“In Haifa,” writes Abdalrahman Alqalaq, “people say that on the first night after settling in Wadi al-Salib, the settlers heard the screams and weeping of the displaced people who, 75 years ago, on April 22, 1948, fell victim to the massacres in that city. It is believed that it was the story of this fear that saved some of the houses in the neighborhood, inhabited by the absentees, from being colonized. Until the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 was enacted. At this point, I would like to add my own story: Those who fear the cries of the dead believe in their return, and fear it at the same time.”

Alqalaq’s poems and prose trace the stories of three generations of a Palestinian family, across eight decades of exile. Born in 1997 in the Al-Yarmuk refugee camp at the outskirts of Damascus, the Palestinian poet and performer uses his writing to navigate the transgenerational legacy of expulsion. From the grandmother’s fleeing Haifa in the wake of the Nakba, to the grandson’s second displacement from Syria to Germany, Alqalaq confronts the unjust permanence of Palestinian refugee camps.

The father Samir and the grandmother Izdihar are recurring figures across Alqalaq’s writing. Neither lived to see the sea at Haifa again. Only after a subsequent displacement was their descendant Abdalrahman able to obtain the first legal document permitting him to “return” to Haifa: a German passport granted him access back to his family’s city. This return was enabled by his newfound citizenship in that same country that has contributed to the unresolved state of the question of Palestine, the same country that systematically erases Palestinian (hi)stories, the same country that is the second largest arms supplier to Israel during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. “I left the camp,” he writes laconically, “crossed the sea to the north, returned with a German passport / and the rubber boat that stuck to my skin was removed by the inspectors with disgust / as if it was an old chewing gum on my ankle. I said this is how I found my forefathers.“

The legacy of grandmother Izdihar shimmers between the lines of Alqalaq’s poetry collection Rite of Passage, published in Arabic in 2023 and translated into German in 2024. Izdihar shields her children from the details of her expulsion, bringing her descendants into a life far from the Nakba, from the catastrophe of her deportation. “Why didn’t you slam the camp gate in the child’s face and instead open the gate of your memory to Palestine?”, the narrator gently scolds his grandmother into account. The text traverses gaps in memory, filling the spaces left by missing documents with imagined experiences, and with untold stories taken to the grave. The text sporadically introduces narrative structures that sit ambiguously between memory, fact, and fiction. In these dazzling episodes something concrete and personal is uncovered; stories and fates from the banned archives of the Nakba become visible.

Parking Lots Instead of Humans

Returning to Haifa after three generations of displacement turns the traveller’s life, and his writing, upside down. It becomes an urgent theme and ultimately the core of Alqalaq’s new book in Arabic, The Thieves Beat Me to Haifa (2025), quoted at the beginning of this article. This new collection of poetry and prose, even more so than his previous work, escalates the rebellion against the permanence of the refugee camps: Alqalaq writes to push for their dismantling.

Arriving in the neighbourhood of Wadi Salib, Alqalaq is at last united with an ensemble of absentees, both alive and dead. Each familiar location stands as a reminder of ongoing dispossession, of the street barricades placed by Haganah militias in 1948 that left only one road open to Palestinians: towards the sea.

Alqalaq views the city through his grandmother’s memory. Taking on her gaze, he can peel away the settlements, the modern city built over ruins and Palestinian bodies. Street names, now overwritten, revert to their old titles. Time stands still, the present is suspended.

Searching for his grandmother’s home leads the traveller to realize that the building has been demolished and replaced by a parking lot. Alqalaq renders this moment of discovery with extreme austerity: the descriptions are sober and restrained. A street sign bearing the letter “P.” Opening hours. Parking fees. The house in historic Palestine, etched into the memories of three generations, has been “replaced” by a parking lot. Where the lyrical voice is met by the stench of metal and rubber tires, the absence of the grandmother and the history of Palestinian dispossession become traumatically present.

Time in the Camps

People often say that bombs can make time stand still. If the pressure wave caused by a blast did not destroy clocks outright, it would cause their hands to stop. After the siege and bombing of Al-Yarmuk, Alqalaq writes that he expected the world to stand still. Yet it continued. His texts, then, instead engage in a practice of modifying temporalities, of creating their own.

The opening text of Alqalaq’s latest collection, “Izdihar’s Eyes … Or, the Nakba Between the Door Shutters,” reveals how camps have preserved their own temporality for decades. Each night for fifteen years, the mother Nidal climbs up onto a chair to remove the wall clock, places it on a table, and then removes the batteries until morning. The loud ticking of the clock would prevent her from hearing if thieves try to break into the house. The narrator, however, never assumed this tradition had anything to do with thieves; as a child, he is relieved that time is standing still, a promise that everything in Al-Yarmuk refugee camp has ground to a halt. No death, starvation, funerals, marriages or protests will happen while the batteries are on the table.

