4: The Ethic of Encountering Al-Nakba: Confronting the Boundaries of Narrative Truth

In 2008, I spent my first night in the Palestinian West Bank processing a dizzying confluence of sensations. All at once and for the first time in my life, I met the summer heat of the Jordan Valley coupled with the sound of Arabic spoken openly and all around me. I was in the early moments of erasing my sketchy mental images of the West Bank and replacing them with a tangible reality. Preconceptions evaporated. The abstract knowledge that I had labored in earnest to gain through countless hours of reading after returning from Israel in 2007 could not compare to the weight of what I was witnessing. Sitting in the home of a Palestinian family, I was no longer tethered to textual representations as my primary way of knowing about the realities of life in the West Bank. The sense of wonder and awe that comes from losing myself in a book felt paltry in relation to exchanging bashful smiles and making eye contact with the members of this family that had just opened their home to me, a curious stranger.