When I wrote my last op-ed, Stop Arming Israel , just before last year’s election, I used a pseudonym for my online Arabic language tutor in the West Bank. Since then, he has asked me to use his real name: Hamza. “Don’t worry, Elena,” he told me, “there are like twenty Hamzas in my neighborhood.”
I studied Arabic at UC Santa Barbara and later in Cairo; today, I stay connected by relearning it with Hamza. As his situation has become even more desperate, our lessons have become conversations about survival.
“We’re the next Gaza,” he kept repeating.