Hassan: Here, in Brooklyn. I grew up a few blocks from here. I actually applied to get into the unit on my old block, but they were filled up. I’m in the next one over, so that’s pretty damn close. The buildings are really similar, so yeah, hamdellah.

  Abdelhadi: Hamdellah. But you haven’t been in Bay Ridge your whole life?

  Hassan: Nah. I moved to Palestine when I was sixteen actually, when the Gaza Rebellion started, and I was there—well in that region—until the Fall. I first came back in ’63, after the borders were liberated. I couldn’t risk trying to come back before then, because I was on all the feds’ lists.

  Abdelhadi: Shit.

  Hassan: Yeah. I didn’t set foot on this continent for twenty-seven years.

  Abdelhadi: Wow. That’s crazy.

  Hassan: Yeah.

  Abdelhadi: We’ll get back to that story for sure. For now, let’s talk about your childhood. Tell me more about your family.

  Hassan: Kinda typical Bay Ridge family for the time. My parents are both second-generation Palestinians, both sets of grandparents were living here in the neighborhood.

  Abdelhadi: Where in Palestine were your grandparents from?

  Hassan: Gaza.

  Abdelhadi: I see, so your parents met here?

  Hassan: Yeah, they met here. They met at a bodega that belonged to my grandfather, my dad was working the front desk all the time, and my mom would come in to buy snacks.

  Abdelhadi: Awww!

  Hassan: You’re still nostalgic for that couple fec, huh?

  Abdelhadi: I just like snacks. [Hassan laughs.] Was your dad still working at the corner store while you were growing up?

  Hassan: Yeah, he took over after my jiddo. Baba was always talking about expanding and renovating and all that, but he never seemed to have the money. Or maybe he couldn’t get his shit together. Maybe both. Good guy, but like he wasn’t organized. Also, the rent was really fucking high in the city. So, he couldn’t really keep up. We were always barely hanging on.

  Abdelhadi: What about your mom?

  Hassan: She worked odd jobs. There was a Knafeh shop on Fifth Avenue—Jerusalem Sweets or something.…

  Abdelhadi: Nablus Sweets.

  Hassan: Right, right. Wasn’t sure.…

  Abdelhadi: “Jerusalem” is always a good guess. [Laughs.]

  Hassan: Exactly. Anyway—she would work there or as a cashier at this pharmacy chain—I think it was called CBS or CVS, some acronym—things like that, on and off.

  Abdelhadi: Did the two of them get along?

  Hassan: Oh hell no. [Laughs.] No way. They hated the fuck out of each other. Neither of them could muster the guts to leave though. They just kind of stayed and got on each other’s nerves. It was annoying.

  Abdelhadi: Why do you think they hated each other?

  Hassan: Well. I don’t know. They just weren’t happy. Shit was always falling apart.

  Abdelhadi: Like what?

  Hassan: You know, just … there was always some crisis. The car broke down. We were behind on rent. Someone forgot to pay for the Internet, and it got shut off. One of us would get hurt, and the bills would dry up all the money. Endless fires to put out, ya know?

  Abdelhadi: Yeah. It’s how a lot of people lived those days.

  Hassan: Yeah. But there was this feeling of being alone. Like everyone else had their shit together and we didn’t. And there was this feeling of it being their fault. [Long pause.] I think they both would wake up every once in a while, look at their lives and think, “Fuck! How did I get here?” They took turns blaming each other. Mama blamed Baba for the business failing. She thought he wasn’t creative enough. She would see these new stores with the fancy yogurt and the Organic Whatever the Fuck and come home and get on his case for not renovating, for not expanding, for not changing the products, blah blah blah. He, of course, kept saying how he didn’t have the money for any of that. It was the same fight.

  Abdelhadi: And what did he blame her for?

  Hassan: Oh. Um. Our existence. [Laughs.] He basically thought they got married too young. She got pregnant right away, with my brother Karam. I think he hated her for that, and hated Karam a bit too, probably. All of us really. We ruined his life.

  Abdelhadi: Did he say that?

  Hassan: No. But he made sure we knew.

  Abdelhadi: How so?

