What if, one day, we were to wake up and find that all Palestinians in Israel had suddenly disappeared? The shadow cast by those absent comes into view in Ibtisam Azem’s novel The Book of Disappearance. Published in Arabic in 2014, the novel was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, shortly after the Israeli prime minister’s visit to the White House during which he applauded the American president’s “fresh idea” to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Azem’s novel might at first be considered a work of dystopian foresight. But rather, it offers a belated retrospective depiction of an ongoing process of mass expulsion, displacement and killing that began with the Nakba, long before the atrocities in Gaza.

The Book of Disappearance reads as a new response to Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. With Palestinians cast as an existential threat to Israel’s security, literary imagination turns to a single Jewish state without its Palestinian Other, having achieved this endgoal without bloodshed. The most unsettling aspect about Azem’s novel is how closely it approaches realism for readers who are familiar with the “hundred years' war on Palestine.”

Azem has spoken about two major incidents that inspired the novel. The first is a well-known quote by Israel’s former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yitzhak Rabin who, during the First Intifada, said he wished he could wake up one day to find that the Gaza Strip had sunk into the sea. The second is Israeli historian Benny Morris’s defence of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians: his framing of the Nakba as a justified action, and his suggestion that David Ben-Gurion erred by stopping short of expelling all Palestinians. In this novel, set in contemporary Jaffa, an entire society grapples with the sudden disappearance of Palestinians, Nakba refugees in their own homeland, vanishing suddenly and without notice, leading to a mass panic among Israelis.

Colonialism without the Colonized

In his 2025 book The Time Beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism seeks to conquer time as much as is does land. “If political Zionism is […] a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest, unable to move past the past,” he writes, “it is not simply because its own immanent contradictions have risen to the surface, but because the Palestinian insistence on remaining and not disappearing amounts to a refusal to abide by the closure of time, a refusal of the rendering of the past into settler futurity, a refusal to allow the impasse to be overcome.” Azem’s novel challenges this claim, presenting a vision where even total Palestinian disappearance inescapably haunts the settler colonial project.

In short chapters, the novel includes the memoirs of a Palestinian cameraman named Alaa. In his opposition stands Ariel, a journalist and his Israeli neighbour. It is perhaps fitting that the two were introduced to one another by a German, a minor character with major historical agency. In an allusion to the contrived German culture of remembrance, the two neighbours first meet at a party thrown by Natalie, a “blond German who was uneasy about being blond and German. She was haunted by her guilt and her ancestors’ crime. And everything somehow revolved around her guilt. Ariel complained to Alaa once that she talked so much about the Holocaust, one would think she was the granddaughter of one of the victims, and not of a Nazi.”

The book highlights the presence of absence even before the titular disappearance of all Palestinians. The novel beings in the midst of one such absence: Alaa narrates how his mother has just discovered that his grandmother is suddenly missing, and rushes out to search for her. The family eventually discovers that she wandered to the beach to spend her last hours of life looking out at the sea, the only local scenery that remains untouched by the settlements. “The sea is the only thing that hasn’t changed”—as opposed to Ajami, the part of Jaffa that “they fenced […] with barbed wire and declared […] a military zone”. An intact view of nature supports a temporality that is unique for survivors’ memory of the landscape they used to know.

Having been internally displaced during the Nakba, the grandmother suffers profound loneliness, feeling “orphaned” after the expulsion of her loved ones. She finds herself surrounded by strangers: “Something about the survivors leaves them always lonely.” Tata describes how “[a]ll the Jaffans who stayed here see a shadow walking next to them when they walk through the old city. Even the Jews say they hear voices at night, but when they go out to see who it is, they don’t find anyone.” The shimmer of the past lives everywhere: Tata always speaks of herself in the past, her mind becoming absent to enter memories of the time before displacement

Alaa’s diaries of his version of the past merge with his grandmother’s memories. They shed light on the perspective of those who, after the founding of Israel, were not displaced but remained despite all adversities. In parallel, chapters told from Ariel’s perspective describe a city in which everything old has been cleared away and replaced by a new urban landscape. In one chapter, while walking through Tel Aviv, Ariel recalls how the city’s first mayor Meir Dizengoff once “took large, old trees from adjacent areas and spread them around so they would appear as if they had been there for a lifetime,” artificially endowing the streets with the aesthetics of an established city much older than the young state of Israel. By doing so, settlers write themselves into the land’s past.