From the River to the Sea

January 2025 · Athens

Winter in Athens felt like a punishment. The sun refused to warm the bones, and the rain didn't just fall, it raged, beating the streets like fists on soft skin.

Every morning Alex woke into a city that had turned strange to him overnight. The streets of Exarchia, which had once felt like home, were full of signs now, shouting at him from every wall: "Free Palestine", "Occupation = Crime", "Boycott Israel". Every sign was a slap.

And he was torn. On one side, the pain of the seventh of October hadn't passed: friends murdered, a sister who had spent long hours inside an outpost that fell, the feeling that terror had won. On the other, he couldn't look at the pictures from Gaza. He had been there. He knew what it was. And still he found it hard to believe his own people were capable of it. Every glance from a passer-by was a question: how do you live with yourself?

At the little café on Stournari Street, where he had sat almost every morning since he came back, the waitress, Anna, no longer smiled at him. Her green eyes, once full of Greek warmth, were as cold as the sea in January. No "kaliméra", no "ti kaneis". As if he personally were carrying a gun through the streets of Gaza right now, and not sitting in front of her with a folded newspaper.

"Freddo espresso, métrio," he ordered, and his voice sounded foreign even to him. Anna took the coins from the table without touching his hand.

In the cold, bitter glass he tasted loneliness. He watched the people passing in the street and felt like a ghost. They were alive. He existed. It wasn't the same thing.

At night the phone rang in the small flat on Alexandras Avenue, a cheap room he had taken when he came back in November, a few streets from Exarchia, which had been his after-work haunt since 2022. His mother.

"Alex? How are you over there?"

How do you tell your mother you feel like a traitor? To your country, to yourself, to everything you believed in?

"Fine, Mum. Everything's fine."

The lie came out smooth. Worrying her was the last thing he wanted.

January 2025 · Gaza City

Ahmed was killed at the start of January, ten days before the ceasefire.

A shell, or a missile, nobody could say. He went out to look for flour and didn't come back. By the time Mehran got there, people were already digging with their hands.

The house became a museum of what had been. His father's room still held the smell of tobacco and of the old newspapers he kept in piles by the bed, as if someone would still read them. Mehran didn't dare clear it. It would be like killing him a second time.

Fatma hardly spoke. She went on working at the medical tent, leaving in the morning and coming back in the dark, her hands smelling of disinfectant. Jana cooked over a small fire in the yard. Reem, thirteen now, slept in their father's room, on the floor, among the newspapers.

On the morning of 19 January the ceasefire came into force. After four hundred and seventy-one days. In Gaza, people came out into the streets, some in joy, some only to see what was left.

Mehran didn't go out. He sat in his father's room and couldn't understand why ten days should be so much.

19 January 2025 · Tel Aviv

Natalie woke at 6:29. Like every morning. Her body had become a broken clock that only rang at one hour.

The room looked like a sickroom. Pills on the bedside table, half-drunk glasses of water, sheets that hadn't been changed. On the wall, a photo of her and Alex at Bloomfield, five years ago, the winter before Covid. Both of them smiling, an arm round a shoulder, a whole world inside a small frame.

Since the start of the month she had been off duty. The unit's mental-health officer had taken her off shifts after a night when she couldn't stop shaking in front of the screen. "It's not a punishment," she told her. "It's so you stay alive." Now she was on extended sick leave, waiting for a medical board, and nobody could tell her when it would sit.

The psychologist, Dr Mira Cohen, sat opposite her once a week and dug into the pain like an archaeologist looking for potsherds.

"How are you feeling today?"

"Like a dead woman who's still breathing."

Dr Cohen wrote something down. She always wrote something down. Natalie wondered whether she was writing "lost cause", or "slow progress", or just a shopping list.

The medical cannabis waited in the drawer. She tried not to touch it in the mornings. She still had enough pride not to admit the pain was bigger than her. But the nights were long, and pride doesn't hear the screaming inside.