Nidal creates a temporality for the camp inherited from her own mother. She, too, used to remove the batteries from the clock and put them back in the morning. The grandmother’s difficulty with memory, thought to be Alzheimer’s, is actually an ability to retain only two dates: either the 14th or the 16th of May, before or after the Nakba. When batteries are removed, new temporalities are created. Stopping the clock arms from moving turns time backwards, to an era before settler violence.

In Thieves Beat Me to Haifa, Palestine, this imagined construct in the camps—on its walls, homes, alleys, and passages—is taken to another level. The Al-Yarmuk camp was destroyed and depopulated during the Syrian war, after having been besieged, its population starved. Not even an imaginary homeland in exile could last. The death of Palestinian refugee camps, therefore, is not meant as metaphor. “From camp to camp, from death to death,” is a quote from a Palestinian mother that Alqalaq returns to over and over in his writing. It describes the history of displacement of Palestinians, including his own: as a stateless Palestinian, he grew up in a refugee camp only to then cross the Mediterranean and arrive at yet another refugee camp in Germany.

Choreography of Resistance

The violent displacement “from camp to camp, from death to death” has become increasingly entrenched since the legally sanctioned expropriation under the Absentee Property Law of 1950. The law allows the Israeli state to confiscate the property of displaced Palestinians, who are thereby declared “absentees”—in a trivializing manner, as if it were voluntary—rather than “displaced persons.” The confiscation thwarts any prospect of return. To illustrate condition this even more powerfully, Alqalaq draws on another medium. His solo play Absentee Law, which premiered at the Burgtheater in Hildesheim in June 2025 under the stage co-direction of Marion Avgeris and Alqalaq himself , recounts (among other things) the story of Ezzedine Kalak—artist, archivist, and PLO representative in France—until his assassination in Paris in 1978.

I had long been familiar with the protagonist’s name. In addition to his political activism, Kalak, born in Haifa in 1936, wrote literature, published a collection of short stories titled Martyrs Without Sculptures, translated literary works into Arabic, collected postcards and stamps documenting the history of Palestine, and established a department for Palestinian films at the PLO office in Paris.

Kalak was the successor to Mahmoud Hamshari, who was assassinated by Mossad agents in Paris in 1973. Within a few months, a veritable series of murders took place in the French capital. Among the victims were the Iraqi activist Basil Al Kubaisi and the Algerian poet and playwright Mohamed Boudia, who both stood in public solidarity with Palestine. That year alone, the Mossad assassinated several Palestinian intellectuals and diplomats in Rome, Athens, Beirut, and Cyprus in what was believed to be retaliation for the Munich Olympics attack.

Five years later, Kalak was shot dead at the age of 42 in his office in Paris, along with his assistant Adnan Hammad. The responsibility for the assassination is disputed. French investigators long accused a militant group that had broken away from the PLO. The Mossad was also believed to be a suspect, not only in Arab sources. There is no conclusive evidence for either theory. Family members, who feared for their lives, cautiously spoke of a suspect who seemed obvious to them—one who had sent Kalak a letter bomb. Despite the assassination of his predecessors, Kalak had remained unyielding and emphasized in an interview that the life-threatening situation would not deter him from his commitment to Palestine.

Kalak’s work was pivotal in mobilizing left-wing French artists and filmmakers around the Palestinian cause, including the Groupe Cinéma Vincennes, which counted Claude Lazar and Serge Le Péron among its members. The latter, together with Guy Chaupouillié, dedicated the French biographical film “Ezzedine Kalak, délégé de l’OLP” to the slain “ambassadeur de la cause palestinienne.” With the diplomat’s death, the struggle for Palestine lost an important figure, not least because of Kalak’s involvement as head of the Union générale des étudiants de Palestiniens (GUPS) in France.

Scenes from said commemorative film, which featured the memorial service in Paris in the late 1970s, are incorporated into the stage performance in Absentee Law and projected onto a wall improvised from limestone. A remarkably large crowd attended the funeral procession in Damascus, where Kalak is buried; luminaries of Arab literature such as Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury wrote obituaries.

Although I was familiar with Kalak’s life story and his role in the Palestinian diaspora of the 1970s, it did not initially occur to me to connect him with the author Alqalaq, living in Berlin fifty years later. The varied spellings of the family name —intended to conceal family ties and offer protection—sparks a full-length wordplay that morphs from “Kalak” to “Alqalaq” and onto the “Kalk”, as limestone is called in German. This Kalk is the most important of the sparingly selected objects that the performer spreads out and scatters across the stage, rearranges multiple times, and which also serves as seating for the audience.

