On ‘Fighting Ideological Fantasy with Fiction’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

On ‘Fighting Ideological Fantasy with Fiction’

‘Palestine -1’ Contributors on Imagination as Resistance 

Palestine – 1: Stories from the eve of the Nakba, ed. Basma Ghalayini

By Cara Burdon

Past and present bleed into one another: the ghosts of the 1948 Nakba surface in the Gaza genocide and in ongoing structures of colonial violence. Look too hard, and temporal and spatial boundaries collapse, and with them the distinction between reality, fiction, and the very notion of dystopia.

Navigating this blurred terrain—between past and present, reality and imagination—has become essential to understanding our current moment as a charged juncture. In the face of persistent attempts at erasure—the denial of land, history, and people—confronting this collapse in temporal and narrative boundaries becomes not only necessary but urgent.

In Comma Press’s new anthology Palestine-1, editor Basma Ghalayani gathers stories by Palestinian writers set on the cusp of the Nakba. By intertwining historical reality with speculative and fantastical elements, the collection invites readers to move within the blurred space between fiction and reality, between the weight of the past and the urgencies of the present. The stories in the collection thus compel us to ask: can ideological fantasy be challenged, and perhaps ruptured, through the imaginative power of fiction itself?

Several authors who contributed short stories to the collection spoke about their thoughts on the collapse of time, historical continuities and the notion of fighting ideological fantasy with fiction.

‘Who Is Speaking—Past or Present?’

Anwar Hamed’s story “Trapped” probes the collapse of temporal boundaries through time travel. Rooted in the Tantura Massacre of May 1948 yet dedicated to the memory of Hind Rajab—the little girl killed by the Israeli army in her family’s car, along with six relatives, in January 2024—her ghost threads its way through the narrative. The title resonates on multiple levels: Hind Rajab’s fictional counterpart, Hiba,  is “trapped” in childhood, frozen at the moment of her death, yet simultaneously freed from its finality. She slips through time, inhabiting and metamorphosing into the bodies of other Palestinian women at pivotal moments before and after the Nakba.

For Hamed, writing about pre-Nakba Palestine is a direct challenge to Zionist “ideological fantasies” that deny Palestinian presence, history, and continuity. “Many people draw a clean division—a rigid chasm in history. They see a ‘before 1948’ and an ‘after,’” he says. “I use time travel to disrupt that. It creates a sense of historical continuity—of dispossession, of lived Palestinian history that is constantly being refuted.”

Hamed says he always circles back to Palestine before 1948 in his works, viewing this as a means of refusing erasure. “In my view, writing about Palestine before the Nakba is itself a challenge to Zionist ideological fantasies—that there were never any Palestinians.” This insistence on a continuity of Palestinian history and presence in his literature becomes a way of stitching together the very seams that Zionist narratives attempt to sever.

His contribution to Palestine-1 blends time travel with the supernatural. Ghosts populate the story; the girl inspired by Hind Rajab continues to speak through other characters long after her death. “Haunting is a key component,” Hamed notes. “Different dead characters live on and speak through others. It creates confusion—who is who? Is this a figure from the past or from the present?” This deliberate disorientation mirrors the uncanny experience of watching history repeat itself—the sense that the Nakba of seventy-five years ago continues to reverberate into the present.

For Hamed, the temporal and the spectral are inseparable. “As a Palestinian, I am obsessed with the idea of ghosts in relation to our history. The fear deeply rooted in the Israeli consciousness is not of armed Palestinians or Arab armies—it is of Palestinian ghosts, of the remnants of a history they have not fully erased. These ghosts cannot be eliminated by armies, censorship, or narrative manipulation.”

Through this interweaving of haunting, time travel, and historical return, Hamed’s story asserts that Palestinian presence—past, present, and future—remains irreducible and unerasable.

‘The Trauma Is Too Vast for Words’

Ibtisam Azem’s story “Ismail al-Lyddawi” engages similar dissonances between past and present, fiction and historical reality, through the interwoven motifs of silence and voice. Anchored in the 1948 massacre in al-Lydd—when Israeli forces captured the towns of Lydda and Ramle, expelling residents and carrying out mass killings—the story threads Azem’s own historical research with imaginative reconstruction.

Her protagonist, Ismail, is a gifted singer whose voice is gradually extinguished as he witnesses the atrocities committed against his friends and neighbors. Though fictional, his muteness emerges from real accounts: “he is based on stories I heard about people who, after the Nakba, stopped talking much,” Azem explains. “Today in Gaza, as in 1948, some survivors want to tell their stories. Others retreat into silence—the trauma is too vast for words.”

For Azem, silence itself marks a neglected but crucial recurring pattern in Palestinian history. “There is a continuity—Palestinians now, as in 1948, are being silenced, both by trauma and by narrative manipulation,” she says. This silencing, whether imposed or internalized, becomes a political and historical condition that fiction can expose.

“It is our duty—as novelists and journalists—to draw attention to this continuity. Time is never linear for Palestinians. It feels circular. We are continually forced to revisit past traumas.”

