“War Coffee Etched with Swan Foam,” by Bayan Haddad, is a Communis original feature.
“Over coffee in Edinburgh with the first friends I made from Gaza, we tried to make sense of a home we couldn’t access: they couldn’t come to Hebron, I couldn’t go to Gaza, and none of us could go to Jerusalem or Haifa. Yet we tried to find joy, imitating each other’s accents, my intonation rising where theirs fell, our laughter collapsing distance for a moment while we eyed the one-pound Penguin Little Black Classics.”
— Bayan Haddad
A Child’s Revenge
My first encounter with coffee was an act of spite.
My mother had just given birth to my sister, and our house was buzzing with the sounds of women from the neighbourhood. They came bearing gifts: soft baby clothes, delicate dishware and tea sets, or, for the better-off, a small gold-plated safety pin engraved with a Qur’anic verse or the Dome of the Rock.
Here is how the custom worked: first, karawia, the sweet, spiced pudding whose anise-and-cinnamon scent clings to the air. Then, coffee—always coffee last.
As I was collecting the karawia bowls, my aunt’s voice cut through the chatter, sharp and aimed at ten-year-old me: “You’re moving like a turtle.”
Stung, I retreated to the kitchen. I reached for the familiar containers on the shelf, but instead of spooning sugar into the pot of water, I added salt. I stirred once and slipped away just as my aunt entered. Moments later, she added the finely ground Arabic coffee, pouring the dark liquid into the small, chequered cups.
She carried the tray in. I watched as polite sips turned to grimaces, a wave of confused murmurs rippling through the room. Triumph and guilt washed over me in equal measure.
Measured by Eye
Years later, coffee became my duty. I made it for the guests without tasting it. I’d go to my mother, asking in a hushed tone, “Number seven or eight?”—each pot sized for a specific number of cups. “Three big spoons of ground coffee or four?” She would wave a hand and say, “I just do it by eye.”
I only drank it during family crises—the kind that start small, almost laughably so. A wrong word at the wrong hour. Someone’s tone. Then, without anyone quite deciding it, the room fills with everything that was never said, and suddenly you are not arguing about what you are arguing about at all. Fragile reconciliation sessions would then take place at dawn since my dad’s family were early risers. Amid slow headshakes, the sugary coffee on my empty stomach would churn—a physical reminder that I often make poor decisions, and that they rarely come alone.
Then came the era of instant coffee, a student’s pact with convenience. Nescafé’s 3-in-1 sachets should have come with a warning label: as bad for your thighs as smoking is for your lungs. They fuelled long nights of studying, and with little movement and countless cups, the weight piled on.
Looking back, I can trace the arc of my life through what I put in the cup. Salt, then sugar, then powdered creamer from a sachet. The real education was still to come, and it would happen far from our kitchen.
The Damp Communion
In the damp British chill, I walked into a Costa and ordered a mocha, a sweet, velvety soother. Gradually, my palate, like my life, began to mature. I let go of the sugary mocha and graduated to cappuccinos in speciality coffee shops. Over the rims of those ceramic cups, coffee witnessed urgent conversations about identity, theological debates about faith and sexuality, and attempts to help a student of Arabic decipher papers on conflict tourism. It witnessed our shared vulnerability: a friend crying with me as we wondered whether coming to “Normal Island” for our postgraduate studies had been the right decision, or whether we should simply scream in its repressively quiet streets.
Over coffee in Edinburgh with the first friends I made from Gaza, we tried to make sense of a home we couldn’t access: they couldn’t come to Hebron, I couldn’t go to Gaza, and none of us could go to Jerusalem or Haifa. Yet we tried to find joy, imitating each other’s accents, my intonation rising where theirs fell, our laughter collapsing distance for a moment while we eyed the one-pound Penguin Little Black Classics.
Something Is Brewing
I returned to teach in Hebron at the same university where I had once been a student. There, coffee was neither communion nor comfort, but contraband. A colleague approached me in my first week. “Does this kettle belong to your office?” she whispered. When I shook my head, she told me the backstory: the head of the board of trustees, annoyed by a coffee stain on a document, had banned it altogether. The gesture is centuries old: ban the cup, and you ban the conversation.
Outside the university walls, change was brewing. In Hebron (Al-Khalil in Arabic or K town if you’re feeling cool), people began adding Americanos to their routine alongside the small cups of traditional Arabic coffee. Little kiosks still sold affordable coffee made on the stove, but new cafés opened up social spaces. With the expanded selection, the conversations expanded too. Love, life’s purpose, the occupation, work, beauty tips—everything circulated in the often poorly ventilated air.
