After the cat bite on my left finger that disabled me for 2 weeks, I was struck with pain again; this time on my right thumb. I did what my dad taught me to do: ignore it because it’s all mental (this includes his diabetes and the occasional tooth ache).
But when the pain became unbearable and my wrist became stiff, I panicked and decided to visit the physiotherapist. The young expat — who spoke Arabic fluently — asked me to move the thumb downwards and when I cried in pain, he diagnosed it instantly: a chronic strain of the thumb muscle. Have I been texting a lot lately? I answered frankly: “Nah! It’s the TV remote. I’ve become a news addict since the war started.” Which was God’s honest truth. When the 7th of October attacks happened, Mom and I watched in mixture of awe and horror before I declare: “This is it! It’s the perfect excuse for them to kick us out!” By ‘them’ I meant Zionists and by ‘us’ I meant Arabs.
I usually watched France 24 English news channel for daily updates. However, the indifference of the news anchor to the genocide scenes and the subtle bias that tainted the delivery got on my nerves that I decided to look for other alternatives, and who could aid me on doing that other than my best friend YouTube? At first, it gave me a plethora of channels including Israeli news channels and an extreme Rabbi declaring that the number of dead Gazans didn’t really matter as long as they win the war (I found that extremely disturbing that I switched off the sermon before it ended. Whatever happened to religious figures preaching peace and tolerance?).
The constant feeling of apprehension aggravated my insomnia as I spent sleepless hours watching excessive political analyses of the situation from different experts including current great thinkers and Americans ex-military who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, which caused my thumb strain as I moved swiftly from one channel to the next. YouTube had a buzz word that marked every week and hundreds of related videos such as: ‘Pro-Palestinian marches’ and ‘boycott’. The latter was a topic that my physiotherapist discussed with me during the painful session. It made no sense to him at all as it was detrimental to local businesses. I winced in pain as I answered that it’s part of solidarity with the misery that the Gazans go through daily. Plus, no aid is allowed to enter the strip so how else could we help? Even if it doesn’t make sense to many, it helps to elevate the sense of helplessness and shame that every single Arab feels when watching the news. He didn’t comment and I remembered instantly the boycott list that YouTube demonstrated weeks back along with alternatives. It included more than 100 items that half of them were not sold here.
Lately, Zara’s group joined the list after it’s owner’s link with Ben-Gvir, the far-right leader famous for his racist anti-Arab rhetoric. Before I leave, the physiotherapist made me promise to decrease my news addiction for the sake of my sore thumb and I smiled back sadly. How could he understand Arab belongingness that surpasses dialect, frontiers, race and religion? Where the poem we’re taught to recite as children is: “The Arab countries are my homeland, from Levant to Baghdad/ and from Najd to Yemen, to Egypt to Tetouan.” With an icepack placed on my sore thumb, I try relaxing while singing along the Swedish song Leve Palestina, praying for an abrupt miracle to end the atrocious genocide of Gazans.
The author is a certified skills trainer and the author of The World According to Bahja. rashabooks@yahoo.com
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