“The Scream” is an original piece by Abdaljawad Omar for his Communis column The Border Within.

“Palestine does not enter the world through the neat diction of accords, nor through the polished grammar of sovereignty that bureaucrats rehearse at conference tables, that work of recognition the Palestinian Authority takes pride in […] It announces itself otherwise—through the rupture, through the uncontainable register of the scream. The scream is not an accessory to speech, nor a metaphor for pain—it is the grammar of failure to articulate. It bursts forth at the threshold where flesh collides with the unbearable, when history drives its shards into the spine, when time itself becomes too sharp to inhabit. Here, politics is not the architecture erected after reasoned deliberation; it is the scream that precedes and founds it. Politics here is born in shattering, and remains audible only in the echo of that untranslatable cry.”

— Abdaljawad Omar

In Jaffa, I screamed twice. Once out of joy, once out of pain—both inseparable, as if carried on the same breath.

It was not only the old houses by the sea, their walls leaning toward the waves as though sharing a secret, what drew the sound from my chest. Nor was it only the ache of knowing that these houses have been occupied and repainted—turned into galleries where the brushstrokes of European newcomers attempt to plaster over wounds they both inflicted and are unable to name. My scream of joy was no less true. It was the joy of slipping unnoticed to the shore, evading walls and checkpoints, and smuggling past the eyes that measure who belongs and who does not. It was the joy of being again a child, almost ecstatic—the joy of meeting the sea not as exile, not as loss, but as arrival, as epiphany, as if the water itself had conspired to let me through.

The ride from Ramallah, or from a settlement bus stop to be precise, was with a stranger. A stranger wearing a knitted kippah—the kind associated with religious nationalists in Israel, those crocheted caps whose very stitches seem large enough to carry the weight of death for anyone who speaks Arabic. You could almost hear the chant, “Death! Death to the Arabs!,” vibrating out of his head. His gun laid beside him, his car was black and large, the windows darkened.

I was not myself. I was Jonathan, from Maryland, in search of my Jewish roots. I was here on Taglit—one of those free trips offered to Jews under twenty-five to connect them with Israel. I needed a ride to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station. And it was a follower of Meir Kahane who would take me there. That my return should be staged through the hands of those most eager to erase me was in itself an irony. And yet such may be also the history of this interval: that return and erasure bound together, the path of return taken through the architecture of the extreme.

My driver did not suspect me. I was tall, white, and my words carried just enough of an American accent to pass. In his eyes, I was a man on the move, a potential brother-in-arms, one more body to be folded into the project of settlement. I never imagined I would sit across from the likes of Ben Gvir, or speak with Smotrich—and yet here I was, rehearsing their language, offering myself as if I were one of them. My disguise was not a mask I had put on, but something I inherited: whiteness, accent, the ease of assumption.

I did not know my driver. Even to say that is perhaps too much—knowing, as if the other could ever be pressed into such proximity. Still, I listened. Or I wanted to listen. Or perhaps I was already conscripted into a listening I could not refuse. It is strange, if strange is the word, how up close the human folds into sameness: the nervous laugh, as if rehearsed; the stutter, both shield and plea; the hand that opens yet withholds in the same motion; the palm, damp with a history no one asked to inherit, sweating out an archive that lingers whether read or not.

He spoke to me in English, or something broken, heavy with the weight of elsewhere, heavy with a refusal of fluency. And yet what I registered — was it compassion or violence? — was only this: he was human. Human—a category that keeps slipping, betraying itself, dissolving at the edges. Perhaps that was the lesson I inhaled unwillingly: humans are defeatable. Not in the triumphalist register of war reports, or in the melancholic ledger of the defeated, but in the tremor of his voice, in the fragility sweating through his hands. Defeatable because to be human is to leak, to falter, to break in the very act of speaking. Ask me—I belong to defeat and its residue, to its afterlife. They are defeatable, I told myself, locking my eyes to his.

The journey was brief—intolerably so. Twenty-five minutes. Long enough for the car to have buckled under the weight of war stories, pressing against the glass, testing its seal. I thought then, with the bitter humor that comes too soon, that Israelis break the ice with war: war as anecdote, war as small talk, devastation inflicted on others offered like an hors d’oeuvre.

