’m thirty-four. If the trains had been working, we would have never acknowledged one another, but now we’re in the back of an Uber together, telling each other our life stories. She has a cat. I have a cat! The similarities are endless.

“What do you think is going to happen in Lebanon?” she asks me. It’s the first time I’ve vocalized my fear—and suddenly I feel very grateful that the universe brought us together in this exact, beautiful moment. How do we always find a way to find each other? Even in the absence of the Mediterranean, we find out ways to each other—in cold dreary cities like London and Berlin, a moment to exhale, to finally say what is really on our minds. It’s comforting, exactly when I need it the most.

Do you want to go to Beirut? My war correspondent friends all want to know. I don’t want to take press tours of Dahiyeh, I don’t want to impose on people on the worst days of their lives. I don’t want to do that and then feel a pressure to be “objective.” What does objectivity even mean when a global superpower-backed terrorist state is bombing the shit out of its neighbors? But I want to be in Beirut. I want to hold hands with my friends and cry and be around people that look like my family, who make dark jokes and yell at each other when they’re “just talking.” London feels sanitized, and I want to avoid anywhere that I feel pressured to be “okay.”

Nightclubs opened their doors to refugees when mosques didn’t. Sectarianism, even in times of what should be a common enemy. “We aren’t performing resilience anymore.” Students perform debkeh while bombs drop, and post it to TikTok all the same. Instagram provides a disjointed reality, a window into a genocide that you can tune into and out of at any time. Friday night drinks! Bombs. Cat videos! genocide. This can’t be good for human mind.

But algorithms rule our lives, so we start trying to trick the algorithm. Let me tell you about these three hair products that completely changed my life. Did you know about this family in Gaza? Don’t scroll away! Watch until the end. There’s a certain kind of sad desperation to it all, the fact that people in The West love to buy shit they don’t need so much, but they tune out of learning about the story of a family in Gaza who needs to set up a GoFundMe to cross one border. Have you wondered about who is actually scamming you? It’s probably your tax dollars. That, and this stupid fucking disaster capitalism that cares more about selling you a new whateverthefuck than human lives.

We adjust our weight. Is this the new normal? We learn how to live with a certain kind of heaviness. A battery at two percent, no charger. Shocks to the system. “How are you doing?” It feels like a stupid question. I look for alternatives. “I’m thinking of you.” The West is so obsessed with therapy speak. At this point it just feels like a form of violence. Hold space for what?

Trump wins the US election. Do this many people want mass deportations? Any moment now, I’ll wake up from this nightmare. Suddenly, the war is nowhere to be seen. Is it over? Hardly. Israeli property development companies posted their visions for condominiums in Southern Lebanon, “journalists” wrote think pieces about how “southern Lebanon is actually northern Israel.” Is this how it happens? A rhetorical slip of the tongue, a lie repeated so many times that it becomes true. Is this our Nakba? A homeland that is locked to people who once called it home.

I feel the hottest rage.

A ceasefire. It starts in twelve hours. Twelve more hours to bomb the shit out of the country. The Israeli Army. What a bunch of fucking overachievers. Mattresses stacked on top of cars. Ululations. Should anyone feel safe with a bunch of fucking psychos as their neighbors? No, but displacement is expensive amidst an economic crisis. We hope for the best.

Rebels on the M5, near Aleppo. Who cares? We gave up on the Syrian revolution a long time ago. The bullies always win. Speaking out against them always ends in punishment. Instead, they push forward. “They’re in Hama,” Salem tells me, unable to stop watching the news. Now the rebels are shooting the locks off the prison doors, allowing people to run free. People who disappeared into the bowels of Syria’s prisons for criticizing the regime are suddenly emerging, seeing sunlight for the first time. “They’re in Homs.” They’re closing in on Damascus. Is this the end of the regime? The words feel dangerous to say. The Syrian regime, the force that shaped the lives of so many people in our lives, but also the world around us.

We have spent years trying to move on, and now this is all we can think about. I go to sleep for a few hours. I’m not sure how. I wake up at 2 in the morning and reach for my cell phone. Prisoners are running free from Sadnaya, one of the most notorious prisons in Damascus. “It’s happening, Bashar is finished!” Salem shouts. I’m waiting for the headline. Instead it is a split screen, freed prisoners running through the streets, elation in Damascus, the revolution’s flag, three red stars instead of two green ones. Everything feels different. Even in London, the air feels different. Syria is free.

“When are you going to Damascus?” Our journalist friends ask Salem. How can we either of us even begin to answer that question when we never thought this day would come? “What about Al-Qaeda?” Western pundits ask. A joyful moment is clearly lost on them, but it is not lost on Palestinians in Gaza, who are celebrating Syria’s victory, even though they’ve been living in tents in Rafah for the past year. It isn’t just a victory for Syria—it is a victory for everyone who has ever imagined a different future, or believed in political possibility. It is a subtle sign from the universe to keep going.

It is not without its complications. While Syrians freed themselves, this was possible in part because of Israel weakening Hezbollah—which they did by terrorizing Lebanese civilians. Palestinians are still experiencing Israel’s wrath. There is so much to hold at once. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are having a dick measuring contest over H1-B visas. Instagram influencers are still trying to sell you random stuff that you don’t need. Some people absolutely do not care about any of this at all, and their world keeps turning all the same. No one knows what the future will bring.

But we are not allowed to be hopeless.