  Hassan: He just did.… Can we move on?

  Abdelhadi: Sure. Was Karam your only sibling?

  Hassan: No, we were three total—two older brothers and me. Karam, Kamal, and me. They thought they were being cute with having the kids’ names start with the same letter. Then they realized it stood for KKK, and it wasn’t so cute anymore. [Laughs.]

  Abdelhadi: Ouch! [Laughs.] What was their approach in terms of parenting?

  Hassan: There was this whole idea at the time, that you just needed to work hard and get good grades and “make it.” Like, go to college, get a good degree, and all that fec. But like they were kinda distracted, and none of us were that good at school. One of my brothers, Karam, got decent grades. But me and Kamal were terrible at school. And my parents couldn’t really do anything about it. Sometimes it felt like my mom would remember that we existed and that we had to get good grades, and she’d make some effort. She’d like try to set down “family homework time,” and that would last like two days. Then she’d just lecture us. And she’d always be like, “I didn’t go to college and look at me! You don’t want to work these shit jobs!” As if going to college guaranteed you a good job. But we all knew college cost money that we didn’t have. There was like the one kid in class who was like a genius and would get the scholarship or whatever. But the rest of us weren’t going to make it. And our kharra schools with their kharra teachers knew that. We all knew. But we were supposed to pretend we believed we’d make it, we were supposed to act like it was possible and going to happen for us. But it was bullshit and we all knew that. So, we were just waiting for the play to end, so we could hang up our costumes and go back to leading our kharra lives.

  Abdelhadi: Damn.

  Hassan: I mean, it’s easier to know that in retrospect.

  Abdelhadi: What did you think at the time?

  Hassan: Well. I don’t know if I really thought about it. I was going with the flow, zoned out. I always had something I was obsessing about. Like in middle school, it was anime—remember, the Japanese cartoons?

  Abdelhadi: Yup, yup.

  Hassan: So yeah, I was into those, then I was really into sci-fi in high school. I was kind of a loner, honestly. Obviously, I wasn’t going to fit in with the white kids, and there was only a few of them in our high school anyway. And there were enough Arab kids that the other people of color didn’t really take you in, you know? It was like, “Dude go hang with your own people.” But the Arab kids weren’t into me either, my parents weren’t that social, so I had no idea what was going on in the little Arab world of the neighborhood. We only knew the people in our building and my grandparents.

  Abdelhadi: Did you not have aunts, uncles, or cousins nearby? Both your grandparents were from the neighborhood, right?

  Hassan: They were, but they weren’t around like that. My mom had three older sisters, but they had all moved away before she got married. One of them was in Westchester, one had moved to Michigan, and the other lived in the UAE. We didn’t really have the money to go visit and as their families got bigger, they stopped visiting too. It was pretty distant. On my dad’s side, I had another aunt. She never married. I think she was a dyke. No one ever talked about it, of course. [Laughs.] So, we’d visit my grandparents, who were nearby. But honestly, both parents worked so much, they didn’t have time for much else. And especially with my mom, her sisters were all bougie. Like they all went to college and married up, so there was always this like … tension. We were the black sheep, the ones who didn’t make it.

  Abdelhadi: That sounds like it was hard.

  Hassan: Whatever. It was what it was.

  Abdelhadi: How’d you end up moving to Palestine?

  Hassan: I’d grown up hearing about Palestine through my grandparents and my parents, and it was in the air in Bay Ridge. Honestly, I’d been dreaming of Palestine my whole life. Sometimes I’d have to remind myself that I’d never actually been there, because it was just so present. It was always there.

  They wanted us to forget, you know? That was the whole plan. The Zionists. They thought, “The old will die, and the young will forget.” We made it our business never to forget. Every house in this area was like Little Palestine. We took it with us anywhere we went, used any chance to remind ourselves and everyone else that we were an exiled people, that our land had been stolen. I can’t believe they thought we’d do anything else.… Anyway, where were we?

  Abdelhadi: I’d asked how you ended up in Palestine.

