Shortly after October 7th, 2023, Israeli police violently dispersed a protest in Haifa against the escalating war on Gaza. By way of explanation, the police commissioner expressed a zero-tolerance policy on dissent, warning that “those who identify with Gaza can be escorted there on buses.” By October 16th, over 100 Palestinian citizens of Israel had been arrested or interrogated over social media posts opposing the war or expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians. In the 17 months since, this severe repression has continued: Israeli officials have cancelled film screenings by Palestinian directors, raided Palestinian bookstores, and arrested Palestinian academics. And yet Palestinian citizens of Israel have continued to find new ways to register opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The Hebrew-language story “On the Squeezing: The Parable of the Lemons” by Tawfiq Da’adli, an art historian and archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is one such creative gesture of resistance. Published in the now-shuttered left-wing Israeli outlet Haokets in April 2024, by which time Israel’s assault had claimed the lives of at least 32,600 people in Gaza, the short piece cloaks its dissent in what may at first seem like a mundane narrative about someone who enjoys juicing citrus. But the particular power of Da’adli’s story lies in the tension between its coded opacity and its direct summoning of state-sanctioned violence: The title of Da’adli’s parable, “Al Ha’skhita,” unmistakably evokes Hayim Nahman Bialik’s famous poem “Al Ha’shkhita” (“On the Slaughter”), written in Hebrew in 1903.

For a Jewish Israeli audience, this is an especially significant reference point. “On the Slaughter” was Bialik’s desperate and outraged response to the brutal Kishinev pogrom, in which Christian townspeople slaughtered 49 of their Jewish neighbors and wounded and raped hundreds of others, all under the watchful eyes of the Tsar’s forces. The speaker addresses the perpetrators, as well as the heavens themselves, in a prophetic register that recalls the Book of Job:

You, executioner! Here’s my neck—go
to it, slaughter me!
. . .
My blood is
fair game—strike the skull, and
murder’s blood, the blood of nurslings
and old men, will spurt onto your
clothes and will never, never be wiped
off.

The powerful poem soon became an iconic expression of Jewish grief. (The 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York, a major moment in the history of Zionism, began with a reading of “On the Slaughter.”) Unsurprisingly, it has had a particularly intense afterlife in Israel, where it is a fixture in the Israeli education system and is often invoked at memorial ceremonies for other tragedies. Over the years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedlyquoted from the poem when working up public appetite for collective punishment. Just hours after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, Netanyahu cited it in his vow for vengeance.

Da’adli is not the first to turn the poem’s indictment against the Jewish state. In 1966, the great Palestinian writer Rashid Hussein—the first prominent Palestinian poet to graduate from an Israeli high school—translated “On the Slaughter” into Arabic. Hussein understood the poem not as an articulation of eternal Jewish victimhood but rather as a meditation on violent abuses of power and an expression of the rage of the oppressed. As poet Peter Cole pointed out in 2014, someone who came across Hussein’s translation “could easily think it had been written by a Palestinian. Yesterday.” In the November 1958 issue of the Arabic monthly al-Fajr, Hussein highlighted the hypocrisy of Israel’s embrace of the poem alongside its stifling of Palestinian dissent: “Whoever denies us the right to express our suffering and our hopes,” he wrote, “must also deny Bialik and Tchernikovsky most of their nationalistic poems.”

If Hussein’s translation unlocks the universal potential in “On the Slaughter” by making it speak from a Palestinian subjectivity crying out against Israeli violence, Da’adli’s parable does so by directly addressing a Jewish Israeli audience in Hebrew. But while Bialik’s poem is written in the voice of the victim, Da’adli’s allegory is told from the perspective of the perpetrator. Indeed, “On the Squeezing” is not an exercise in translating Palestinian pain into Hebrew in the hope it might be recognized—perhaps futile in a society that has grown startlingly numb to Palestinian suffering—but rather an attempt to force Jewish Israeli readers to finally accept the mantle of culprit rather than victim. Da’adli draws in his audience through a seemingly innocuous account of an ordinary activity, then lowers the veil, slowly but surely, to reveal a mirror.

– Dikla Taylor-Sheinman

Not long ago, I received a massive citrus juicer from my neighbor—one of the old, reliable kinds. I quickly climbed over the fence separating my yard from the one next door, where a wild lemon tree grows bursting with fruit, and I gathered its bounty. For almost half a year now, I’ve made it a habit to squeeze as many lemons as possible. I place each lemon on a bamboo cutting board, the cheap kind: the kind you don’t mind discarding once it wears out. Over time, I’ve also acquired a collection of knives, not the expensive kind, but the kind you might find at IKEA, with silicone handles that crack after a few washes. What’s nice about these knives is that they work just fine with a simple sharpener.

The lemons surrender to their reclining position; they don’t roll to the right or left but stay put, awaiting their slaughter. Sometimes I want to demonstrate my ninja-like skill. I slide the knife blade, just like on TV, over the lemon’s belly, and voilà—a perfectly straight, clean cut. I slice through the peel, the flesh, and then the peel again, pressing against the bamboo surface. Most of the time I leave scratches behind. These are quite troublesome, especially when cutting beets; their blood seeps into the grooves, making it hard to wash off, particularly if I don’t scrub them immediately.

I place the lemon halves on the ridged, cone-shaped juicing plate. After that, I lower the handle, which swiftly clamps down on the lemon half, and as with a lightning strike, or an iron sword^[1], it is crushed between the hammer and the anvil and starts to splatter its juices into the opening at the bottom. In my excitement, I sometimes forget to place a receptacle to collect the liquid. Then the liquid spills onto the white surface and begins to flow toward the sink. When this happens, my patroness blows up at me. How dare I contaminate the massacre^[2] like that? Sure, you can run wild, flatten, and crush, but everything must drain into a container. Clean hands and moral conduct are a banner we must hold high.

In this way, I can come down on the fruits of a whole tree. Sometimes, I stack a number of already-squeezed peels, one folded into the other, like a pile of carcasses: I squeeze again and the remaining guts spill out. Sometimes, the lemons return fire. Some of the venomous liquid stored in the lemon’s pores sprays back at me. On rare occasion a drop finds its way—through a sniper’s direct hit—under my glasses and into my eyes. In those moments, I stop the slaughter for a second and wash my eye with a bit of purified water and return with renewed passion to crush and obliterate.

The lemons give themselves over so completely to the upright rod that pierces their souls and tears them apart that I am tempted to document the event on my phone. So I proudly upload a video to TikTok in which, casually and absentmindedly, I set half a city ablaze in fire and smoke. Sometimes, I even select the slow-motion feature; it really elevates the action and showcases my power. Who is Nebuchadnezzar compared to me? Who is Pharaoh or Titus? They never dreamed of a fraction of the power I hold in my hands.

But I have to say that sometimes I feel something like a slap on the shoulder, especially after I put several halves atop one another and hit them with a single stroke. Then the limbs spread excessively far and wide, and it’s hard to conceal the evidence. They smear across the window, and their pulpy texture makes them hard to clean up. And yet, who can stop me?

The generous neighbor promised to send a more sophisticated juicer, one with a hydraulic apparatus that requires only a gentle touch. But she has requested that I stop uploading videos and demanded that I put a wide drainage container underneath because some of my spouse’s complaints reached the Hague, where it’s harder to wield a veto. In the meantime, until the upgrade arrives, I have laid piles upon piles—maybe a million and a half—in different bowls. Some of them have already dried up, their appearance now more like that of a Muselmann^[3] than a sour lemon.