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.

Even the architecture of the city, with the novel’s reference to the Bauhaus, “the style fascism banned,” that “found a home in this tiny country after it fled fascist Europe,” makes Tel Aviv appear as northwestern Europe’s projection of the Mediterranean aesthetic. “Tel Aviv is full of Bauhaus architecture. Its memory is buildings and houses washed in whiteness. Memory is a choice.” This reference is followed by a mention of Yehuda Magidovitch, an architect who emigrated from Ukraine to Mandatory Palestine and is considered to have largely shaped the International Style aesthetic of Tel Aviv. His mention in The Book of Disappearance and the trees planted in the 1930s are a reminder of the settlement processes prior to the year 1948 in Palestine, foreshadowing the Nakba.

The Threat of Presence, The Threat of Absence

The unresolvable debate about what to do with Palestinians that has preoccupied Israeli society since 1948 is the subject of the extensive body of documentation, reporting and writing about Palestinians. In Azem’s novel, statements by state-run media borrow from the language of ethnic cleansing, framing the unexplained disappearance as a relief: “The news we’ve been hearing since this morning is great. I would like to salute our brave soldiers who carried out a clean operation to rid us of the fifth column and terrorists who were around us everywhere. We have finally cleaned up the country and achieved what we weren’t able to do during the war of independence.” (This fictionalized quote could almost be a real one from 2025.)

In the aftermath of their mysterious disappearance, Israelis assume that the Palestinians are staging a strike or planning a terrorist attack. This alarmed reaction occurs because of the structure of agency of this sudden absence—the Palestinians have not been disappeared; it is an autonomous decision, possibly planned, without the consent of the colonising power. The fact that the Palestinians have emancipated themselves from colonial rule causes mass hysteria across Israeli society. Not only has the essential, cheap labour carried out by racialized Palestinians evaporated, but the regime’s surveillance, and its famously powerful and sophisticated intelligence apparatus, have failed. The state’s instruments of control—media, the police, military—cannot begin to explain what happened. This throws the coloniser’s status, whose rule is by definition based on control, into question. How did the colonised exercise independent political will and get away with it?

The Zionist state apparatus seems to enter an impasse now that its Other has disappeared. Both Palestinian presence and absence pose a threat to the Israeli regime’s dependency on its antagonist. While grappling with the mystery of the absentees, a source in the army says, “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the forty-eight hours following the first mass disappearance of Arabs will determine the direction the state will take and its steps in the future.” The state of Israel is defined in the novel as an unfinished project, whose territorial integrity and ethnic identity is definitionally and permanently under existential threat from neighbouring nations in addition to Palestinians; this justifies the continuous building and improving the state, police, and military apparatus, expanding both the settler dimension of the state and its colonial aspect, to guarantee ‘more security.’ The sudden absence of Palestinians—reframed insistently by the Israeli media as generic “Arabs” who just happened to live inside the boundaries of the state—likewise becomes an unsettling occurence for a nation whose territorial boundaries have been historically defined and redefined through the justification of defense against both internal and external “Arab” antagonists.

Liberal Zionism’s Palestinian Other

Even liberal Zionism, embodied by Alaa’s neighbour Ariel, derives its legitimacy largely through the discourse it adopts in relation to its colonial other. Ariel’s liberal identity is constructed though his criticism of the military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet his instinctive response to discovering the memoirs documenting Alaa’s familial loss and trauma is an exploitative one. After Alaa’s disappearance (together with all other Palestinians), Ariel enters his neighbour’s apartment. What begins as a search for a missing person develops gradually into a takeover of his physical and symbolic space. Ariel first gains access to Alaa’s red notebook, with its account of Alaa’s and his grandmother’s history; he views the material as newly valuable historic currency for a self-serving memorial project, reflecting that the notebook’s contents could be part of a book he would write and publish on the disappearance of the Palestinians. Eventually, Ariel begins to make himself at home in Alaa’s living space, using his bed and utensils. By the end of the novel, he is ready to literally (re)write the narrative for Palestinians: he has created a new file on his computer titled “Chronicle of Pre-Disappearance,” and starts translating passages from the memoirs into Hebrew, usurping Alaa’s personal inheritance of family stories and pain, and subordinating their perspective to his own dubious chronicling skills.

Dispossession is being practiced systematically, it turns out—the government has set a deadline for an eventual return of the disappeared Palestinians. Once the deadline is past, their property will be confiscated, its ownership transferred to the Israeli regime. Well before that time, Israeli private citizens begin inquiring about empty properties and when they might possibly take possession of those homes. Literature here follows a real legal precedent: the Absentees Property Law of 1950 was the main legal instrument that allowed Israel to take possession of land and property of Palestinians displaced in or outside the country. In the meantime, the expropriation of Palestinian land has escalated further. For the first time since 1967, Israel intends to confiscate large swaths of land in the West Bank—for which Palestinians cannot provide official title deeds—and declare them state property.