The resonance between the Gaza genocide and the Nakba brings suppressed stories and forgotten massacres back into the frame. For Azem, this recursive emergence is precisely where fiction becomes indispensable. “Fiction allows us to tell survivor stories, but also delve deeper into our current situation and into our past—to connect them, to reconcile them when the world insists on keeping them apart. It is important to maintain and emphasize these connections in order to rupture Zionist narratives.”

‘A Space for Critical Questioning’

Selma Dabbagh’s “Katamon” similarly refracts a pivotal historical moment through imagination and speculative inquiry. She revisits the 1948 assassination of UN Peace Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte—killed by Zionist extremists—through the perspective of the wife of French military officer André Sérot, who, seated beside Bernadotte, was shot in the same attack. This assassination has long been interpreted as the symbolic “death” of the two-state solution, given Bernadotte’s role in establishing UN Resolution 194, which foregrounded the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For Dabbagh, the imaginative dimensions of her story lie in the “what ifs” embedded in this juncture.

“I wanted to investigate modern-day Zionism by returning to its core,” Dabbagh explains. “When we think of imagination and fantasy, we think of the extraordinary or the supernatural, but they also reside in the questions—the what ifs. By returning to these what ifs, you open a space for critical questioning: why and how have we reached this point, and what comes next?”

Dabbagh notes that at the moment of Israel’s creation, at this moment in which her story takes place, alternative pathways still remained. “There was space for reconciliation, room for dialogue. This was the turning point into violent, hostile othering and negation. Things could have unfolded differently.”

The narrator is herself a Holocaust survivor whom Bernadotte helped rescue. Dabbagh portrays her disorientation as she confronts both her husband’s sudden death and the bewildering unfamiliarity of the new state around her. “The narrator’s confusion reflects that historical moment.” The ambiguity saturating the story extends beyond the character’s consciousness, prompting readers to interrogate their own assumptions—inviting further “what ifs.”

The story also foregrounds the recurring erasure of Palestinians, as the narrator observes—often without comprehension—the gradual disappearance of Palestinian life around her. “The desire to blot out, expunge, eliminate—to erase Palestinian presence through physical, epistemological, and discursive violence—is something we see today,” Dabbagh says. “It was present at the beginning as much as now; it has simply taken different forms.”

“Katamon” also exposes a deeper contradiction, another persistent pattern that runs from 1948 to the present: the duplicity surrounding acts of violence. “The contradiction,” Dabbagh says, “is that the Israeli government publicly condemns settler brutality when the Western world is watching, while privately celebrating, funding, and enabling it.”

‘We Time-Travel In Fiction As We Do In Reality’

Mazen Maarouf’s story “A Chronicle of Grandad’s Last Days” unfolds in his ancestral village of Dayr al-Qasi in 1947, a place he has reconstructed through research, images, oral accounts, and family memory. Yet in this reimagined landscape, everything is permeable: characters blend into one another, speak through the dead, converse with animals, and address the future. The real dissolves into the fantastical, and the fantastical into a historical reality that has long been dismissed as fiction.

In Maarouf’s world, nothing is fixed. Time folds in on itself; life leaks into death and death into life. Heroes slip into villainy, and villains unexpectedly acquire the qualities of heroes. Characters remain fluid, mutable, in constant metamorphosis. “I wanted to question the meaning of heroism, resistance, love, and betrayal—all the social relationships that exist in any community,” Maarouf explains. “I always avoid portraying Palestinians as pure villains or pure heroes, as if we fit neatly into one category. We are human beings. We have the right to be good, to be bad, to change—just as we did in 1948.”

Many of the story’s characters draw inspiration from relatives, friends, or people whose stories Maarouf has inherited, yet most are imagined. “A lot of documentation about the Nakba—names, people, families—has been lost,” he says. “Every Palestinian family has a story, and every story is living proof of the Nakba of 1948 and its continuation into the present. I took fragments of these stories and employed them fictionally. I used imagination, but I imagined these characters as they truly were, in their village.”

Although the figure of the grandfather is central, the narrative voice belongs largely to a child. “Writing in the voice of a child is a tribute to my grandparents,” Maarouf says. “It allows me to reimagine and re-examine my relationship with them.” This merging of child and elder, of past and present, opens a temporal aperture where generations co-exist.

“Palestinians live in different eras at the same time,” he says. “They live in the present, marked by alienation or exile, but they also live in their grandparents’ time—when Palestine was their home. And they live in the time of the future, in hope, in waiting to return. This waiting is not giving up.” The simultaneity of these temporalities, he argues, shapes the work of Palestinian writers. “We all share this distorted sense of time. We time-travel in fiction as we do in reality.”

For Maarouf, the collapse of time into a literary form is itself evidence of the Nakba—of a history persistently denied and silenced—and proof of the Palestinian capacity to imagine otherwise. “For Palestinians, reality constantly collapses into fiction and fiction into reality. We have nothing if we do not have hope and dreams. We must keep holding onto life, onto the future,” he insists. “As a writer, I try to build pathways between reality and dreams. Imagination for Palestinians is a haven.”

Imagination, for Maarouf, is both escape and insistence. “As Palestinians, we must acknowledge our reality, our history—we must revisit it again and again. But we are dynamic, and our imaginations are dynamic. To imagine, to write literature, is to insist otherwise. Our imagination confirms that hope is part of our identity—something rooted in our minds—and it cannot be erased.”