Then, almost all at once, many people stopped adding sugar. Takeaway cups and insulated mugs became essential, signalling an aura of “I am busy” as we navigated capitalist structures under occupation. Coffee machines began appearing in homes and offices alongside traditional metal pots.
There is a general distinction between the traditional qahweh (or maqhah in standard Arabic) and the newer café. The qahweh remains thick with mu’assel smoke, the click-clack of backgammon, and usually older men—patriarchy lingering over board games, cards and news. The newer cafés, with their espresso machines and laptop islands, are more mixed in gender and age. Screens often crowd the tables.
When I first moved to lecture at Birzeit, I would frequently go down to Ramallah. Overpriced coffee offered a way to get close to others, but not too close that someone might see the stretch marks on your soul. “Here is your unrefined—read: old-fashioned, backwards—friend from Al-Khalil,” I’d say, making fun of myself before others could. Khalilis are usually the butt of jokes, perhaps as Fifers are to the Scots, or Sa’idis to Egyptians.
Geographies of the Bean
If “Coffee is geography,” as Mahmoud Darwish writes, then it is inescapably political. Coffee arrived in Palestine along Ottoman trade routes. Domesticated on the Ethiopian plateau of Kaffa and traded through the Yemeni port of Mokha, the bean spread across the Ottoman world before Europe took it up in the seventeenth century. By then, coffee had become a global commodity inseparable from slavery and empire. Conditions akin to slavery persist on coffee farms today. The hands that pick the beans rarely afford the cup.
A Palestinian family’s story with the beans tells a larger story as documented by the writer Matthew Teller: At the foot of the steps from Damascus Gate, Mazen Izhiman still grinds beans to order on the shop counter, weighing out whatever blend and roast a customer asks for, cardamom folded in or left out. The aroma, Teller describes, is “stupefying, disabling, a kick to the back of the knees.”
The founder of Izhiman coffee was Mazen’s grandfather, Khaled, who came to Jerusalem from Jaffa. He started in 1921, buying Yemeni and Brazilian beans from an importer, before securing the strategic spot at the start of Khan al-Zeit in 1948. The 1967 war split the family: all of them fled to Jordan, and while some settled in Amman and built a parallel Izhiman business, Khaled managed to return to Jerusalem and reopen the shop. It remains a small, stubborn fixture in Jerusalem’s restless, heavily surveilled Old City.
The journalist Mariam Barghouti traces the cafés in Palestine back to their political origins: the first opened in Akka and Jaffa in the late nineteenth century, mainly serving dock workers and day labourers before becoming hubs of political debate and news exchange. After the Nakba, they became spaces of collective mourning and community mobilisation.
The coffeehouse can also be read as a symbol of inaction. In his poem “Lament for the June Sun,” written in the aftermath of the 1967 war, Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati turns the Arab coffeehouse from a hub of debate into a space of lamentation and self-condemnation:
We were ground in the coffeehouses of the East by
War of words, wooden swords
Lies and empty heroes.
The defeat curdles into indictment. To be ground in a coffeehouse is double-edged: the people are likened to coffee beans, crushed in exhaustion and disappointment, while the poem itself grinds the hypocrites in return. Al-Bayyati’s target is the corrupt rulers who fed their people propaganda and cover-ups while trading action for talk. Refusing to let the people alone carry the loss, the poem closes on a defiant turn: those who should answer for the shame are the “giant peacocks,” the strutting leaders. This moves powerfully along what scholar Nouri Gana calls the “differential spectrum of melancholy” which holds together seemingly opposed states—grief and grievance, creativity and stasis, defeat and defiance. Al-Bayyati’s café sits near its most defeated end, yet that closing turn keeps it from settling entirely into despair: the grounds still have grit.
The sense of defeat leads some to disavow politics altogether—as if one could. Mourid Barghouti writes: “Staying away from politics is also politics.” For him, “Politics is the number of coffee-cups on the table…” – it could be a way of counting who is present, who is missing, who refuses to leave, and who has quietly slipped away. There are fewer cups by the year.
Under an occupation that criminalises movement and makes the private home a target rather than a refuge, Mariam Barghouti reminds us that coffee shops have become some of the last places where collective life can still, briefly, be assembled. She calls them threshold spaces for people “holding life at the edge of survivability” while navigating “a state of limbo.”