The settler paradigm relies on cultivating a dominant collective memory deliberately designed for incongruence with the recollections of indigenous populations. Reinventing landscapes and landmarks, substituting languages, destroying and curating archival material, internal propaganda and censorship, Hasbara, political instrumentalization of the narrative of constant threat to the state’s security – all of these craft and maintain a cohesive dominant narrative that makes Palestinian memories seem inaudible, not to mention implausible. In The Book of Disappearance, several disputes between the main Palestinian protagonist Alaa and his Israeli antagonist Ariel elaborate on that issue. After Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel recalls how, in a heated discussion, Alaa blames him, a liberal Zionist, for denying him the space for Palestinian narratives to be voiced. “Everything we say is lost in translation. Even when we speak the same language.” The tragic irony is highlighted by the fact that Alaa’s story and his memories of his grandmother are being shared with the reader indirectly, and through a breach of privacy; Ariel’s own discovery of Alaa’s story occurs because he is invading Alaa’s home, his belongings and ultimately even his words.

Liberal Zionism is characterised in the novel by total complacency and confidence in the dominant narrative, sheltered from self-doubt by this impermeable collective memory. While navigating Alaa’s memories, Ariel questions the legitimacy of Alaa’s preoccupation with the past: why can’t he just enjoy living in a modern state, with all its freedom and privileges? He wonders why the Palestinian protagonist once erupted in anger when discussing this before his disappearance. Ariel ultimately settles upon a conclusion: he blames Alaa for his disappearance, reflecting that it would have been a better choice to stay, to continue the struggle over renaming streets and so on. Ariel defines his superior position by flatly denying the right of the colonized other to assign significance to his dispossession, the right to understand his own memories.

The Double Bind of Palestinians in Israel

The Book of Disappearance depicts Alaa in a double bind, moving between his grandmother’s past and the Israeli present, whose project is to overwrite that past. Born in 1967, the year of the Naksa after the Six-Day War of that year, to a mother who was born in the year of the Nakba, the Palestinian protagonist eventually asks what it means to be Palestinian.

Meanwhile, Azem’s first book, Sleep Thief. Gharib Haifa, published in 2011, thematises the third generation of Palestinians in Israel. It touches on how they must first learn about the shared narratives in the collective memory of majority Israeli society, that overshadow their own history of displacement and dispossession. The sense of rootedness despite estrangement is featured in the title of Azem’s first book, repatriating the protagonist by placing the protagonist’s first name “Gharib” (“stranger”) alongside his hometown of Haifa. Every time someone calls his name, we are reminded of him being an alien in his own homeland.

The Book of Disappearance shows a struggle over historical time on multiple levels: a transgenerational one between Tata’s past and Alaa’s present, and on a further level, between Alaa’s personal and family archives, overshadowed by Ariel as member of Israeli society at large. The complexity of these issues is reflected in Alaa’s relationship with and perception of Jaffa. “Your Jaffa resembles mine. But it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each other. You carved your names in my city, so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. And we call both cities Jaffa.” In another scene, Ariel recalls finding an entire stash of street name signs Alaa brought home with him. “He crossed out “Rothschild” and called it “Sharabi Street.” He loved Hisham Sharabi, had read everything he had written and believed that he deserved to have a wide street named after him.” Streets seem to have two names: one that is written on the street signs, and the other one that struggles to persist as a memory. The bitterness of that fight lies in the fact that it can only be found in homes, where street signs stand as a reminder of a pristine past.

Azem’s novel, and writing in general, become an unsettling act, a space for imagining the undoing of colonial settlements. Alaa’s grandmother’s absence, marking her death, prompts him to start writing his memoirs in the red notebook. Ink falls onto paper to replace the grandmother’s disappearance. When he looks back at what he has written, he notices his chaotic handwriting, that the grandmother used to describe as “scribbles like chicken marks” unlike his grandfather’s script that was “so beautiful, like a calligrapher’s.” Alaa’s path to sorting through the memories is marked by discovery, the memory of his grandmother not overlapping with his own, and the feeling of frustration because of the cracks in Tata’s memory.

No Metaphors

Azem’s book raises the question of the role and responsibility of readership. To turn the book’s pages is to bear witness to an ethnic cleansing that becomes even more obscene when we are at the same time spectators of a livestreamed genocide. We become trapped between bearing witness and being implicated readers. Another pressing question is: Are we reading about Alaa’s memoirs of his grandmother—or are we reading about Ariel’s reading of these memoirs, an act of what I previously described as usurpation?
None of the Palestinian grandmothers I mentioned can be abstracted, elevated into a tasteless allegory of homeland or nation, to serve a libidinal economy of reading. What is speculative fiction for us is for them gruesome realism; their most sober depictions our hyperboles. I regard it as part of a commitment to an ethics of reading, then, not to approach descriptions by Palestinian, and particularly Gazan, writers as metaphors. When children describe a heart still beating outside the human body, when people are carrying the remains of their beloved ones in plastic bags, when children are performing funerals for their dead toys, when a boy writes letters and sends them to the picture of his killed father hanging in the tent, it becomes a moral responsibility to avoid indulging in recognising metaphors in texts. Bearing witness to a genocide is also about recognising the abjection of the literal. Gaza is the end of metaphors.