Seeing the unthinkable

Today: Join us in welcoming Yonatan Raz Portugali, a writer and arts program manager living in Tel Aviv.

Issue No. 232

To Create It
Yonatan Raz Portugali

To Create It

by Yonatan Raz Portugali

2024 was a terrible, awful year. My main experience of it was a deep sense of blindness—an ongoing feeling that something enormous had changed all around me, yet I still couldn’t grasp its full meaning. I didn’t read any books except for studies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I couldn’t really focus on TV, and I don’t remember any films, except one: IF, the first movie I saw with my 4-year-old son in the theater, a few weeks before Hezbollah rockets started reaching Tel Aviv. Nuri loved it, and so did I. I especially loved that it’s a children’s film about the effort required to begin seeing something you’ve grown accustomed to glossing over, and how the story conveys, almost imperceptibly, the experience of not being seen by someone close to you. Oh, and also the idea that imaginary friends serve in childhood as an escape from reality, but later in life they can actually help you deal with its complexity and hardness. But wait, that’s not what I wanted to write about.

What I did want to write about is that for the past month, I’ve been listening to the podcast “Unapologetic: The Third Narrative” day after day, sometimes for four or five hours straight. It’s an English-language podcast, recorded since late 2023 by two Palestinian-Israeli peace activists, Amira Mohammad from Sheikh Jarrah and Ibrahim Abu Ahmad from Nazareth. 

In each episode, Mohammad and Abu Ahmad host a lengthy conversation, about an hour or 90 minutes long, with an activist from the region who shares a different perspective through which to view life in this place. What all the participants share is an insistence on believing that a shared and free life between Arabs and Jews is still possible here.