I think of the cafés multiplying across Hebron. They are not a sign of newfound prosperity nor a negation of the violence around them. When the colonial project pens people into ever-smaller enclaves, the insistence on beauty does not vanish—it adapts. People try to make these fragmented spaces liveable, even exquisite. What looks, to a distant observer, like indulgence is often a refusal to let the walls close all the way in, an insistence on grace where there is little room for it. And yet I hesitate: how much of this is people finding small, creative ways to manage, and how much is capital learning to profit from our confinement? Under occupation, the two become hard to tell apart, and perhaps that indistinguishability is the point.
The Interrogator’s Cup
To offer coffee is to offer welcome; to be offered it by the State is to be marked for capture. Mourid Barghouti names this dark double of hospitality—the invitation to coffee that is itself an abduction: “And if the ‘dawn visitor’ tells you, with official courtesy and a weapon-bearing smile, as he tears you from your family and leads you away, ‘We’d like you to have a coffee at our place,’ it’s a form of kidnapping, or murder…” He continues by warning that “foolish is the man who trusts the government’s coffee.”
Indeed, “having coffee” is a euphemism for a summons to meet an intelligence officer, be it of the colonial State or its collaborators. Oftentimes, there is no such prelude at all. The soldiers break into the home—the most intimate of spaces—usually near dawn, and the kidnapping comes with no invitation to coffee, no pretence of courtesy.
I was once in a taxi when I fell into conversation with the driver, a former political prisoner. It felt inappropriate to ask whether he had coffee in prison while he was speaking of torture. Yet he was generous to share. Coffee, he told me, can be offered as a test of one’s willingness to cooperate. Many refuse the interrogator’s cup, rejecting any sense of normalcy that would make it an act of fellowship.
Days of interrogation leave a person estranged even from themselves. The small comforts, coffee among them, come to feel like rumours of another life.
Outside the interrogation rooms, in the courthouses, the anxiety is palpable. Families bring their own coffee in thermoses while waiting on the fate of their loved ones. After 7 October 2023, in-person family visits were banned. In some cases, prisoners with court sessions can fleetingly see their families through quick video calls.
Mahmoud Darwish captures the essence of this carceral cruelty in miniature: “A mother reprimands the prison guard: Why have you spilled our coffee onto the grass, you mischief maker?” The image of coffee spilled on the grass is a moment of connection intentionally broken. The mother’s choice of words is what makes the image more searing: “mischief maker”—a phrase for childhood pranks levelled at a figure of systemic violence. She strips him of his authority and exposes what might lie beneath it: a petty, spiteful will.
There is, indeed, something called the “coffee charge,” but it is levied against the victim, not the guard. In January 2022, an Israeli court sentenced Mohammed Salim, a nineteen-year-old from Jerusalem, to twenty-eight months in prison and an 18,000-shekel (around $6000) fine. His crime was spilling his cup on a settler who had been provoking him near the Damascus Gate.
Once admitted to a cell, a prisoner could buy coffee, often limited to “mud coffee” from an Israeli brand called Elite, at an exorbitant price. In a tongue-in-cheek moment in Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, Suad Amiry writes: “I’ve been told that the army has no time to boil the coffee and the water together, so they just pour warm water over the coffee grains and drink mud!… If they stopped harassing us, they might end up with a better life and a good cup of coffee.” The soldiers drink mud, and the prisoners buy it.
In its post-October 7th crackdown, the Israel Prison Service has shut down commissary access as part of its policy of collective punishment, and severely limited food rations in a campaign of systematic starvation. When food and medicine cannot get in, coffee is no longer even a necessity.
Parallel Time
There is more than one way to measure a life.
When the weary speaker in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” laments, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” he describes a life of bourgeois inertia. For the Palestinian prisoner, time is something else: a substance the colonial State tries to confiscate and fracture.
Writer and martyr Walid Daqqa, who died in 2024 after thirty-eight years of incarceration and medical negligence, called this carceral reality “Parallel Time.” It is a world where place stands still and the usual units—minutes, hours, dates—matter only during a brief family visit. This is when prisoners’ time briefly collides with “normal” time across a glass window. Inside prison, people learn to measure life not by calendars but by arrests, transfers, and releases: “X happened the day so-and-so arrived,” “before such-and-such was liberated.” Daqqa describes the prisoner’s time in a tense of their own: the “past continuous and never-ending.”
Objects kept from the day of arrest—a lighter, a cigarette pack—come to carry a different weight from the life they were seized from. Daqqa writes that these were the last things prisoners held in the “future”: proof of a life before the rupture, and anchors to a world that kept moving while they remained still. What is targeted by Israeli authorities, he writes, is any relationship outside the self—with other people, with nature, even with the jailer as a human being. In the silence of the cell, the prisoner must stitch minutes from whatever is left—objects, thoughts, daydreams—and find a different language for being alive. In that language, holding onto love is a radical preservation of the self, one’s “sole victory over [the] jailers.”