  Hassan: Oh yeah. When the uprising first began, I wanted to go. Gaza had been under siege for like thirty years or something—since way before I was born. No one in or out. People had water for a few hours a day, electricity at random times, it was a big fucking prison, with two-and-a-half million people crammed in. And they’d bomb it every few years, brutal shit, just relentless. And people from Gaza would just have to rebuild over and over and over. When I was four, I remember they bombed, those were some of my first memories—watching those buildings fall on stream, people sifting through the debris of their homes, and all that.

  Anyway, when I was sixteen, and Thawrat Gaza started, I was ready. You didn’t have to tell me twice. I had been working odd jobs around the neighborhood, mostly under the table, since I was fourteen. Had a little money saved up, just enough for a ticket.

  Abdelhadi: They let you in?

  Hassan: Who? The Zios? Hah! Of course not. We flew into Egypt, hitched a ride to the Sinai and crossed the border—

  Abdelhadi: Who is we?

  Hassan: My friend Talal was in a similar boat as me. One of my only friends growing up, also an Arab burnout. We just decided we’d go, and we did. He spoke better Arabic than me at the time, mine got better eventually of course. But at the time, he could get by.

  Abdelhadi: So, you got to Egypt, and got to the Sinai—I thought those borders were closed at the time?

  Hassan: Well, Egypt was falling apart. They had had an uprising in 2010, or 2011, or something—2012? Can’t remember, but they had overthrown the government, then the military took over a couple of years later. The military reign lasted decades. But it was like everywhere else where when the economy started collapsing in the thirties, they couldn’t keep up. There were massive famines, because so much of the Nile had dried up, and Egypt couldn’t grow food anymore. Plus, the heatwaves were killing more and more people every year. When the markets crashed, they were truly, truly fucked. By the time I went—well, this was 2036—there were riots all the time, mostly over bread and grains. It started in Port Said, because they have always had big unions there. So yeah, the Egyptian Army was kinda distracted with all that.

  Abdelhadi: Gotcha. And that was also happening all over the Arab world, right?

  Hassan: Oh, hell yeah. Syria was still in tatters after the civil war in the twenty-tens and twenty-twenties. Iraq had never recovered from a US invasion in the early two thousands. Jordan was barely hanging in there. It was all a fucking mess and people were over it. The Levant was where the first governments fell, you know. Everyone was realizing they had nothing left to lose, and it was time to fuck shit up.

  Abdelhadi: Good reason for an uprising.

  Hassan: Yeah, exactly. I mean think about it: why would you care if you’re getting arrested for protesting when you can’t feed yourself or your family anymore? For so long, these fuckwads had everyone convinced that if they just put their heads down, they could get by on whatever meager shit there was. But eventually that was obviously not the case anymore. It didn’t matter how quiet or obedient you were, there was nothing to fucking eat. The whole region imploded.

  Abdelhadi: Yeah.

  Hassan: So anyway. Uprisings everywhere. Egyptian Army really could barely keep that border to Gaza closed even when they weren’t busy quashing uprisings. By then, it was an open secret that if you could make it to the Sinai, you could get through.

  Abdelhadi: How’d you make it to the Sinai?

  Hassan: Dollars. The dollar hadn’t fallen yet, and we bribed our way through. The Egyptian pound was in the toilet by then, it was like a hundred pounds to a dollar or something, I’m telling you—people were starving. So yeah, even as teenagers, whatever American money we had got us through. Plus, Egyptians had never been down with Israel. Their government was, but they weren’t. Egyptians always thought that was some fuck shit. So, when we said we were Palestinian, when we said we were from Gaza and we were just going home, people were down with that.

  Abdelhadi: That’s beautiful.

  Hassan: It was. It really was.

  Abdelhadi: But why wasn’t the Israeli army guarding the border?

  Hassan: Oh, they would have. But the Final Intifada was already underway, there were riots and strikes all the time, and they were really distracted.

  Abdelhadi: Tell us more about the Final Intifada.

  Hassan: It was a mass insurrection that started in the early thirties and ended with the liberation of Palestine in ’38. People were rising up all over Palestine, in FortyEight, and in the West Bank.

