Seeing the invisible

In the 2014 TV show, The Leftovers, the world contends with the inexplicable disappearance of two per cent of the Earth’s population. People vanish from their places at the breakfast tables, aisles of department stores, and as they walk on the road. The world they leave behind is unmoored and changed, with the leftovers stranded in a reality that no longer makes sense. In the 2022 book, The Muslim Vanishes by journalist Saeed Naqvi, TV anchors in news studios in India announce that 200 million Muslims have vanished into thin air — and India has to decide what it will do with all the space, property and businesses that lie empty, without so many of its ordinary citizens, politicians, shepherds and businessmen. These two works delve into the psychological repercussions of a speculative event, and are interested in what people might do when confronted with a loss that is both personal and historical.

I thought of this TV show and book and their questions as I read Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, which speculates on a similar, more terrifying question: What would happen if all Palestinians disappear one day from the borders of historic Palestine? This is the second novel by the Palestinian-American Ibtisam Azem, a journalist born within the ‘48 borders of Israel. Originally published in 2014 in Arabic by Dar al-Jamal in Beirut, the novel was translated in 2019 by Sinan Antoon, best known for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. This book was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in February 2025, bringing it global attention.

The novel begins with an old woman in Jaffa who takes a bath, puts on a beautiful dress and perfume, and walks to a bench facing the sea, where she passes away. This is Alaa’s grandmother. Alaa is a young Palestinian living in the ‘48 borders of Israel, who introduces us to this world. He is grieving his grandmother’s passing and grappling with his inherited memories of her stories of Jaffa before it became Tel Aviv through the violence of the Nakba, when more than 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed, and 750,000 Palestinians were displaced and not allowed to re-enter. He writes his remembrances of his grandmother — who chose to stay in Jaffa rather than flee to Beirut at the time of the Nakba — in a journal. He tries to reinscribe the city he lives in with her stories: “I, who was born and raised in Jaffa, after Jaffa had left itself.” He is the Palestinian voice we hear and get to know before all Palestinians, including him, disappear from the world of this novel.

We then shift to the perspective of Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and liberal Zionist journalist. On the day that no Palestinians show up for their jobs as bus drivers, surgeons, farm labourers and shopkeepers, we view the world from Ariel’s journalistic investigation of the event. He goes to look for Alaa in his apartment, but Alaa is absent. Ariel finds his journal and diary entries and begins to read them, even as he writes his own journalistic accounts of the aftermath of the disappearance. The son of British Zionists who arrived with the British mandate for Palestine in the 1920s, born the week after the 1967 War, and even having served in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) as a translator, Ariel is staunch in his patriotism. We read his records of the response of the Israeli state, its citizens and his family.

The Israelis are paranoid, worrying that the world will think they did this to the Palestinians. Soon, the government issues a new directive that all citizens must register themselves as such within 48 hours or risk forfeiting their citizenship: “I call on you to vote for this law, which stipulates that any person who doesn’t celebrate our state and its independence must be deported.” The government shifts into full gear to fulfil its colonial fantasy of “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

The book is a layered and formal experiment, centring Palestinian stories even as it explores what Sinan Antoon calls “the colonial fantasy par excellence” of Palestinian absence. It is chilling to read this book in the context of the ongoing genocidal devastation of Gaza and the Palestinian people by Israel for more than 600 days.

Written over a decade ago, this novel is prophetic, instructive, and historic, using a reality that Palestinians have lived with for 75 years to explore how a settler-colony would cope with the fulfilment of its fantasy. It does this by grounding us firmly in the memory of the Nakba of 1948 and leaves us with what Ibtisam Azem recalls of Mahmoud Darwish’s words, that Palestinians live “in the presence of absence.” The Booker longlist seems to ask us as readers to look closely at our present moment, where the disappearance of Palestinians is not a speculative question for the future, but the most trying moral question of our present.