Stones Arrangement

Through these time leaps, a discontinuous space of memory unfolds that juxtaposes family history with political history: the Nakba and the expulsion of the grandmother Izdihar from Haifa in 1948; the assassination of Ezzedine Kalak in Paris thirty years later; Abdalrahman Alqalaq’s return to his grandmother’s birthplace in 2023.

How does the play succeed in making the absence and the silence tangible on stage? On the one hand, through Alqalaq’s disruption of the unity of character and performer, his inconsistency in appearance as a narrating or commenting protagonist. As in his poems, his body gives voice to the grandmother Izdihar, and also to figures—such as Kalak’s sister, who recounts how she once wanted to buy a scarf not far from the crime scene in Paris where her brother was being murdered. In the final scene, while dancing the dabke,a Palestinian folk dance, Alqalaq wraps a scarf around his neck, establishing a subtle connection without forced complete identification.

More than mere props, the limestone blocks also transcend pure metaphor. They embody—literally represent—the absent members of the Alqalaq family, the incomplete accounts of trauma, the silence, the grief, and the long shadows of dispossession. Two hundred grey blocks of stone, weighing a combined total of about 700 kilograms—the return of the “Alqalaqs” to the material realm is massive, bulky, and not easily humanized. And it is modular, for the limestone blocks are rearranged, repurposed, and repositioned over the course of fifty minutes. In another twist of wordplay, the restless rearranging evokes the Arabic word qalaq, which means “restlessness, worry, fear.” In one scene, the performer turns the stage into a sort of construction site to dramatically re-enact the grandmother’s escape route. In another, he recreates the shamefully levelled parking lot that has replaced the grandmother’s house in gentrified Haifa.

The coup de théâtre is not a singular effect, but unfolds consistently throughout the entire evening. It emerges in the poetic interstices between the names and the stones, between Kalk and Kalak, the absent Alqalaqs and the sole individual present on stage. In a key scene, Alqalaq turns his attention to the political dimension of the history of lime. The whitewashing of church interiors goes back to the Middle Ages; already by this time it symbolized “dominion, purity, and holiness”; during plague outbreaks, it was used to disinfect corpses and houses. Under Franco, this hygienic function took a cynical turn: lime was now spread over mass graves to hinder forensic investigations, and thus to cover up war crimes and crimes against humanity—to literally whitewash them. “In the logic of violence, lime becomes a tool of control: it preserves power and masks death as order, devastation as hygiene.” Absentee Law carries this logic to the extreme: lime was commonly used in the urban structures erected upon the corpses of Palestinians. In the limestone blocks on stage, the dead become present, their names casting an eerie echo. In a dystopian twist shortly before the finale, this echo fades away.

Palestine 2048

It is the year 2048. The Dead Sea has completely dried up. Where there was once water, there now only lies a landmass of sand, salt, and piles of limestone. “The legal logic of the Absentee Property Law has reached its peak,” explains the performer Alqalaq. The family’s last descendant decides to change his name from “Alqalaq” to “Kalk” and appeals to the United Nations to establish a Palestinian state on the dried-up bed of the Dead Sea. But the proposal comes too late, as the last Palestinians have themselves turned into lime, along with millions of storks (a final play on words with the name of that bird, which in Arabic is called “Laqlaq”).

Because language too has dried up, in the end it is only the body that speaks, as it begins to dance dabke. Traditionally performed in a group, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, the solo sequence of steps becomes accompanied by an ensemble of absentees. Life and dynamism seem to have faded from the limestone. Insisting on his right to return and remain and in face of a final catastrophe, the protagonist stamps his righteous anger on the ground—the earth from which he was, and continues to be, driven out.

To finally counter that catastrophe, collective remembrance must turn into collective action. And for that, the audience must become an actor—something for which the play has been preparing the viewers all along. After the closing scene, the applause is interrupted, the theater flooded with bright light. Abdalrahman Alqalaq, still in the persona of performer but also of political figure, appeals to those present to sign, after leaving the theater, a self-drafted petition to the German Bundestag calling for the recognition of Palestine as a state and an immediate halt to arms exports to Israel.

From a political and physical space outside the performance, the petition renews the audience’s relationship to the absent bodies on stage and all over the theatrical space. Thus, the audience can hardly escape the realization of what is experienced day in and day out: As long as Palestinians are registered as “stateless” or their nationality as “undefined” by German authorities, Palestinian bodies can be neither mourned nor remembered.