Standing Up for Palestine

When I was a little girl, my mother would often pick me up and thrust my tiny body onto tables at my many cousins’ birthday parties and command me to dance. My memories of those kid’s parties are mostly a blur of big hair, angular outfits, and loud music sizzling from speakers (Amman in the ’90s), but I remember very clearly the thrill of dancing on those slippery, plastic-lined tabletops while my family cheered me on. Even if I’d initially resist by burrowing my face into my mom’s chest in dramatic protest, I always acquiesced to her attempts at putting me on display. In fact, I secretly loved it. 

So I was not new to performance when I hit the stage for my very first kindergarten dance recital as a shy little five-year-old a short time later. That very first routine was a medley split into two parts, beginning with a traditional Palestinian dance complete with thobe and ending in a pop jig. The thobe was difficult to put on, the material stiff and unrelenting, almost impossible to get over my head without help. The idea was that I would remove the thobe for part two to reveal the outfit underneath and continue into the second dance seamlessly. Part one went off without a hitch. The audience was rapt. I could sense the energy in the room, the collective parental pride, even if I had no words for it back then. But their reaction confirmed something I already sensed about our identity, that we were making a statement that went beyond the confines of the stage. When the time for part two rolled around however, things got complicated. I struggled with the thobe. My pudgy arms got stuck at the shoulders and lost the battle against the zero-stretch material. I had no choice but to continue to the pop portion with it still on. The budding performer in me intrinsically understood the number one rule of live performance: the show must go on. I struck my final pose on the last beat and the audience cheered. I learned two things that day: one, there was no high better than the one awarded by an approving crowd and two, try as I might, there was no removing the thobe.

But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t get rid of that nagging tug for performance. 

My family and I were uprooted for the second time (for my parents, a third and fourth) when we moved to Canada a few years later in search of citizenship.  My father was growing tired of the constant, often humiliating limitations experienced by those considered stateless like us. Every encounter at an airport, embassy, or government office became a bureaucratic nightmare of wading through confusing paperwork and poorly understood Palestinian refugee documents. By then, I knew enough about our history to understand that that there were two kinds of Palestinians, the lucky ones who miraculously got to remain on the land—occupation and all—and those like us, who had inherited the curse of Palestinian exile. Nowhere on earth outside that double-edged-sword-shaped piece of land could be called home, and that was made shockingly clear after arriving in Canada, where I discovered that most locals didn’t even know what Palestine or Palestinians were. 

Still, I made a life for myself in Montreal, focusing on academia and studying sciences throughout high school and university as good Arab kids are expected to do. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t get rid of that nagging tug for performance. 

I was urged into trying stand-up after the funniest person I know (who was an incredible comedian in his own right) told me that I was the right kind of funny for it. I knew enough even then to understand that simply being funny didn’t mean I would automatically succeed at stand-up. Tons of newbies have made the grave mistake of confidently hitting the stage thinking they’d wow the audience with no prepared material, their egos falsely inflated by the laughs they got from recounting that one funny anecdote to their friends. But the audience is quick to teach; you will not succeed on vibes alone. It takes hard work to make comedy look easy. And so, eager to live up to my friend’s encouragement, I sat at my kitchen table one night and started scribbling down every dumb idea, trying to put together what they call “a tight five”: your best, joke-packed material that can fit into five minutes and which most amateur show runners usually ask for anyway. Everything came out all jumbled and senseless at first, but eventually something started to take shape. A scaffolding emerged, and more little pieces appeared to hang them from it (I’d later learn these were called tags, mini jokes within a joke). By the time the sun came up, I was looking at my first fleshed out stand-up bit. Like almost all my jokes, it gravitated towards politics—a by-product of being Palestinian and news channels serving as the soundtrack of my life since birth. I still think it wasn’t too bad for a first try. The bit compared various powerful countries to high school stereotypes. China as the strict teacher, Mexico as the weed dealer, and the punchline: the USA as the school shooter.  I read it out to my comedian friend and he laughed—which is when I knew I had something worthy of an audience.  

