Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye

University, and David didn’t think we should go. It wasn’t safe, he said. He was concerned about physical danger, but also concerned that I might be used.
    ‘Used how ?’ I asked.
    ‘How well do you know these people?’ he said.
    ‘Well enough,’ I said, ‘to trust them.’
    My unvoiced outrage did not entirely displace a niggling moment of doubt – was I being naive? I thought of Ghaith, of his mass of curly black hair, his piercings, his splay-footed walk, and it was laughable to doubt. Nevertheless, it did not seem a good idea to mention that his parents had been members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I didn’t in fact know them at all.
    ‘Why should you go there?’ Myriam said. ‘Can’t your friend come here?’
    ‘It’s hard for him to get a permit: he’s the wrong age,’ I told her.
    ‘Good, I’m glad,’ she said. ‘Why should they come here? If they want to go somewhere they can go to Jordan, to Saudi…’
    My aunt had welcomed me; she had embraced my daughter. She had said, ‘This is your home: please feel completely at home.’ I was her guest. I could not engage with the enormity of what she’d just said. When she made such a pronouncement, as her guest I could not say anything that was in my mind. To have said it would have been an abuse of hospitality, and for my Moroccan aunt, hospitality was close to something sacred.
    Instead I picked up plates and bowls and took them outside to the table in the back yard where we would eat. We were getting ready for a family gathering – one of my cousins was coming over with his wife and children to see us. The adobe walls of the house and yard were painted an orange ochre, and the shutters and gate and woodwork were cobalt blue. All the woodwork had been made by my uncle years before: outside, the window frames and shutters and fence; inside, the furniture and the stairs and banisters, and, hanging on the walls, some of the ouds and guitars he’d made before he’d cut off the top joint of his thumb with a saw. He’d put his piece of thumb in a bag of ice and driven to hospital, but the doctors had been unable to reattach it.
    My uncle lifted the edge of the tablecloth. ‘Look,’ he said, bending over and showing me the hole in the end of the hollow frame of the metal trestle-table. There in the opening floated a tiny face of poison and danger, black-patterned, with yellow antennae. Another appeared behind it, jostling to come out, and delicately, lightly, the first one climbed to the edge and floated off towards me, trailing long, finely jointed black and yellow legs. I backed away from it. Those wasp colours of alarm and patterns of attack were my deepest childhood fear, fear on an irrational scale – a phobia.
    Around my bare legs another had arrived, waiting, floating, wanting to go in. There was a little crust of mud in the entryway. ‘They’re building a nest there,’ my uncle said, smiling at them. ‘They’re mud wasps. Aren’t they wonderful?’ Seeing my reaction, he tried to reassure me. ‘They’re not like the common wasp,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they even sting,’ but to me that didn’t matter – the colour scheme, and that arbitrary movement, whose meaning I could not interpret as anything but threat, meant only imminent attack.
    Knowing so deep inside you danger, violent danger, can you react as if it were otherwise? Can you ever undo the way the angry face, those terrible mandibles and that bisected abdomen, those violently contrasting colours, have burned into you the knowledge – often mistaken, but knowledge nevertheless – of attack ? Perhaps you can change it, if you want to: you can study the habits, the meanings of its movements; you can watch it build its complicated nest, and observe its delicate communications. Gradually increasing exposure is one method for trying to overcome a phobia. But I didn’t want to understand, and in some fundamental way I did not want to lose my