The Power of Invitation
There is much to be said about the power of invitation. Of feeling wanted. There is more to bond over than shared violence. A warm hug (the kind where hands interlock across bodies), a smile, and a home-cooked meal—above all, an opened door—all feel better.
Nahr El-Bared Camp 1948 – Source: UNRWA Archives
Fugitivity as a concept is something I learned relatively recently in my life as a non-American scholar in U.S. academia. But, as an action, as Palestinian, I understood. The running joke in our private conversations is that our displacement is measured by how far some of us were willing to walk to find a safe place (Palestinians in the Americas probably needed to do more than that, though I do enjoy picturing them walking on water). The humiliation they endured as new arrivals at a place where they did not belong was—well, quite simply that. They did not belong. There were no hosts at the borders. No homes were opened to them. Maybe new houses, if they could afford them (thus the subtext of the joke: only the abled could walk). Most of the people lived in tents. A textbook refugeehood. They were stuck in the tenthood.
There is a lot of power in invitations. The degradation of dispossession is that it forces you to compromise your manners. To ask for help from those who do not offer it—or, as my mother would say, those who are lacking in their capacity to gift. To expect homeliness in a place with bad hosts. Above all, to go somewhere without being invited first. An invitation is a redemption, is an acknowledgment that the cheap tent in the rundown lot is not a place to live—is the highest form of respect.
"Cement block houses replace tented refugee camp, Khan Younis, Gaza Strip"
1955. Photographer J. Madvo. Source: UNRWA Archives
Perhaps it is a cultural thing? Perhaps there is something to be said about this White American thing of offering you water (or their “I think I might have juice too?”) but never wondering how much of your energy it took to get to their homes, how you had to miss a meal to catch the long bus ride, how you miss being in homes with your people, who would never ask if they could feed you first. There is something to be said about why inviting someone is a culture and a cultural form of love: fugitives and refugees understand.
Palestinians are a homeless people, but there are no homeless people in Palestine. In September 2021, a year ago from now, six political prisoners escaped Gilboa, the most highly secured Israeli prison for Palestinians. Mahmoud al-Ardah, Mohammed al-Ardah, Yousef Qadri, Ayham Kamamji, Munadil Nafa’at and Zakaria Zubaidi—overnight, these men became Israel’s most wanted group of fugitives since its foundation, and the architects of one of the most creative escapes in its history. They used spoons and other kitchenware and, over the discrete course of several months, dug a tunnel that led them all the way from their prison cells to the outside world—we called it nafaq al-hurriyah, the freedom tunnel.
Maitham Abdel’s sculpture “Freedom Spoon” – Source: Samidoun
An image circulated at the time of a group of Israeli security men overlooking the edge of the hill where the tunnel opened to the world. One of them, seemingly their leader, crouched near the hole, hand on chin, baffled. The prisoners were not only able to escape; they hid in Palestinian quarters for days. Palestinian homes opened for them, they were fed and cared for, and protected for twelve days. In settler colonial math, in one of the most securitized states in the world, in the world’s most surveilled territory, that felt like months, like victory. We all felt like we could finally get away with being who we are. All six men were from Jenin, a place that lived encampment, siege, and great suffering. Their action inspired resistance across Palestine for months to come. We called them the Jenin Brigade. Their recapturing felt like a minor detail in the grand picture of their extraordinary escape. In the twelve days the fugitives were sheltered, Israelis spent millions of dollars to find them, and millions more to refortify their prisons. Their panic showed, spilled over, and reeked all over the territory. Colonizers know that in stolen homes, what quintessentially produces a pathology of bad hospitality, of selfishness, they could never feel truly safe. And, in that moment of their collective fear and our collective escape and sanctuary, we all felt safer than them.
Israelis investigate the tunnel – Source: Israel Prison Service
There is more to bond over than shared violence: an invitation to be present, to enter, always feels better.
Eman Ghanayem is a Palestinian scholar whose work examines questions of displacement, settlement, and belonging through a framework of interconnected settler colonialisms and comparative Indigeneities. She is currently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature, the Society for the Humanities, and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University.