I discovered during that first open mic that when I’m extremely nervous, my body likes to remove every drop of saliva from my mouth. Still, I stood in the corner of that shoddy dive bar, knees wobbling, tongue so pasty it could be heard on the mic, and somehow made it to the other side of those five minutes. I miraculously got one good laugh—a massive success for a first-timer. There is an immediacy and power in the laughter you finesse out of a room full of people and, just like at that first dance recital, I was hooked. I got a thrill out of conducting crowds like some comedy maestro, guiding them toward bigger and bigger laughs with a calculated crescendo. But what little confidence I built up after that first successful set was quickly checked after my second one, performed to what felt like a crowd of narcoleptics. It taught me an important tenet of stand-up: laughter is never guaranteed. There are too many variables at a show. You might tell the exact same jokes that killed one night and then bomb on the next, encountering humiliating silence instead of the triumph of laughter—every crowd is its own beast to tame. But I would learn all that later—after my first laugh, it was already too late. From then on, I was on the never-ending chase for my next fix. 

It is a general rule that any Palestinian with a microphone will eventually talk about Palestine—unless you’re DJ Khaled. So it only took a few sets before I found a way to inject it into my material. Trying to extract humor out of something rooted in so much tragedy felt precarious, but I was certain of one thing: the punchline should always be aimed squarely at Israel. 

My first joke went like so: “I come from a very Palestinian family. What I mean by that is when I would misbehave as a teenager, my mom would say things like ‘if you don’t straighten up, I’ll take you back to our country.’ [Pause.] To which my snarky teenage ass would reply ‘joke’s on you mom, we don’t have a country!’ [Pause for (hopefully) laughter.] But I very, VERY quickly remembered why you never mess with or talk back to Arab moms. Because as I snickered away like a smug asshole, my mom just looked at me dead in the eyes—you know that mom look? That look where you realize you fucked up so hard that she’s summoning the ancestors for this one. [I look at the back of the room with a freaky side grin, eyes shooting lasers as I impersonate my mother.] ‘No, no, no…. [evil giggle] What I meant is that I’d send you there to let the Israelis take care of you.’ [Pause again. I’m back to me, eyes wide in fear as I realize what I’ve done.] White parents punish their kids by sending them to their rooms. Arab parents? Direct to ethnic cleansing. [Audience should ideally be roaring by now.]”

That’s what gets audiences laughing: that sudden moment of realization, of upended expectation. But in order for that to succeed, a series of carefully crafted elements have to fall into place. At the heart of every (successful) joke is almost always a kernel of truth. You start with a setup meant to guide the crowd through something familiar and, somewhere along the way, a collective understanding must emerge. When I talk about that laser-eyed look from an angry mom, I’m drawing upon a shared experience in the hopes that they join me on the journey from that truth to the punchline.

In stand-up, it’s generally understood that when making jokes about the powerful and the oppressed, the joke only really works when we punch up, when we make the joke at the expense of the oppressive system. I’ve known few audiences who were comfortable punching down at the already downtrodden, and rarely did I meet one that didn’t appreciate the small, collective act of rebellion granted by laughing at my jokes about the powerful (like the one where I call Justin Trudeau the fuckboy of world leaders). Still, there is no shortage of comedians (and their audiences) who seem to thrive on homophobic, racist, or otherwise hateful material as pushback against perceived censorship—the oppressor, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. When making jokes about Palestine, the kernel of truth is simple; our people have been fighting against Israeli brutality for generations and so every joke shall be made in service of this truth—a right hook into the jaw of our oppressors. 

I felt a rush of excitement and giddy satisfaction whenever I succeeded in getting entire rooms of people to laugh when I ridiculed Israel. As I kept retelling my first Palestine joke at subsequent shows, it quickly became a litmus test for understanding the demographics of the crowd in front of me (much like Palestine functions in the real world). Roaring cheers revealed a SWANA-heavy or at least politically conscious crowd, while uncomfortable laughs meant they were mostly white. Then there were those that cackled at “we don’t have a country,” but whose smug grins quickly turned horrified at the end. I could almost hear the mental tantrums they were throwing as they squirmed in their seats. Won’t someone PLEASE think of the antisemitism! In any other context, this reaction is a knife in the belly for a comedian, but in front of those racist audiences, I didn’t care. They were in my territory; the mic was in my hands. I wasn’t bombing, I was hitting back.

Another Palestinian-themed joke went like this: 

Us Palestinians have never needed the internet to keep in touch with our family back home. Even before the internet was around, we didn’t need phones either. If we wanted a quick check in, my family would gather around the TV and turn to an English news channel. That’s it. After a few minutes my mom would perk up “Look, it’s Uncle Samir! He’s yelling death to Israel on CNN! He’s doing well, alhamdullilah.”   

