I’ve spent the last few months promoting a novel about young Muslim Americans coming of age in a post-9/11 Brooklyn. At every bookstore, radio interview, or university lecture hall, someone will ask me about the research I had to do for the book. I tell them about the NYPD police reports I read—these bizarre, chilling records of a massive law enforcement surveillance program targeting Arabs and Muslims in New York City. The reports are filled with awkward euphemisms to half-heartedly obscure the truth that they were spying on us for no other reason than we are Arabs or Muslims.

I explain what it was like to comb through these documents, to be riveted by them, to feel the pervading menace they so successfully instill. An undercover or an informant walks into an Arab-owned cafe and records the number of chairs inside, for example.

At this point in the book talk, I make a joke: “Oh, watch out for the Muslim chairs!” This always gets a laugh. The takeaway for audiences always seems to be: What a time that was! I can’t believe that happened. I’m glad it’s over. 

I’m not laughing now.

For the past four months, Palestinians have been begging the world to see a child as a child, a journalist as a journalist, a hospital as a hospital. I’m faced with the ugly realization that those decades of war against Arab and Muslim bodies have not ended. Part of that war is not only dehumanizing us so we can be killed en masse abroad, but also criminalizing us so we can be silenced at home.

To speak now about Palestine, especially for brown and Black people in America, is to knowingly put a target on your back. To code yourself as a threat, a barbarian, a terrorist, and an antisemite. To publicly grieve the lives lost is to submit yourself to a massive surveillance machine that will monitor your social media posts, your emails, your charitable donations, your friendships.

When I spoke to audiences about my book before October 7th, I urged them not to think of surveillance of Muslims and Arabs as a problem of the past. I reminded them how much better surveillance technology is now than it was in the years right after 9/11, and how the same methods used on Arabs and Muslims then are now being used to target Black Lives Matter or environmental activists.

But I think a small part of me did believe that perhaps things had gotten a bit better—that as the American public turned against the War on Terror, heard the lies about WMDs, wanted American troops out, that maybe Muslims and Arabs would no longer be so easy to use as a sort of global boogeyman.

Now, I’m forced to reckon with the crushing reality that nothing has changed. Because if we’ve learned one thing in these last two decades of the War on Terror, it’s that Arabs and Muslims are like a contagion. We must be surveilled and penned in; we must be stopped. Because what we have might catch.

The sensation of being watched is something I have carried around with me for years, trailing me like a shadow. To walk around in a state of perpetual paranoia, to speak and to simultaneously imagine your words being played back to you from a tape recorder. To imagine yourself moving through the world like a red dot on a surveillance map.

The main characters of my novel, two teenage sisters, also often feel watched and spend much of the book trying to escape that feeling—by being invisible, by transforming so radically that they will be unrecognizable, or by attempting to flee outside the radius of their surveillance. As teenage girls, there is the “ordinary” and universal form of being watched: they must exist under a patriarchal gaze. They are watched by men on the streets, by their older brother, by boyfriends, by neighbors.

But there is also another form of watching they must contend with: the invisible eye of the state. The girls often cannot see who is watching them. They are told there might be either informants or terrorists in their community, but they cannot tell who is who and which is more dangerous.

I often think about how those girls would feel if they were on a college campus today. We are now witnessing a robust build-up of surveillance programs designed to spy on Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who even vaguely supports Palestine. Officially, these programs are to combat antisemitism and support for terrorism on college campuses, but it’s not hard to imagine how this is going to go because it’s happened before.

I’m remembering the NYPD undercover who went on a 2008 whitewater rafting trip with Muslim students from City College. I’m remembering how in 2009 the NYPD set up a safe house near student housing at Rutgers University, and how when the superintendent of the building entered the apartment one day, he called the police because he thought it was a terrorist cell. I’m remembering my own college friends—how we would paste blank, unreadable smiles onto our faces whenever anyone new came around.

At a recent book event, a young man approached me from the audience and told me that he was one of the lead plaintiffs in a 2013 ACLU lawsuit against the NYPD. It was Asad Dandia. I recognized his name instantly, because I read about how an undercover cop befriended him when he was an undergraduate, claiming he wanted Asad’s help to become a better Muslim. Who will be the next Asad, I wonder now.

At another book event at a university, I met a young woman who told me a story about a man who often appeared and asked her and her friends odd questions. He had appeared again just that morning when he sat down next to her on the bus. “I’ve always thought he might be a—” she said, knowing I could fill in the blank. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

The idea our governments have asked us to subscribe to is that all Muslims and Arabs (there’s not much point in distinguishing between them) are latent terrorists, as if we all have a ticking time bomb in our chests, just waiting to go off. As I witness the deaths of thirty thousand Palestinians, live-streamed from the phone in my palm, which is also a tracking device, I do feel an awakening in my body, and I wonder if the politicians are perhaps onto something.

I wander past my car in parking lots, forgetting where I’m going. I cry uncontrollably and without warning in the grocery store. I recently left a meeting with my boss about my professional goals and ran straight into the bathroom, kneeling over the toilet and dry heaving great gasps of nothing.

My therapist tells me these are physical manifestations of trauma. “What trauma?” I ask her. My children are not being bombed in their beds. I have water. I have food. And yet my body is remembering something it has felt before. You can’t grow up watching people who look like you, talk like you, and have names like yours die across your various screens without it changing you. To watch them die on a massive scale—a staggering, nameless, faceless death—and to listen to the world’s cheers of approval, or perhaps even worse, the roar of its silence, without something cracking inside of you.

You cannot feel any sense of certainty when you exist in a constant state of gaslighting, of wondering and doubting whether you are considered an enemy by your own country, by your own college, or employer. I feel it most as a lump in the throat, like I have swallowed something that has almost, but not quite, choked the life out of me.

At a virtual support group for Arabs and Palestinian Americans, I heard others describe similar symptoms. Taking a sip from a glass of water brings one woman to tears. Another breaks down in Costco when her child picks up a treat and asks if she can have it. Several describe walking around in a mental fog. One person says it sounds like he has white noise blasting between his ears. We go to work. We pick up our children from daycare. We cook dinner.

“It feels like I’m fine and like I’m dying inside,” someone says. “It feels like I’m screaming, but no one can hear me,” another one says. At one point in the meeting, an unidentified “Zoom user” pops up onto our screens. The group falls silent.

I eye the black square at the bottom left corner of my screen like it might shoot me through my laptop. We dry our eyes. No one will cry in front of the black box. “Identify yourself,” we ask it. We wait for the host to remove the user.

But it’s not the same after that. There are no safe places to grieve. More than seventy percent of the dwellings in Gaza have already been destroyed. The premature babies at Al-Nasr hospital were left to rot in their cribs. And we, the American Arabs, the American Muslims, scream into the void.

______________________________

Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad is available via Doubleday.