Love and Blindness at the End of the World
By Julia Choucair Vizoso
1.
On day 368 of the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians, Netflix released Love is Blind: Habibi, the Dubai version of the reality show in which contestants converse across windowless “pods” until they find someone who is willing to marry them, sight unseen. The show quickly topped non-English language streaming around the world. Here was a version of Arab love for the new Middle East order in the making.
It takes until episode 6 (of 9) to confirm our suspicion: One of the contestants might be Palestinian. The setting for this ethnicity reveal is his bachelor pad. Having emerged from the pods into the “real world,” Mohammed (the suspected Palestinian) has invited us and his fiancee Safaa (a confirmed Iraqi) to his apartment for a curated visit – part of the unmasking rituals that are leading up to the big day. The camera pans around the living room to the background noise of Safaa reacting to the aesthetics of her soon-to-be husband. It pauses momentarily on a shelf with a single, decorative wooden box engraved with a map of historic Palestine. The letters falasteen cut through the territory, and then through us.
All the trailers and promotional writeups have sold us that participants “hail from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Iraq.” Yet here is a portal to a different truth. Like the graffiti behind CIA agent Carrie Mathison that confirmed to Arabic readers that “Homeland is racist,” the shot feels subversive and dystopic at once. Here is Palestine breaking through erasure; here is Palestine confined to folkloric shelf art.
An online search for “love is blind Palestine” returns a single Reddit thread asking, “Is Mohammed’s ethnicity left out on purpose?” Possible_Ad6294 seems to think not: “They showed a few things that made it clear,” such as “his art of Palestine and the Palestinian flag on the boat and the Dabka,” they comment, in reference to the shelf art, the couple’s date on a boat, and the dancing at their wedding. But MyLovelyMan offers a correction: “That was the UAE flag sadly.” Sadly, it was.
All other searches for Palestine in this version of reality transport us from Dubai to Washington, D.C., where contestant Ramses Prashad declares that he cannot “see himself with someone who is involved with the military because of the injustice of US imperialism as seen in Palestine.” Ramses is arguing with his US Navy-veteran-turned-lawyer fiancee Marissa, with whom he also disagrees about God’s role in their wedding ceremony. But they are able to work through that one. Religion is less intractable than imperialism.
That Palestine was more visible on American than Arab reality TV during the genocide of Palestinians is a chilling reminder of the Middle East that already is.
Violence is everywhere and nowhere in the Dubai version of love. Iraqis, Lebanese, and Syrians are more visible protagonists than Palestinians, but blurred are the reasons why they left their homelands for this “global city.” In this fortified Ellis Island resort, wars and financial crises are ghosts that can be left behind by anyone with enough capital to make more of it. Yet, like Palestine, the reality of these homelands also breaks through when you least expect it. In one of their first conversations, Safaa reveals to Mohammad that she does not remember anything [her emphasis] from her childhood in Iraq – “not school, not playground, not teachers … zero memory” – as she recounts her family’s many exiles, from Iraq to Kuwait to Russia to Uzbekistan. This glimpse into trauma is perhaps the only seemingly-genuine moment of interpersonal connection across gender on the show.
In 2017, Israel’s minister of intelligence and transport Israel Katz first revealed the “Gaza Artificial Island Initiative,” his fantasy for an artificial island off the coast of Gaza, complete with a port, cargo terminal, and even an airport – all under full Israeli control and connected to Gaza through a 3-mile long bridge. “At first glance”, says Reuters, “the video looks like a promotion for a luxury offshore development, a Dubai Palm-style project on the Mediterranean.” In January 2024, Katz screened his fantasy at the European Union; the post-genocide plans for the reconstruction of Gaza borrow from his plan. A few months later, another global city had become the metaphor for Gaza. Reporting on Netanyahu’s plans to share control over Gaza (for a few years) with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and the United States, Israeli news outlets projected “a kind of Singapore on the Med.” By May, the plans for “Gaza 2035” entailed a “Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone” where skyscrapers, solar fields, and water desalination plants will be connected through a high speed rail corridor through the Negev to Saudi Arabia’s NEOM. In a culmination of these genocidal projections, Donald Trump fantasized in February 2025 that the US will “take over Gaza” to create “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Seen from the Love is Blind pods, the most disturbing plans being floated for Gaza seem possible. Everything is real estate, everywhere a Riviera. Lebanon – the only other country where filming takes place – is reduced to a getaway beach resort, to Edde Sands specifically: infamous site and symbol of the oligarchic theft of public space. We already know the Arab elites who would purchase beachfront property in an ethnically cleansed Gaza.