Outside the SWANA crowds, the reaction to this one was usually tepid. Few people understood the crux of the bit; that news media was not our friend, and in the rare instances when they did talk about Palestinians, they made a concerted effort to portray us as aggressive and violent. This joke cemented something I already understood about being a Palestinian in the West: we are often looked at as foreign, perhaps dangerous, and our story is poorly understood if at all. In our region, our identity needs no explanation, neither do our jokes. I kept that bit for those occasional shows performed to Arab crowds.

Not all my material was about Palestine. I often gravitated towards the more racy and absurd. I didn’t shy away from a good raunchy bit and, like all devoted female comedians, I dedicated a decent amount of stage time talking about sex, vaginas, and periods. Material that my Arab family would surely be proud of, you know, real life or death stuff.

Six years after that shaky first set, I got the opportunity to audition for a Just For Laughs recording session that showcased up-and-coming talent.  Stand-up is an enterprise that can take a long time to turn into a viable career, so the opportunity was kind of a big deal for someone in my position. I remember the night of my audition very well: my mind was sharp, my confidence high, but I was beating myself up for having waited until the last minute to invite my friends—a strategic error that could see other performers get bigger laughs. A hot crowd (one that is ready to laugh) can do wonders when your energy is low. But an audience’s nature is fickle, so packing the crowd with friends would have offered a safety net of guaranteed laughs from at least one group.  In the end, only two of my friends were able to buy tickets, one pair of voices I could count on in the crowd of a hundred and fifty people. The lights seemed to be extra blinding on that stage, but as most performers know, this can have its advantages when you’re nervous—you see nothing, so there’s nothing to fear.  But from the first second of those ten minutes, the audience was hanging on to my every word. I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction, especially on such an important night. In stand-up speak, I destroyed. There was barely a moment of silence, Palestinian jokes and all. I walked off feeling proud to have taken my place on that stage. A few weeks later, I got the news that I’d been selected for the Just For Laughs recording. Career-wise, this was exactly where I wanted to be as a comedian. 

But when the recording was released months later, it was only seven minutes long. My heart sank immediately. When I listened, it proved to be exactly what I’d suspected—they had completely edited out everything about Palestine. Though I knew that censorship of Palestinians was part and parcel of the struggle, it was still jarring to experience it so deliberately. When I asked for an explanation, I was given vague excuses about “quality” and “airtime.” But if you know you know. 

A few months after that recording, the genocide finally kicked into its most vicious iteration since the Nakba. Finally, because, like every Palestinian, I knew that the history of Israel’s violence over the last eighty years was all a precursor to this. Our oppressors had been frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to take the logical next step dictated by their ethnosupremacist project: to wipe out this nuisance of a people from the land they lusted after. The attacks on October 7th were the perfect opportunity to finally do so. 

For the first few months of the genocide, I slugged around from place to place like a ghost, barely functioning. I felt broken. I could hardly laugh at anything, let alone imagine trying to make other people laugh. I canceled every upcoming show, telling myself I’d somehow pull it together for the next one. Eventually I asked for time off work, holding back tears as I explained why. Without exception, everyone I appealed to replied with sincere, somber condolences. This wasn’t the same North America I came to in the ’90s—it was the first time I felt seen as a Palestinian, felt like our struggle was beginning to be understood. The horrific irony that it took the extermination of entire bloodlines to spur this awakening was not lost one me.  

The time away from the stage grew longer and longer. My friends kept telling me how important my voice was at a time like this. I’d see posts about the importance of joy, affirmations on how this was a form of resistance. But it felt hollow. What we were witnessing left no room for joy or a sense of purpose.  Sitting down to write a joke became agonizing. I’d spend the entire time fighting off intrusive images of the torn flesh of people who looked and sounded like me and my family. That nugget of truth at the heart of all jokes suddenly became radioactive. It had mutated into something so violent, so massively destructive that it transformed my fundamental understanding of the world around me, corrupting every atom, tainting every human experience, dwarfing thought itself. A glance at a construction site, drinking a glass of water, or just looking at my five-year-old niece—with her little ghazzawi accent, her thick braid, a face indistinguishable from that of any girl in Gaza—all became horrific reminders of what was being done to Palestinians. Every waking moment was transformed into a procession of funerals. To try and look for anything funny in any of this felt like a kind of profanity.