In the afternoon she watched three young women climb out of a Red Cross vehicle on television. Romi, Emily, Doron. Four hundred and seventy-one days.

Emily. For a second the name took her to Alex's Emily, the Hungarian with the old cameras, who had packed up her film and left in November, and she wondered whether he was watching too, in Athens, hearing the name. Then one mother ran, and then another, and the name belonged to someone else entirely. To the whole country.

Natalie didn't cry. She sat in front of the screen until the pictures ended, and then for another hour.

27 January 2025 · The coast road

On Monday morning the road opened.

Mehran stood on the roof of a wrecked building near the beach and watched them come. A river of people. Hundreds of thousands, they said later. They walked along the road by the sea, with mattresses on their heads, with carts, with children on their shoulders, with bags that held everything that was left. Some wept. Some sang. Most just walked, step after step, home. To what had been home.

His family had never gone south. Ahmed had refused, "you don't leave twice", and now Ahmed was gone. And Mehran looked at this river and thought: they are coming back to my father.

On the burnt wall of the house opposite there was spray paint he hadn't noticed before. A symbol he knew from his phone screen, from the stand at Bloomfield: the Hapoel ultras. Red on grey. He thought of the wall Alex had told him about at Hanukkah, his voice breaking, and didn't know if this was the one. Gaza had a lot of walls.

Azzam climbed up to the roof, out of breath.

"Did you see?" he said. "All over the world they shout 'from the river to the sea'. There's the river. And there's the sea."

Mehran didn't laugh. Across the sea, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, millions were shouting the name of his people. He saw them on the old television that ran off a generator, humming like a dying bee.

"Do they really see us?" he asked.

"They see us as a voice," said Azzam.

"But feel?" Mehran looked down at the human river flowing below him. "That's something else."

February 2025 · Athens, Tel Aviv

The streets of Athens became an arena too. Not of tanks and rifles. Of the soul. Protests broke out like winter storms, sudden and fierce, and left behind wet streets and broken hearts.

One evening Alex walked into a bar in Exarchia, the place that had once been a refuge. Anna was there with friends. He asked her, as neutrally as he could, what was going on in town today.

"A protest. Smoke. Flags," she said, without looking at him. "Palestinian ones. Everywhere."

The word fell between them like a stone into a still pool. The silence afterwards was deafening.

In Tel Aviv, while she waited for the board, Natalie started work. Night shifts on the desk of a news channel, as an editor. A friend of her mother's arranged it. "Do something with your hands," said Irina, and Natalie agreed only so they would stop looking at her like that.

The screens around her were full of the world. London, Paris, Berlin, New York. Flags, placards, "Stop genocide", "End the occupation". And the hostages too, coming back almost every Saturday, a trickle, thin, pale, with eyes that had seen too much. And one day, small coffins.

Every word was a needle. She lost the border between the camera and the tongue, between the news and life, between what was real and what only looked real.

At night, when she got home, she opened the window to breathe. Even the wind smelled of hatred.

18 March 2025 · Before dawn

A little after two in the morning, with no warning, the planes came back.

Mehran woke to the noise and at first didn't know if he was dreaming. The walls shook. Reem screamed. Fatma was already standing in the doorway with her medical bag, as if she had slept with it.

By morning, according to the health ministry in Gaza, hundreds had been killed. Israel said Hamas had refused to extend the deal and free more hostages, and that it was going back to war until they were all home. Hamas said Israel had broken the agreement. In the street below the house, people who only weeks before had walked home in the river were packing again.

Natalie saw the newsflash come into the system at 2:30. She typed the headline. Her hands didn't shake. That was what frightened her.

Alex saw it in the morning, at the café on Stournari Street. Anna put the espresso down in front of him and, for a moment, hesitated. She had seen his face. Then she walked away.

He wrote to Mehran: "Are you OK?"

The reply came only in the evening. One word.

"Still."