My driver, the settler, recited his itineraries: Syria, Lebanon, Gaza. Each destination stamped in violence. Apparently, these were the only countries he had ever visited. This was long before the current war, and yet the words already felt like prophecy—the utterance that delivers what it anticipates, war arriving in the mouth before it arrives on the ground. Syria glittered at night — seductive, deceptive —, he recounted. Gaza—too easy, he said, almost eager to break, as though fragility itself were an invitation. Lebanon, at first, was beauty, flattened into postcard form. But once crossed, it convulsed, unmasked itself. The very name — Lebanon — split the air in the car, a silence not of absence but of saturation, a silence heavy enough to wound. He spoke of it as one speaks of a lover betrayed: a paradise transfigured into hell. Again, this was before the current war, and yet already war was there, rehearsing itself in his voice.

One wrong word, though, and things could turn ugly. Language here is never neutral; it is a weapon, a test. A single slip — one stray stopword, the kind that escapes unguarded — could mean exposure. And exposure here does not end in awkwardness; it ends at the barrel of a gun, or behind prison gates. To live at this threshold has been my joy: close enough to danger to feel alive, never so close as to be undone by it. I rode a motorbike for the same reason. I stood my ground when I was shot for the same reason. And I fell in love for the same reason too—because the pulse quickens not in safety, but in the knowledge that it could be the last.

It almost did, on the threshold near Jerusalem—at the checkpoint that cleaves between the clustered homes of settlers and the villages whose persistence still sustains life against erasure. He was about to be married, and my reflex was to answer Inshallah Kheir. God willing, may it be good. The words leapt from my mouth as if carried by muscle memory, before I could stop them. I caught myself, pulled back, softened the phrase into English: I hope so. As though translation could erase the cushion, disguise the breath that had already revealed me. It passed.

The follower of Kahane dropped me near the central bus station, complicit in my return, betraying his own creed, with a betrayal that did not register. He dropped me like a sentence that trails off, and he did so with a smile. I held back the glee, a containment exercise, waiting for the afterimage of him to dissolve. Only then could I bubble. The ride was already half-spent, the “hard part” supposedly over—though one never knows where the hard part is staged, whether it lingers, whether it has just begun. Jerusalem, not seen for years, rose like an ache, an afterlife of sight.

And I was bubbling — yes, that embarrassing effervescence of return — because I was also on my way to Jaffa, on my own terms.

I felt like a man on a mission. I was on my way to surprise a girl, to show her that I could arrive at will—that the way she spoke of walls was only an interpretation of their mastery, that love could crack them and smuggle itself through. That I could cross borders without an ID, armed only with trickery and a courage that was rather foolish. I did not return to conduct a dialogue with the new occupants of Jaffa’s old houses, nor to consult the archives, nor to measure the magnitude of the crimes. I returned to study eyes, breath, rhythm. To test the limit of reality.

I found her at work, behind a counter cluttered with receipts, the small banalities that tether a life. She looked up, startled at first, then settled into a flatness I could not read. No smile. No surge of recognition. No softness to mirror the bubbling I had carried across borders, through disguises, reenacted poses, decanted instincts. Past walls, past guns, checkpoints, aborted suspicions. The joy of arrival, rehearsed so many times in my chest, froze. It was as if I had miscalculated the script, walked onto the stage of her life at the wrong cue. Outside, Jaffa was waiting—the sea, the houses leaning into the waves, the smell of salt stitched into every stone. Inside her refusal lingered, heavy, immovable. The gesture of surprise, which I thought would bind us, crumbling before being recognized.

Near the shore, I let it out—not one scream but two, inseparable, as if carried on the same breath. A scream that danced and faltered, that celebrated and mourned, that burst into joy even as it broke against refusal.

The first was a chastisement, a rinsing flame, a recursive cry. It reminded me of the way I misplace myself so easily—how instinctively I gamble my own being, risking what is tender for love, for the pull of others. Always in ways that frighten them, and perhaps terrify me too. Perhaps what drives me is not courage but a deep revulsion with myself, a loathing that compels me to return to the same gestures again and again, as if ritual could cleanse.

I stage myself as though nothing mattered — not consequence, not even prison or death — except the intimate nearness of affirmation, that fragile spark of being seen, of being wanted. This is what undoes me. Others are composed; I am not. Others are cautious; I am not. Others move slowly; I am fast with everything, as if speed itself could erase the ache of being. I dress fast, I shower fast, and I finish my meal while others take their time. I write as if death is near, as if the world is burning just beyond the window. I pull words out of nothing, yet at my core, I too am nothing—a hollow instrument straining for sound, a body straining for touch, a soul burning itself clean in the hope of being remade. And what remains, always, is that flicker of recognition: how silly I am, how naïve, how small in my grand defiance. Yet I return to it. I repeat it, again and again, as though repetition itself could carve meaning from the void, as though each act of risking were a prayer flung into the fire, hoping that this time the flames might answer.