The prisoner’s struggle extends to coffee’s oldest companion: the cigarette. One quickens the heart, the other steadies it. Together, in the Turkish proverb, they bring “complete repose.” In Daqqa’s account, however, repose is the last thing on offer. He recounts waiting in handcuffs in a transit yard when a voice rose from a holding cell behind him: “Uncle, give me a cigarette.” Crouching at the bottom of the door was a child no older than twelve. The word stopped him—”uncle”—signalling the generational distance. Both of them were afraid, Daqqa writes: “I was afraid of the past and he was afraid of the future.” The boy did not want nicotine but early admission into adulthood—a way to shed visible vulnerability in order to survive a four-year sentence. After some hesitation, Daqqa handed him a cigarette, understanding that he was granting a premature rite of passage forced by the colonial State. When the ember caught, the child rose onto his toes, suddenly older than his age.
The prison guard barked at the boy to drop the cigarette and muttered in Hebrew at the sight of a child smoking, yet went on cuffing him all the same. The wrists were too small for the handcuffs, so he used them on the boy’s legs instead. Daqqa wanted to hold the boy and felt the urge to weep. But he hid it. He would not shatter the man the boy was trying to become. He crossed the yard to shake his hand, comrade to comrade, and asked: “How are you, fighter?”
“The day after the release” is another way prisoners measure time. If imprisonment is described as the “funeral site of the living,” then release is the unearthing of a buried future and the resumption of stolen rituals. After twenty years and five months of incarceration, Mohammad Zayed fulfilled a promise: to have the first cup of coffee with his wife. She handed him the cup; he gave her a rose. Time was restored. She asked if he was really here, fearing it was a dream. Coffee here is a homecoming—a small joy that marks the shift from a life ruled by the jailer’s clock to one shaped by the freed prisoner’s own time.
Against Entropy
As Israel’s genocide intensified, my relationship with coffee hardened into an obsession. My mug had to sit precisely on the left edge of the shelf, the cinnamon in the same place on the spice rack. I gripped my mug until my knuckles blanched. My morning routine became a liturgy I performed as if breaking the sequence would break something in me.
When my mother once moved the mug to a different shelf, something in me broke. I had been trying to control a kitchen cupboard to offset a deeper powerlessness.
I wonder how many feel acts of injustice as dregs of coffee stuck in the throat, the bitter water rising to the eyes as tears. I notice the coping mechanisms of people around me: half-breaths slip out as cigarette smoke. Eyes fix on nothing. Knees jitter under tables. Coffee sharpens the edge.
The Coffee Machine in the Dream
Following the soldiers’ raid on Birzeit University on 6 January this year, I dreamt that I could not reach the coffee machine in the lecturers’ common room. I was paralysed by the fear of being “laser-marked” by soldiers.
In another dream, a soldier stared into a coffee machine as it dripped. Another casually shot a person. Al Jazeera flashed across the screen in the arithmetic of the dream: “Over Nine Thousand Palestinians killed in Cafés.”
In late June 2025, an Israeli airstrike on the al-Baqa internet café in Gaza City killed at least thirty-nine people. I could not access their names or stories. The nightmare does not stop at dreams.
The Nightmare Bus
Najwan Darwish names that vehicle, the nightmare bus, in a short poem of Armenian-Palestinian solidarity, “Who Remembers the Armenians?”:
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night
and my coffee, this morning
I’m drinking it with them
You, murderer—
Who remembers you?
Those marked for erasure are not alone on that bus. Across genocides, the cup reappears, almost always tasting wrong. Each passenger holds something that no longer tastes like what it once was, because the world that gave it flavour has been burned.
In Nazi Germany, party doctors incorporated decaffeinated coffee into racial-hygiene policy, calling caffeine a “poison” for young Aryans. At the same time, Jews confined to ghettos and camps were issued ration cards for ersatzkaffee—substitute coffee brewed from chicory, barley, acorns, or burned grain—which some survivors later described as “tasting like ink.” Outside those barbed-wire geographies, ersatzkaffee circulated among the wider German population as a more general wartime austerity measure: even perpetrators and bystanders tasted the shortages authored by their own State, albeit in a different register from its victims.
The history in which Jews were given ink-tasting coffee as a regime of starvation, and the present in which a self-declared Jewish State starves Gazans and bombs their cafés show how easily the machinery of dehumanisation is rebuilt, this time with different hands on the controls.
