If eight decades' worth of Palestinian souls killed by the Israeli occupation could speak, what would they say? If their spirits lingered in this world, would they haunt the Israeli settlers who stole the land their houses once stood on?
It is an idea that British-Lebanese author Amy Abdelnoor toys with in her debut novel Ever Land (Hutchinson Heinemann), out this month.
"The land speaks," Amy tells The New Arab . "The land won't be silenced. And that's evident in the cactus plants that still grow where Palestinian villages once stood."
The sabir plant , the prickly pear cactus that grew around Palestinian stone houses in the early 20th century, symbolises strength, resilience and endurance, interestingly sharing its name with the Arabic adjective for someone who is patient.
The sabir plant features prominently in Ever Land as a conduit between the past and the present, as Amy describes it . It is how Safa, the spirit of a teenage Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in 1967, identifies her house, which over three decades later has become part of a gated Israeli community inhabited by settlers.
Safa has been waiting — waiting for the right living person to come along who has just an ounce of a moral compass, to guide them to her sole living relative, her baby sister Nur.
Before Safa was shot dead by Israeli forces along with the rest of her family, she had been looking for Nur, who was just a toddler at the time. And now, Safa cannot move beyond the barzakh until she knows what became of her sister.
Her soul is tethered to the site of her childhood home, and because of that, the person who will help her will inadvertently have to be an Israeli.
She finds that person in Dinah, a British Jewish girl from North London, whose stepfather, Lavi, has forced her, along with her mother and younger brother, to leave behind their home, school and friends and start anew in Israel.
From the very beginning, Dinah feels uncomfortable when her new friends tell her she will be expected to serve in the military within a year.
When she starts a relationship with Eban, a young man serving in the Israeli military , she cannot reconcile the man he is with her to the man he is while on duty. In many ways, Dinah is having her new Israeli nationality enforced on her. Her critical questions irk both Eban and Lavi.
Safa nurtures Dinah's consciousness by sending her visions. A child pressed against her mother, squeezed into a small enclosed area at an Israeli checkpoint. Israeli soldiers pointing their rifles at children. Teenage boys with wrists cuffed in plastic zip ties.
At first, Dinah wonders if she is going crazy. But little by little, she realises she is being sent messages, though she is unsure from whom or what.
As a reader, you wonder how these visions will lead Dinah to Nur. But suddenly, when you least expect it, the plot clicks into place.
"The choice of a British Jewish girl to find Safa's sister was to demonstrate who has access and who has control," explains Amy. "And to demonstrate the power dynamic difference." Land, loss and testimony By being an Israeli, Dinah is able to access parts of Israel, such as Tel Aviv and pass to and fro between checkpoints undisturbed, while Palestinians, as demonstrated in detail in the novel, are kept waiting for hours and in most cases are turned away by Israeli soldiers.
In one scene, Dinah witnesses Israeli soldiers firing at the tyres of a car belonging to a Palestinian family that is trying to cross the checkpoint for an urgent medical appointment.
Much of the material in Ever Land comes from Amy's lived experience.
In the 1990s, while studying at university, she joined the charity Unipal and visited Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon, where she taught English to Palestinian children.
On the cusp of the Second Intifada, she lived in Ramallah, working for Save the Children.
"I was living in refugee camps with Palestinian families. And I was sent to Lebanon. I went and found my grandpa's village, and two things happened. One, I became passionately involved with the Palestinian community. And two, I felt like there were parts of me that were really coming home in Lebanon and in Palestine," she shares with The New Arab. "In Ramallah, I watched the Israeli occupation become more and more entrenched. During the siege of Ramallah, I woke up one morning and opened my blinds, and there was an Israeli tank outside." During her time in Palestine and South Lebanon, Amy became close friends with a Palestinian woman called Siham, who she stayed in Rashidieh Camp in South Lebanon . In many ways, Siham inspired the story.
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon , Siham and her family were fleeing the camp by car when Israeli forces shot and killed her parents in front of her.
She became a mother to her five siblings at the age of 14, two of whom developed schizophrenia from the trauma, and two of Siham's brothers were taken to an SOS village in Switzerland .
"When I was in Ramallah, Siham said to me, 'When you go back [to the occupied territories], find my village Suhmata,'" Amy recalls.
"So, I found it on a map, went to where it roughly was, and we could find it because of the cactus plants, the sabir, growing over the slabs of rock. They [Israelis] can do what they want to the land, but the land will speak." Writing against erasure Another catalyst for writing Ever Land was a series of emails with those whom Amy had considered friends.
During her time in the refugee camps, she would email friends in the UK describing the conditions for Palestinians.
"A university friend from North London emailed me back and said, 'Oh, there are two sides to every story, Amy, and you're getting quite entrenched in one of them. Don't forget the other side of the story,'" the author tells The New Arab. "I remember thinking, yeah, there are two sides to every story, and they're totally unequal. I emailed her back saying, 'If I could just bring you here for a day, you would get it.'"
The denial did not stop at this one friend. Upon returning from Ramallah and sharing her experiences with family friends, Amy says they also invalidated things she had witnessed first-hand, in an attempt to silence her.
And hence, she says Ever Land is a book as much for those people as for readers who are passionate about Palestine.
"Describing [Israeli] occupation is really hard in an everyday situation. I've tried it," says Amy. "As a teacher, I have tried to explain what an occupation is like in language students will understand and explain to them what it means to go through a checkpoint," she continues. "In writing, however, you can convey the emotional intensity of little Siham trying to cross the checkpoint and needing to have her sweets to help her get through it. The extraordinary thing about the written word is how you can create empathy," she adds. "The power is in the Dinah-Safa relationship because Dinah is the girl next door, or Dinah is the area you've been brought up in. Dinah is the white non-Muslim, non-Arab, non-racially minoritised person. Dinah is you. I am saying, 'See yourself in this. Here you are in England,' and I think that's what gives Ever Land that power and the potential for an empathetic response." Yousra Samir Imran is a British-Egyptian writer based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA