“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

To be committed is to be in danger. I have never forgotten those words.

Reading Mr. Baldwin together was how we passed our time for the next few days under curfew when he wasn’t doing chemistry experiments upstairs. I never told anyone, not even Bilal, that the first book I ever read cover to cover was the first one we read together—The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin—when I was thirty-four years old.

“Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”

Next we read Ghassan Kanafani—I loved him too—starting with his book Men in the Sun, which we finished in one day. In this story, Palestinian men inside a water tanker being smuggled into Kuwait die quietly from the scorching desert heat. “Why didn’t they knock on the tanker wall to get out?” is the question that haunts the book and haunted me.

Baldwin and Kanafani were contemporaries thousands of miles apart, who never met but lived parallel lives. They wrote with the same passion, the same irreverence and defiance; with overlapping wounds and bottomless love for their people. Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.