Shortly after October 7th, 2023, Israeli police violently dispersed a protest in Haifa against the escalating war on Gaza. By way of explanation, the police commissioner expressed a zero-tolerance policy on dissent, warning that “those who identify with Gaza can be escorted there on buses.” By October 16th, over 100 Palestinian citizens of Israel had been arrested or interrogated over social media posts opposing the war or expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians. In the 17 months since, this severe repression has continued: Israeli officials have cancelled film screenings by Palestinian directors, raided Palestinian bookstores, and arrested Palestinian academics. And yet Palestinian citizens of Israel have continued to find new ways to register opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The Hebrew-language story “On the Squeezing: The Parable of the Lemons” by Tawfiq Da’adli, an art historian and archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is one such creative gesture of resistance. Published in the now-shuttered left-wing Israeli outlet Haokets in April 2024, by which time Israel’s assault had claimed the lives of at least 32,600 people in Gaza, the short piece cloaks its dissent in what may at first seem like a mundane narrative about someone who enjoys juicing citrus. But the particular power of Da’adli’s story lies in the tension between its coded opacity and its direct summoning of state-sanctioned violence: The title of Da’adli’s parable, “Al Ha’skhita,” unmistakably evokes Hayim Nahman Bialik’s famous poem “Al Ha’shkhita” (“On the Slaughter”), written in Hebrew in 1903. ….more
