For the past few months, there has been a grim new ritual whenever I meet people from some Arab countries. It’s a sort of mutual commiseration and checking in. How are things with you? Where is your family? I hope you are safe, I hope they are safe. I hope you are OK. We are with you.

There is a comfort to it, and also an awkwardness. Comfort because the words are earnest, the solidarity almost unbearably meaningful. Awkward because the scale of what many are enduring is too large to be captured in those words. Everything feels shot through with survivor’s guilt, but also with a little bit of resolve in the knowledge that the calamities tearing apart our nations have closed the distances between us.

At the heart of it all is Palestine – an open trauma that haunts interactions. A muteness has set in, where before there was anger and shock. Added to this is Lebanon. Before the ceasefire, a Lebanese friend told me that it was strange feeling that you may not have a country to return to soon. “Shit,” another said, when I asked her what the situation was for her family in Beirut. We moved on.

At the same time, Sudan is a year and a half into a bewilderingly savage war. Even in the occupied West Bank, almost every single Palestinian I met asked me about Sudan, their sense of the war there sharpened by their own experience. “It’s such a shame,” one man told me, “[and] so unnecessary. It’s always our leaders who want to fight, never the people.” Wherever it is, it feels like one war, the causes of which are complex, but the consequences for those experiencing it are simple. We are all in familiar trouble.

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