The second scream was different: it carried the electricity of a wager, the joy of the reckless throw, the trembling satisfaction of half-success. It was not about shame but about risk as its own reward—the way a life lived on the edge of extremes offers a kind of return no certainty could bestow, even promise. Even when the gamble fails, the act of wagering redraws the boundaries of possibility, reminding me that my life is not a ledger to be balanced but a fire to be tested against the dark. This scream was a hymn to the thrill of hazard, to the exquisite vertigo of standing at the border between annihilation and affirmation.

Together, these screams reveal the paradox of desire: the wound of self-reproach and the exaltation of risk. To love, to dare, to lose oneself in the proximity to another is to oscillate endlessly between these two registers. One scream chastises me for my promiscous relation with scandalizing myself, the other exalts me for having dared in the first place. Between them, I live suspended—haunted by my own recklessness, silliness, yet unwilling to forsake the rapture that lives at the threshold of dissolution. Isn’t this also the pull and labor of resistance?

***

There is also a troubled silence that paralyzes the tongue before it even reaches for words. A silence that is not absence but overabundance, swollen with meanings too dense to pass through the sieve of language. It sediments inside, layer upon layer, until the body itself becomes a tomb of unfinished noises.

I know a girl who screamed at her violated body.

Her throat was her only alphabet, and every cry was a broken letter written against the air. She did not speak, not because she did not know how, but because speech requires witnesses, and her world had none.

The house called her mad, her family said she brought shame, and the uncle who stole her body said nothing at all. He needed no words; he had her silence forced beneath his weight. You see it in the way shoulders tense against invisible weight, in which the eyes look outward but never land. This silence does not soothe; it gnaws. It teaches the body to perform normalcy while keeping its abyss intact. Many of us carry this scream, passing each other in streets, in queues, in waiting rooms, on border, though checkpoints, and though no sound is exchanged, the air between us grows heavy with the pressure of what refuses to be spoken. If you breathe too deeply, you will inhale it, and it will sit in your lungs like a stone.

I know a man who screamed at the Seventh Sky.

His son was killed at sixteen. A sniper’s bullet cut the sky, found the neck of the boy, and laid him down where boys should not so untimely lie. The father remains in his chair, on his balcony, the whole day. He does not walk. He does not eat with appetite. He does not speak with words. He looks at the sky as if the sky were guilty, as if the clouds themselves were accomplices, and travels back to when the boy was toddler, and the toddler was a newborn. Time, for him, is no longer a line to be stretched, a rope to be extended, but a pool of flattened ends. His body has no energy to move, no desire to bargain with life. Only his throat works, and from it pours a sound that is neither word nor song—only the raw noise of a wound that refuses to heal. Only the raw voice of silence.

I knew another girl who never stopped screaming at her father.

Her scream is different—woven with desire and refusal, braided with her father’s absence. He sits behind the bars of a prison, and she spends her days speaking to his shadow. When men approach her, they find themselves caught in the orbit of her longing. She pulls them close, not with promises but with the ache that clings to her like a second skin.

For a moment they believe she is theirs, as though her hunger could be fed by their hands, as though her loneliness might rest and find solace in their arms. But time and again, she exiles them. She rejects them with the same force with which she had drawn them in. It is both cruelty and fidelity. Her scream is a rope knotted to the prison gate. Her anger is for a father who leaned toward the unbecoming of resistance, and her desire is for a father who cannot step into her world, who cannot shield her, who cannot explain why prison bars have proven stronger than love, why her life has turned into the murky mirror of his.

I knew a child who was raised not for laughter or speech, but for a life of screaming.

This is not the scream of joy, not the sound children make when they vanish into the innocence of play. It is the scream that precedes language, that outlives it—the scream of a wound that knows it will never heal. Born without a mother—her death unregistered, erased as though she had never touched the world. A father remains, but only as fracture: too broken to hold, too absent to abandon. The child will grow into his scream. He will fill the streets of Ramallah with noise, not speech, and argue with everyone. He will wander without end, carrying the unfinished sound, incapable of contemplation. Everything will move outward from him, endlessly dispersing, nothing will return.

On a night of unbearable quiet in Ramallah, Gaza screams. The sound tears through the distance, splitting the silence until it curdles into curses, until the curses deflate into nothing. Yet even silence does not bring relief—it lingers, thick and metallic, suspended in the air with the dust of falling buildings. The dead do not rest. They either rise, howling, or are fused into the concrete, skulls protruding like broken lanterns, refusing us the mercy of looking away. The city breathes through the throats of corpses, and every breath is a demand to intervene.

