Written by Ibtisam Azem and translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon, The Book of Disappearance is a work of speculative fiction about the sudden disappearance of Palestinians from Israel, vanishing from homes, hospitals, and even imprisonment camps. Following the story of Alaa’s disappearance, along with that of all Palestinians, and the responses of Israelis, the book feels increasingly close to reality. After Alaa vanishes, his Israeli friend Ariel, a self-proclaimed left-leaning journalist, discovers a notebook Alaa had been keeping to write his memoir.
“Yesterday marked twenty days since they bombed Gaza. That’s what I initially wanted to say, but it wasn’t how I wanted to begin. They were pulling corpses out of the rubble as if they were dolls,” Alaa writes. “I say ‘bombed Gaza’ and not ‘declared war on it’ because war sounds lighter. War was a big word when I was young. But I grew bigger and it grew smaller.”
He writes these notes to his grandmother, who dies shortly after the book begins. She was forced to leave Jaffa during the Nakba of 1948, when Palestinians were permanently dispossessed of their homes. In his memoir, Alaa recounts what his grandmother told him about her life during and after the Nakba, as a way to fight against erasure and forgetfulness.
“What does it mean when some write, ‘We will not be silent anymore’? Does that mean that Palestinians will use force to realise their demands?” Ariel writes in a newspaper article about the disappearance of Palestinians from Israel. He is referring to the last words of a Palestinian content creator before she vanished. The anxious reaction her statement—“We will not be silent anymore”—elicits from Ariel and Israelis like him reflects their complicity, something they may only subconsciously be aware of.
What would happen if all Palestinians disappeared from Israel? A man fears that he has waited far too long to apologise to a woman he raped during the Nakba, and now he may never get a chance to speak to her. Azem paints a devastating picture of a world that exposes the banality of evil. From progressives and atheist Zionists to Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers, Azem’s Israeli characters show no concern for the vanished Palestinians. They never question what Palestinians did to deserve this collective annihilation. Instead, they are busy trying to move into Palestinian homes.
Recurring themes of suicide, Nakba, and disappearance all point to the same thing: the eradication of Palestinians. Death no longer shocks Palestinians. Alaa’s father ends his life, but his suicide becomes trivial against the backdrop of daily bombings. Alaa himself has never married because he cannot bear to bring more Palestinian children into the world. The book remains one of the most urgent stories ever nominated for the International Booker Prize.
