When I was five, I thought war looked like Tom chasing Jerry. My cousins and I would sit cross-legged on the cool tile floor of our Teta’s house in Beit Ummar, West Bank, the power flickering like an eyelid fighting sleep, waiting for the TV to come back to life. Someone would bang on the old set, and then—if we were lucky—Tom & Jerry would jitter back onto the screen, all static and slapstick.
The volume was low, so we could hear if a drone passed. We never understood all the words, but that didn’t matter. Tom rarely spoke. Jerry never did. What mattered was motion. Chase. Trick. Escape. We laughed when Jerry smacked Tom with a frying pan, even as the windows shook from an airstrike a few neighborhoods over. When the bombing intensified and our walls and windows wouldn’t stop shaking, we inched closer to the screen, palms flat on the tile, as if we could slip through the hole with Jerry. When he reappeared on the other side, whole again, we let out a breath we hadn’t noticed holding, our bodies learning the rhythm of escape. Jerry kept running through the fear outside our windows, letting us slip away with him, if only for a little while. He was, somehow, immune. Unshaken. Untouchable. How I wished I could be like him.
Years later, at Oxford University, a professor described Tom & Jerry as an allegory for American race relations. Someone else said it was about Cold War anxieties. Another mentioned violence in children’s programming. I raised my hand, thinking of all the questions I never asked as a child: How many times can you rebuild a house? When does running stop being running and become exile? Can Jerry ever stop running from Tom? “Can a mouse outrun a drone?” I asked. No one answered. The professor smiled politely, the way people do when they don’t know what to do with you. I didn’t press it. I never do.
Cartoons taught me to laugh at violence. To see it as pattern, rhythm, inevitability. Hit, run, repeat. But back home, the patterns were bloodier. Tom was the soldier, the settler, the checkpoint, the drone. Some of us—just a few—were the Jerrys: small, fast, and never still for long.
When the tanks rolled in and the soldiers raided our neighborhood, we knew which alley to take, which neighbor had a basement, which building had collapsed the week before. It was all a map. Not the kind with lines and legends, but a muscle-memory map, a survival script passed down in whispers and silence.
The first time I learned the word border, I wasn’t in school. My father said it in a tone I’d never heard before, like the word itself hurt. “They closed it again,” he muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose, listening to static on the radio. I asked if we could dig a tunnel, like in the cartoons. He smiled.
Years later, when I crossed that same border with a scholarship letter folded seven times in my pocket, I kept thinking I was doing something wrong. That the soldiers would stop me, ask me what I was trying to escape, and I wouldn’t have the right answer. But they didn’t. They barely looked at me—just a lucky Jerry making it out.
In Oxford, I walked to the library in silence most days, haunted by the quiet here—how still the streets are, how gentle the rain. I couldn’t explain to my classmates why I froze every time someone slammed a book shut, why the sound of a siren—even a distant one—turned my stomach. I tried. “Where I’m from,” I’d begin, but that was never enough.
In the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestine, we watched American cartoons and buried our dead. In Oxford, people sip coffee and eat scones while discussing ideology like it’s abstract. One night, in a pub just off High Street, a man grabbed my arm during a heated conversation about the conflict and squeezed—hard. I didn’t flinch. Didn’t make a sound. I wanted to speak, to name what he’d done, but the words stayed in my throat. I thought of myself back at my Teta’s house, watching the screen as the walls around us shook, and speaking felt like stepping outside into the airstrike. “Don’t go outside,” I remembered Teta saying when the bombing was too much, and we were so scared my cousin peed himself. Stay inside. Keep watching. I kept my eyes on my right hand pressed against the cup, my breath slow and steady. I sipped the coffee and waited for him to let go. Still and silent, but in my mind, I was running through holes, under tables, through vents and chimneys, slipping between walls, behind curtains, inside cupboards and cabinets, along narrow hallways, beneath staircases, through hollowed barrels and boxes, moving without moving, escaping without leaving a trace, without a sound.
Last week, I streamed Tom & Jerry for my daughter. She laughed—loud, unafraid, the way I never did. She doesn’t know yet that she comes from a long line of mice. She doesn’t know that her laughter, in a small way, is resistance. That we didn’t survive so she could live in fear.
Sometimes she asks why Jerry always runs and never fights back. I open my mouth to answer and feel that same tightness in my chest I once felt at the pub off High Street, my hand half raised. Then I close it. Some questions, I’ve learned, press back harder when you try to press them.
I watched her watching the screen, and for a moment I felt something slip—between time, between countries, between the child I was and the man I am now. I wasn’t crying, not exactly. But my chest ached in that way it does when memory pinches too hard.
Cartoons didn’t save me. But they gave shape to something I couldn’t yet name: the absurdity of violence, the comedy of power, the instinct to survive even when nothing around you makes sense. Jerry never wins. But he never dies, either. And sometimes, that’s enough.
We fight by running. By ducking, weaving, refusing to be caught. By watching the frying pan come down and still finding a way out. By getting a master’s degree from one of the best universities in the world. By marrying another mouse. By refusing to raise our children like cats—or mice. By learning how to be small, and quick, and clever.
And sometimes, I tell the story—not because it changes what happened, but because it gives shape and sound to the silence that followed. It isn’t an empty, soundless silence; it’s full of everything I’ve ever swallowed, lurking, coiling under my ribs, curling and uncurling, waiting for a moment that may never come. It’s the silence after the windows and walls stop shaking, after the cartoon crash fades, after the siren dies out, after the drones disappear, after the hand that kept squeezing is released, after Jerry makes it out whole, after Teta turns off the TV, after it’s finally safe for us to go out and play.