Lean closer, and you will be seized by the surplus of screams woven into this landscape. They will shudder through your body, wrench it off balance, hurl it against the frontiers. The scream does not feed you gently—it shoves you into exposure, where each inhalation is trespass, and each trespass flirts with your undoing. In time, you will discover that excess is not an affliction, but the only atmosphere left to breathe.

At the edges — where the land is sliced, measured, parceled — the noise finds you. It brands you as prey, as surplus, as excess, as a throat to be sealed, a body to be extinguished, to be erased. There, the settlers wait. They rehearse their theater of lynching, reenacting their claim to order. They walk, they speak, they smile to one another as they desecrate your body—urinating on your skin, devouring your eyes with their guns and their sticks.

Perhaps you will manage a smile. Perhaps panic will betray you. Either way, a scream tears through your whole inadequacy. Yet even this scream is not yours: it arrives haunted, infested with the echoes of the silenced. The body collapses, but the scream lingers, a scar vibrating in the air. Urine pours over you, pours from you, as if the body itself leaked its undoing. The scent of olive trees rises, acrid, funereal, awaiting your death.

These are not ordinary cries. They are the screams of help, the universal SOS. They rise from the chest as though announcing a drowning, even when no water has yet claimed the body. Each one is terminal, bearing within it the weight of an ending; and yet none of them are final.

For sound, once unbound, does not die. It splinters into the air, threads itself through silence, and returns — amplified, sharpened — as though the earth itself had become its echo chamber. If you lean close enough, you will hear them. They do not console. They do not promise redemption. Listening will not grant you the strength to intervene; it will not carry you toward happiness. To hear the scream in its truth is to be stripped bare. It offers no catharsis, no closure—only the endless reverberation of what refuses to end.

It also does something else. It no longer hovers in endless suspension. It sinks — slowly, heavily — into the air, refusing dispersal, refusing to dissolve into mere noise. To hear the scream is not to resolve it, it is to endure its gravity, to let it inscribe itself without escape. This is the threshold: when the scream, once heard, is stripped of its ghostliness. It becomes less spectral, less untethered — more present, more suffocating — in the shared, unbearable air we are forced to breathe together.

***

Palestine does not enter the world through the neat diction of accords, nor through the polished grammar of sovereignty that bureaucrats rehearse at conference tables, that work of recongition the Palestinian Authority takes pride in.

It announces itself otherwise—through the rupture, through the uncontainable register of the scream. The scream is not an accessory to speech, nor a metaphor for pain—it is the grammar of failure to articulate. It bursts forth at the threshold where flesh collides with the unbearable, when history drives its shards into the spine, when time itself becomes too sharp to inhabit. Here, politics is not the architecture erected after reasoned deliberation; it is the scream that precedes and founds it. Politics here is born in shattering, and remains audible only in the echo of that untranslatable cry.

In its vibration, everything is heard at once: victory unraveling into defeat, defeat collapsing under its own exhaustion; hope tangled with despair, despair howling its own annihilation; loss entwined with the fragile insistence that drags you to rise again, to walk again, to breathe again—even as you stagger beneath the unbearable cargo of ruins. Sumud is no more the vocabulary of the day. It is something else. Too unbearable to live, too.

Have you ever screamed so violently that your ears broke down into silence? Screamed so profusely that the world itself halted? In that instant it froze — time, space, the body —suspended in the abyss of a sound that refused to end.

The scream does not narrate. It shatters narration, fractures it into splinters too jagged to reassemble. It is language stripped of syntax, word, even meaning—leaving only resonance, the naked sound that refuses domestication.

To hear Palestine is not to hear strategies or outcomes, or the measured words of experts, analysts, specialists, not even the failure to make my own account so excessive that it overwhelms you before you are done, making you turn away, reject its attempted surplus. It is to let the voice cornered into exposure reach you, a scream that is at once witness and wound presence, that is its own undoing.

To hear Palestine is to hear our terminal breath, and to let that scream —broken, deferred, unbearable — replay in the hollow of your skull, again and again, until you realize that what echoes there is not theirs alone, but already your own.

Featured image: “‘Instead of a scream’”: the Palestinian artist who does a Gaza drawing every day.” Sketches by Maisara Baroud on show in Venice. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian. Courtesy of gaza.heterogenesis.com.

Abdaljawad Omar