2.
On February 5, 2025 Milad Walid Daqqa celebrated her fifth birthday. In the grainy video, she is wearing a frilly pink and white dress and a matching bow in her hair. She claps in glee before crouching down to blow out the candle on her cake. Her mother, journalist and political activist Sanaa Salama, is sitting on a couch behind her, beaming, clapping, and singing sana helwa. To their left is Zakaria Zubeidi, the beloved Palestinian resistance fighter and cofounder of Jenin’s Freedom Theatre who had been released only a few days earlier as part of the prisoner exchange deal. He too is seated and clapping, animatedly leading the birthday chant. “Sana helwa ya Mallud,” he sings, then switches. “Falasteen hurra ya Mallud,” he sings twice. Happy birthday ya Mallud. Palestine is free, ya Mallud.
Everything about this birthday scene is love. Milad was born twenty years after her parents first dreamed about having a child together. Sanaa met Walid Daqqa, the revolutionary leader and prolific thinker and writer, in 1996 when she visited him in prison to interview him. They fell in love and were married in Asqalan prison in 1999. Milad could only be born after her parents successfully smuggled Daqqa’s sperm out of the prison. Every one of her birthdays is a celebration of life against all odds, of love despite and against surveillance. Every birthday, a prison break.
Milad’s pink bow delights and shatters us in equal measure. An impossible number of little girls in Gaza will not have a next birthday. They too had their hair in pony tails and tidy braids and colorful hair ties, theirs peeking through caked blood, changing us forever. 17,881 children slaughtered by Israel in 15 months. For the survivors, birthdays pass without ceremony, candles, and cakes. Without parents or homes. The lucky ones blew virtual candles on cans of red beans.
Surrounding Milad’s chocolate cake are towers of stacked coffee cups that invite us to come back to the joy. They hint at a larger crowd off camera. Celebration will be communal even if Zionism forbids it. In this love, a prisoner will wait 20 years and five months to sip his next cup of coffee, until his wife can brew it for him, until he can present her with her daily red rose.
Walid Daqqa’s absence is everywhere in the scene, as is Zakaria Zubeidi’s presence. Ten months before his daughter’s fifth birthday and having never met her, Daqqa was martyred in an Israeli prison through severe medical negligence. At the time of his death, after 38 years of imprisonment, he was the longest-serving Palestinian political prisoner in history. From his own cell, Zubeidi had offered Daqqa his bone marrow in 2021. That same year, together with five other prisoners, Zubeidi used a spoon to dig an escape tunnel out of the maximum security Gilboa prison, smuggling out parts of Daqqa’s final and unfinished play “The Martyrs Return to Ramallah.”
Daqqa teaches us how to see and think and write at the end of the world. But more viscerally, more urgently, he teaches us how to love at the end of the world. “I confess that I am still a person holding on to love as if it were embers”, he writes in his mindbending letter “Parallel Time.” “I will remain steadfast in this love. I will continue to love you, for love is my humble and only victory over my jailer.” Through abolitionist love we are victorious.
On September 17, 2024, a young woman sits in a hospital in Dahye. Surrounded by distressed relatives, she gently urges them not to cry. She reassures them: She will accept whatever fate may bring. If her husband loses his sight, she will be his eyes. It’s a vow.
Four hours earlier, Israelis had unleashed a terrorist attack simultaneously across Lebanon trying to blind, maim, or kill thousands of men, women, and children at once. In the interminable hour that it takes me to get through to my father – in my panic I have forgotten that doctors at his hospital no longer use pagers – I remember that today is my parents’ wedding anniversary. Forty-three years. I finally get through. I want to unhear the cries of pain in the background.
Love is Blind: Habibi premiered three weeks later. Like all escapist pleasures, this one dangles an alluring alternative. Here is a world where Arabs live, not die, fall in love, not mourn; a world where Arabs prosper, where they travel across borders, where women confront misogyny. To enter, simply leave Palestine at the door, along with the suffering that brings you to this anesthetized city. Savage erasure is the price for Arab representation.
My imagination of the steadfast woman in the hospital continues to haunt me in the most soothing of ways. Of the many images we cannot unsee, this one I keep close. For those of us chasing the real thing, these images are incantations. They are one-line poems that shake us out of sleep paralysis.
May we be each others’ eyes.
Palestine is free, ya Mallud.
Julia Choucair Vizoso is an independent scholar and seasonal translator. She hopes these words move you to refuse and resist the Israel-US genocide of the Palestinian people and destruction of Lebanon, wherever and however you can.