#19 - no songs

As a child, before I started dreaming of freedom, I first dreamed of being an ‘inventor’. Before becoming a political science PhD student, I wanted to built robots. My love for innovation, fascination with technology, and curiosity about what is newly and not yet possible predated and outlived many other interests, and still shapes my outlook even as I take on more critical, often skeptical, cynical, perspectives. My dreams have been molded by my experiences and in turn molded my ambitions.

My interest in robotics more specifically was born out of my participation in a robotics competition called Botball all 4 years of high school. As I wrote in a previous newsletter, my late friend Dania and I “spent countless hours in the robotics room, messing around with our little LEGO mishaps, taking them very seriously but having so much fun.” In college, I organized the first regional Botball competition in the UAE. When I saw that same excitement in the students’ eyes on competition day, I knew the daunting process of making it happen as a struggling sophomore who didn’t know how to ask for help was absolutely worth it.

Years later, in the first year of my PhD, I was somehow even more miserable than I was in sophomore year. I was a shell of myself, unable to do my work and seemingly unable to lastingly enjoy much else either. I was so behind on my academic workload I requested to withdraw from a requirement and take it over the summer, and still saw no path towards catching up.

At that time, a college friend reached out, telling me a professor she met at Oxford University was looking for an Arabic speaker to teach a coding + LEGO robotics workshop for kids in Gaza. She knew I both had an educational robotics background and cared deeply about Palestine. I replied immediately, affirmatively, not sparing a minute for unnecessary thought or consideration. It was not primarily out of duty or obligation, but genuine marvel and bewilderment at the opportunity to do something I would love and care about so deeply suddenly finding me. Such specific luck.

Over the next few weeks, I caught up on my coursework, landed my dream summer internship, un-withdrew from that class, caught up on it, too, and co-developed and translated a curriculum for a series of coding and robotics workshops in Arabic. Due to the time difference, I held the workshops early in the morning, before going to class. The students were working with a limited number of kits; it’s not easy to ship into Gaza, obviously, but it worked. Due to the occupation’s throttling of communication infrastructure, we haphazardly lost internet, sometimes temporarily and sometimes having to change class time altogether at the last-minute, but we made it work.

Those sessions quickly - immediately, actually - became the most exciting and rewarding part of my life. Waking up at 7:00 a.m to build little Scratch animations and play around with servos and sensors and troubleshoot why the LEGO car/robot keeps turning around instead of going in a straight line 9,000 km from my students in Gaza gifted me with a joy and wonder that was then foreign, distant.

My classmates asked me how I did it, how I could be working on a completely unrelated workshop when I was presumably as busy as they were with the first year of a PhD. But it wasn’t a zero-sum game. The time I spent on those workshops did not take away from my other commitments, but provided me with the strength and motivation to finally get through them. I got more out of it than I put in.

Still, the joy was not without its complications. The kind and generous U.S. professor facilitating my participation told me, and the students, that he wanted to do this to expand those kids’ dreams and imaginations, to use ‘learning by doing’ to teach them that they could do anything they wanted. I found myself using less ambitious language as I translated his words into Arabic, cautious of pitching a reality deemed impossible by the siege and occupation. An older student auditing the workshops asked me for advice on how to leave Gaza to seek tech opportunities elsewhere. I felt helpless in offering him any meaningful advice. I’d sought opportunities outside my country, but I never needed to get through a militarized siege where dreams are condemned between two crossings.

That first series of workshops was a pilot, and a year later, we started planning its expansion. With the help of our coordinator in Gaza, we planned to extend it into a 14-week course simultaneously taught across 5 schools in Gaza, including teacher training sessions. In my last meeting with our coordinator (September 2023), he recounted every time he had an opportunity for a trip abroad but was not permitted by the occupation to leave Gaza. The next meeting was supposed to be on October 8th. I postponed it saying we can circle back in a week if the situation is calmer.

In the first days after October 7th, I asked our coordinator how he and the students are doing. He said the majority are from the northern parts of Gaza, so some of them have had homes demolished, some of them have been injured, and some could have been martyred. Fifty days later, when essentially everyone in the north has been displaced, everything destroyed, and 20,000+ people have been killed including at least 6,000+ children, I cannot ask the same question. But I can imagine the answers.

This week, I was supposed to start teaching our expanded robotics course for kids in North Gaza. I was going to hope that my excitement can be their excitement, that their excitement can once again be mine. I would have taught a class today. The alternate timeline where we would be playing around with servos and sensors and agonizing and laughing over silly debugging issues is plagued by the reality of the ongoing genocide; the incomprehensible horrors of murder, loss, grief, displacement.

I taught a different class today; a political theory section for my undergraduate students at NYU. In the 50 days since the current genocide began - which, of course, is part of the larger project of genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has taken place for 75+ years - I have exchanged much of the time I would have spent on pretty much anything else with time dedicated to Palestine. The only other commitment I consistently maintained was to my students. I love teaching, and I love being in class with them. I’ve walked into class in tears, wondering how I could possibly withhold them for 75 minutes. But I always walked out feeling a little better, driven by the care I have for them, and the love I have for the job.

I walked out of class today thinking of the other class I would have taught, much earlier in the morning. The students I may now never meet, never know, and all those like them. The dreams that will never be entertained, much less realized. The little robots and school graduations and lasting friendships and first jobs and first loves and mistakes and learnings and failures and successes.

Shortly before my class today, NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine unfurled 6 truly massive banners on the steps of the Kimmel Center for Student Life with the handwritten names of 8,000+ Palestinian martyrs. I was overcome by the size and quantity of banners required to name what is now not even half of those who’ve been murdered. Each one of them a universe. Each one of them leaving behind mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, infants, friends, loved ones, dreams. A constellation. Many of them killed alongside their fathers, sons, daughters, infants, friends, loved ones, dreams. Hundreds of families completely erased from the civil registry.

Tomorrow, Google workers in NYC are hosting a vigil for Mai Ubeid, a passionate software engineer who previously held a Google-backed internship and was also killed by the occupation. I read her story, scrolled through her LinkedIn, related to her love for technology, her ambitions, her dreams. We could spend the rest of our lives attending events similarly individually dedicated to each of the thousands of names on and off those banners NYU admin were so inconvenienced and troubled by. It wouldn’t be enough.

I love writing this newsletter, and curating my little playlists, but naturally, none felt appropriate in the past two months. I do have playlists about Palestine and resistance and solidarity that I would love to send out to my friends, and may at some point. But there are no words, no songs, no art, no banners, no vigils, no protests, no rage, no grief that will ever be enough. A definite, permanent insufficiency.

I realized, walking home from class, that I care as much about the students I did not teach today, the kids I have not met, the kids I may never meet, the kids who are no longer alive, as I would have had I been on an intermittently functional Zoom call with them this morning. That I do not need to know names or details to care deeply about every life taken, every life destroyed, every life grieving, every life hurt, every injury, every loss, every dream.

And as I dream and fight for justice and liberation for every Palestinian, I dream and fight for the kids I would have met this week to be able to dream and not have to fight. For a playful evening on the Mediterranean soundtracked only by laughter and conversations and birds flying overhead. For new inventions and barely functioning code, for the LEGO pieces to match up, for that robot to finally drive in a straight line.