If by some miracle I did find the strength to write, it kept turning into rants and lectures about the evils of Israel, which, while true, didn’t feel like it was fit for the medium. People attend comedy shows to have a good time, and the truth is, I didn’t know how to make Palestine a good time. I didn’t know that I even really wanted to try. To stand in front of an audience and say “Joke’s on you mom, we don’t have a country” as Israel was literally wiping entire neighborhoods from the earth, or to make light of how news outlets portray Palestinians after their complicity in whitewashing our genocide now all felt grotesque—a clown capitalizing on my people’s misery for laughs. 

The enormity of genocide is such that nothing it touches can ever be considered average. 

Ironically though, it was at this point that I started seeing a massive influx of online content about Palestine. My feed became saturated with all manner of stand-up comedians suddenly talking about us. On one end, I was repulsed by those that were clearly taking advantage of this newfound attention on our struggle to “increase engagement”—people who likely knew nothing about our history prior to this. On the other end, I admired stand-ups like Amer Rahman, who was spurred by the genocide to release new material after a seven-year hiatus, not to serve algorithmic demands, but to explicitly punch up at Israel. And Palestinian Sammy Obeid, who is an expert at seizing interactions with Zionist hecklers to denounce Israeli crimes and further people’s understanding of our cause. But much of this content elicits something that in comedy we call clapter: when the audience reacts to something with claps and praise rather than laughs. It felt different than your average stand-up routine. The enormity of genocide is such that nothing it touches can ever be considered average. 

And then there was the emotional whiplash of the occasional, stomach-churning clips of Israeli comedians making what they think are jokes about dead Palestinians. What struck me about these weren’t the heinous implications, nor the absence of comedy, nor the complete lack of talent—none of these were surprising coming from a hysterical, genocidal society high on its own supply—it was the absolute fury it elicited from people online. The comments and stitched videos all seethed with outrage and condemnation. People were finally understanding that when Israelis made jokes about the suffering they inflicted on Palestinians, this was the oppressor punching down on the oppressed—in fact, it was Israelis doing what they do best, bombing. I had never imagined in my lifetime that I’d see such a fundamental shift in conversations about Palestine. It was hard to comprehend the magnitude of this change after all these years, but I was deeply moved by it. It was the only source of hope left to hold on to. 

I still find myself incapable of making room for these conversations through stand-up. I still can’t imagine a bit that would inspire laughter and not clapter. The reality is that the comedy stage is too highly dependent on audience approval, and I resent the idea that I’m performing Palestine content for anyone’s approval. Something in me has permanently changed. I don’t only want to make people laugh, even in this new landscape where they might actually be laughing with us—it feels too late for that. To say Palestine is to invoke the largest orphan crisis in modern history, to invoke mass graves, and hospital bombings, and Israeli rape dogs, and the shredded remains of a father carried in a plastic bag by his son. It’s to be confronted with the worst acts of depravity that humans are capable of. I have not found a purpose on the comedy stage under the weight of these crimes against humanity.

All art finds a way towards that kernel of truth at the heart of every joke, and I’ve discovered that other mediums are more forgiving in this regard than stand-up because they allow my presence on the stage to be unfettered by ignorant audiences or online engagement. I want to speak to every single Palestinian out there without being bogged down by western discourse, while maintaining some amount of personal integrity. 

The genocide’s destructiveness has seeped into our consciousness in such a way that no Palestinian in the world has come out unscathed. Yes, there is power in finding a place for joy, but somewhere in this landscape that has forever been transformed, I want to take part in a telling of our story that is beholden to all of its complexities, all its pain, discomfort, and deep loss. Comedy will naturally be a part of that—a comedian never misses an opportunity to chase that laugh—but I want to demand something deeper, a reckoning of who we are as a species. The performer in me is still attempting to find a way to make the performance work for the audience, not only as a comedian, but also not only as a Palestinian. The artist and the Palestinian are always fighting for a place in the foreground, and sometimes one wins over the other—art isn’t limited to one facet of person, there needs to be room for a vagina joke or two. 

I found myself in the exact same predicament as the one I had on the stand-up stage when I attempted to end this essay with a joke, shoe-horning levity where it did not belong. As I read it back and winced at the joke’s pick-me energy, it was all the confirmation I needed; there is simply no appropriate palate cleanser for genocide. This new performer has come to terms with the fact that some performances demand that you sit with discomfort, letting it change and challenge you—and, by extension, the audience. Where laughs must make way for silence to do the talking instead.