Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and Fulbright scholar. He is currently working on his PhD at New York University. His interests lie in the intersection between literature, film, and power structures.
From this author
This collection of some of the most compelling pieces Al-Shabaka has published contextualizes and discusses the unique difficulties of Palestinian refugees displaced across the Middle East – from becoming refugees a second or third time due to the ongoing Syrian civil war to over-researching camps “famous” for tragedy while under-researching other refugee situations and exile communities.
If Joseph Conrad was right when he said that we live as we dream, alone, then an inverse of that statement might carry some truth as well. Unlike life and dreams, death and nightmares can be communal, as Syrian Palestinians have discovered. The fortunate among them can now look from their Facebook balconies into the heart of darkness that they barely escaped.
One hot summer day in 2011, the residents of the beleaguered Homs neighborhood of Al-Khaldyeh were struggling to identify the bodies of two men. There was something unusual about the bodies even by the now morbidly gory Syrian standards. They were merely skeletons with worn-out fatigues, and a few personal belongings.