  Abdelhadi: Wait, I just want to make sure it’s clear for readers and listeners. By FortyEight you mean within the borders of what was then Israel?

  Hassan: Yeah, Palestinians were split up. There were the people who’d gotten Israeli citizenship and lived within Israel. There were the people in the West Bank, the people in Gaza, then the people in these, sort of, no-man’s lands that had been taken over by settlements.

  Abdelhadi: What do you think made the Final Intifada different from the first three?

  Hassan: Two things. First, there was a lot more pressure from FortyEight. It wasn’t just the West Bank rising. That had started to happen in the twenties, that you saw more agitation in FortyEight. The second and more important thing was pressure on the Israeli state. In the twenties, you had massive boycotts of Israel by individuals, companies, universities, and industries all over the world. Those got stronger and stronger, until the main holdout was really only the US government. But by 2030 in the US, shoring up Israel had become unpopular. By the mid-thirties, it had become financially impossible. No more money for surveillance, for the military, for all the fancy weapons that came from the US. That, plus the market crashes, spelled the end for the dawla.

  Abdelhadi: How were the market crashes affecting things?

  Hassan: Horribly. Similar to everywhere. The state couldn’t afford to keep up the luxuries they gave to working-class and middle-class Jews, because the global economy was faltering. So no more free healthcare or free housing for new settlers. None of that. That really brought down buy-in for the whole Zionist project, and of course it upped the insurrectionary pressure from Palestinians—who were literally starving.

  Abdelhadi: Okay, so what happened when you crossed the border?

  Hassan: When we got into Gaza? I reached out to a distant cousin who lived there, Ahmad. Ahmad was amazing. He had been living with his katiba—that was a small resistance militia or brigade. They were living in an old UN school that had been shelled and hollowed out. Only the outside wall survived, and they built a little tent city inside. When we got there, they welcomed us in. People really familied their kata’eb, because so many families were broken from the shelling.

  Abdelhadi: Who were some of the other folks there besides Ahmad?

  Hassan: Well, the most important person to me was Ahmad’s wife May. She had such a crazy story. Her family got a notice to evacuate in 2007 when she was a baby. They did what a lot of families in Gaza do, they divided the children between relatives’ houses. So that if the houses got bombed, someone from the family would survive. Her older brother carried her in a blanket and fled to one aunt’s house. Her other brother took their two sisters—they were five kids total—to another aunt’s house. Her parents stayed back to gather valuables and documents from the house. They were there when the rockets struck. It had been sixty-three minutes since the notice to evacuate was dropped on their house. By 2014, one of her older brothers had managed to reunite the siblings. He’d worked like a dog to rent a one-bedroom apartment in this old building. But once again, when the bombings started, an evacuation notice came. “You have thirty minutes to leave.” This time they were ready. They had a bag packed with everything and they fled. But one of her brothers and one of her sisters were at work, their building was bombed, and they were killed. It kept happening again and again, every few years, a new round of bombings. Families breaking up and trying to re-form. So yeah, we already knew how to make families out of survivors. The katiba was just another version of all that. We’d cook and do housework together, and we’d read about struggle and plot.

  Abdelhadi: What were you plotting?

  Hassan: Resistance.

  Abdelhadi: Like?

  Hassan: You know, guerilla ops. Mostly targeting the border to Gaza. There was a sense that if we could break the geographic hold, they wouldn’t have a chance to control us. Our strength was always in numbers, and that’s why they had separated us into different groups. We were opening the prison gates—the border to Gaza. We knew we couldn’t form a big army. Too much surveillance for that, too easy to bomb the shit out of wherever we were gathering. It always had to happen in small groups. I think that model really influenced the communes later, how everything had to be local first. You had to know who you were dealing with, there had to be trust, you were accountable not to some big, anonymous dawla but to like your actual neighbors and housemates.

  Abdelhadi: Mm, definitely.

  Hassan: It took a year of intense planning and coordinating with resistance fighters across Palestine, but eventually the border between Gaza and the rest of Palestine fell. The IDF couldn’t hold out, between the mass defections, the international condemnations, the weapons and supplies drying up.

  Abdelhadi: Tell me about the day the border fell.

 

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