Writer Hanan Habashi articulates what many feel about the way genocide reaches past the body to the small rituals that make a life legible to itself: “I weep at this savage rupture of a very ordinary life, a small life that only wanted to go on quietly loving its little things… to keep making coffee and combing its hair and leaning towards flowers… the right to persist in those minor devotions by which people keep themselves human.”
Making coffee, like other everyday activities, has become an extraordinary mission. Nahil Muhanna, a writer from northern Gaza, shared that after ten months without cooking gas, they burned wood, paper, their children’s books, and their own nerves just to boil water. For a time, Nescafé disappeared entirely. When it returned, a single jar cost 400 shekels (around $135). “We got used to the fake coffee,” she wrote. “The sound of rockets is our only alarm clock now.” She and a few other “crazies,” as she called them, pooled their money to share one jar, dividing it with a spoon for fairness.
At funerals, people are usually served small cups of bitter coffee with Medjool dates. But what happens when life itself becomes a perpetual funeral? A woman named Nada went to the market to find coffee for her father’s service and paid 120 shekels (around $40) for a small bag the seller swore was real. When she served it to the mourners, the bitter taste of roasted chickpeas filled their mouths. She had been sold “war coffee,” a counterfeit mix of chickpeas, lentils, and date pits, roasted over a wood fire.
Bosnians know that cup. During the 1992–1995 siege of Sarajevo and the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995, they roasted whatever they had—acorns, chicory, dandelion root, lentils, uncooked rice—and poured it into the fildžan, a cup whose name shares a root with the Arabic finjān. The fildžan holds what the finjān holds: a small cup, a large grief. One survivor shared, “After the genocide, life and coffee are not the same, but I try to keep the meaning of coffee alive.”
The politics of the cup crosses the Atlantic. A friend tells me about Cuba—once the world’s largest coffee exporter, now a place that cannot grow enough to meet its own demand. To stretch what little there is, there have been extended periods of time since 1959 when the government has had to mix the rationed coffee half-and-half with roasted peas, much like what Gazans call “war coffee,” though born of a different siege. Now, with the United States preventing fuel and cooking gas from reaching the archipelago, that coffee-growing nation is brewing coffee over candles.
Cubans have a name for standard, light-brewed American coffee: agua sucia. Dirty water.
Can One Drink Coffee in a Tank?
I am reminded of the voice in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem:
The soldiers are trying to listen to the same songs
the martyrs listened to
while they’re still circulating in their blood
like the smell of fresh coffee.
The image is intimate and predatory. The soldiers press their ears to the martyr’s current, wanting the warmth, the wakefulness, the will—the coffee. The poem reveals a dependency the occupiers cannot name: they cannot generate these things from within themselves, so they must take them from the bodies they have just destroyed. They covet a vitality they cannot produce. But song, blood, and coffee all stain. They seep into walls, into fabric, into memory. Culture is not so easily conscripted. It clings. It haunts. It returns.
In “A Letter to an Israeli Soldier,” Muin Bseiso and Mahmoud Darwish ask:
Can one piss in a tank?
Can he read in the tank?
Can a person fly pigeons in a tank?
Can one fuck in a tank?
Or plant trees in the tank?
And here I ask: can one drink coffee in a tank?
A Promise
On my last day in Oxford after a research fellowship, a barista in Society Café handed me a fully stamped loyalty card. “So that next time you are here, you can just stop by and have coffee,” she said. For a Palestinian, so often made to feel like an imposition, this act of kindness was a powerful relief.
A loyalty card carries the assumption that there will be a next time, that you will return, that your freedom of movement is a given, that visa authorities will grant you entry. These are assumptions some make without thinking. I don’t.
Mahmoud Darwish calls the love of coffee a “plea for difference itself.” No coffee is like another, and no person is a copy of the next—a quiet rebellion against the wishes of fascists and colonisers, who dream of a homogeneous, compliant world.
To keep making coffee, as Hanan Habashi writes, is to keep oneself human. To make it with someone, across a checkpoint or a century, is to refuse the chisel that would split us apart.
Coffee, then, is a promise.
The promise is not only that I will return to a café that still stands. It is that shared time will return—the unfractured kind Daqqa named, and of which many prisoners in our carceral geographies are still robbed—and that we will measure it, again, in cups poured for one another.
I send a photo of my cappuccino, a swan etched in the foam, to my friend in Gaza. She knows what this means. We will one day embrace, breathe the same air, and share coffees.
Feature image: Aftermath of an Israeli air attack on the beachside Al-Baqa cafe, in Gaza, where a 500-pound bomb killed 39 people on 30 June 2025. Photo: Jehad Alshrafi / AP. Source: Al Jazeera
