Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon. 

“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did.

He was right. It was fun. I’d never previously thought of prayer as fun, so this was a first. Once I did, prayer changed for me, then changed me. Fake-praying eventually became a habit, then became the first step of my (very) circuitous, convoluted mode of re-entry into religion. Religion became a game, then a full-fledged hobby.  I needed a hobby. I enjoyed it.

Nasr Mosque, Nablus (photo credit: Moataz, Wikipedia)

I read tonight that the Israeli military attacked and then burned the Nasr Mosque down last Friday.  

Israeli occupation forces stormed several mosques in the old city of Nablus at dawn today, the Palestinian Information Centre reported, setting fire to Al-Nasr Mosque. They also prevented dawn prayers before arresting three Palestinians during the raid.

Eyewitnesses said the fire completely destroyed the imam’s quarters, damaging the mosque’s walls and carpets.

Al-Nasr Mosque is one of Nablus’s most significant historical landmarks, originally built as a Roman-era church before being converted into a mosque in 1187.

Local authorities said that the Israelis prevented the municipal fire department from putting out the fire, intensifying the damage.

I guess this is Israel wishing us all a Ramadan Kareem, like they just did in Gaza, where they’ve dropped leaflets celebrating Ramadan as they starve everyone to death, reminding the starving to feed the “needy.” Nice people.

Not really, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to remind you of the obvious: Gaza is under blockade right now, just as it was for sixteen years before October 7, 2023. And a blockade, just to remind you, is an act of war. So “the war” that everyone so glibly claims to have “begun” on October 7, 2023, could not possibly have begun on that date. It obviously began well before it. And the brutality you’re seeing from Israel–in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, and in Syria–is not a “retaliation” for the attack of October 7, but a perpetual renewal of the initiatory aggression that’s characterized Israel’s existence from Day 1. The burning of Nasr was done in concert with Israeli attacks on some six or eight mosques in the northern West Bank. These attacks aren’t “retaliation” for anything but the crime of living, as a non-Jew, on territory that Israel wants to conquer for the Jewish People.  

I’ve gotten to the point where I take news like the destruction of Nasr in stride. Another house of worship destroyed by the “most moral army in the world”? Another fond memory spat upon and ground into ash and powder? Another day of having ignorant, infantile people throw the Holocaust and the Star of David in my face in the hopes of suborning my servility? Inconsequential compared to what preceded it. Just another day in the life of Western Civilization.

Interior of Nasr Mosque, just as I remember it (photo credit: Andreas Tanner, Wikipedia)

I can’t help thinking, though, of a prayer–a fake prayer, I suppose, but that’s what they all are. 

“Nablus” is an Arabization of “Neapolis,” or New Polis, itself an appropriation, by the Romans, of the Greek term polis, for city-state. That’s what Nablus was supposed to be. A New Polis. 

Call me a Hellenizer, but that’s what Israel itself needs to be–and Palestine, too, for that matter. They both need to be washed clean of the ethno-national fetishes that have taken hold of them for the last hundred years, and rebuilt from scratch, as a single constitutional republic–from the river to the sea–where people leave their ethno-religiosities at home, and meet as equal citizens in some version of a polis open to all. Israel isn’t that, and was never meant to be. Palestine will only become that if it explicitly aims at it. And PS, you can’t aim at it by bowing in the direction of either Mecca or Riyadh. You can’t aim at it by bowing to anyone at all. 

To put this another way, you can’t create the right sort of neapolis from within the assumptions of Zionism, Islamism, or any other kind of ethno-nationalism. You have to put all that aside, or at least put it in its place, and start over with one of the things that the Romans gave us that was really worth having–the concept of the human being qua human, or humanism, as a governing identity. It all sounds like a dream, but like the “polis of our prayers” in Aristotle’s Politics, the best that we can hope for doesn’t have to be impossible (Politics VII.4, 1325b37).  

Forget Jerusalem. Make Nablus the capital of this new polis. Better knafeh. Better location. Less religious fanaticism. Less historical baggage. 

I know it’s not going to happen. That’s the beauty of prayer, after all: no one’s there, and no one’s listening. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s the thought that counts. And thoughts are fireproof.