can Palestinians laugh?

Can Palestinians laugh?

What does Palestinian stand-up comedy look like? Is there more to Palestine than suffering, occupation and genocide? Can you joke about the unbearable?

All valid questions, and to an extent, Palestine Comedy Club attempts to answer them.

Suffering does not deprive people of their sense of humour. If anything, sometimes laughing at the absurdities and atrocities of your daily life is what helps you survive. But there is something else worth remembering: Palestinians exist beyond their suffering.

I'm often asked, once people realise I'm Palestinian: "Do you have relatives in Gaza? Have you lost any family?"

I say no. Then I try to explain that our family lost its entire village in 1967. Does that qualify me as Palestinian? Does that make me entitled to sympathy and support?

How much do I have to suffer to be Palestinian? Does my humanity, expressed through comedy or poetry, count?

The film takes you on a documentary journey with a group of Palestinian comedians, following their lives, their jokes and their daily struggles. Along the way, it brings together the complexities, differences and diversity of Palestinian society in a remarkably simple and human way.

Perhaps that is one of the most important things the film achieves. It reminds us that Palestinians are not just people to feel sorry for. They are people who laugh, joke, love, argue, dream and live. And they have every right to do so without having to justify their humanity.

As Mahmoud Darwish wrote:

ونحن نحب الحياة إذا ما استطعنا إليها سبيلا

And we love life whenever we find a way to it.

Thank you, Aisling Bee, for a great conversation, and huge gratitude to Alla Shehada, Charlotte Knowles and Sam Beale for this amazing film.

“What Colour Is the Blood of a Child?”

 

 

“it’s complicated,” he said.
“I’m not well read.

I can’t support either side, but
they were attacked, right?”

I paused, tried to smile,

biting my tongue all the while.

moments passed, i said:

what colour is the blood of a child?
red. warm. wild.

does it matter where the child’s from,
a palace, a camp, a slum?

in what language does a child cry?

Does it matter which flag flies high?

 

wrong questions, you’d think.

While the world sinks beneath the blood,

And billions watch don't even blink.

babies starving. dying, every day.

simple truth: black and white, not grey.

you say you can’t take a side

while watching genocide.

sorry if it’s an inconvenience,

our existence, bothering you.

but we’re just like you:

we love, we care,

we laugh, we dare,

we envy, we celebrate,

we grieve, we hate,

we write poems, sing for martyrs,

chant for revolution.

so let me ask again:

what colour is the blood of a child?

Red!

the colour of Revolution..

what’s the answer to a world this mad?

One solution..

Revolution

 

Ahmad Baker

Am I English

Am I English?

I Am Not One Thing

I am the father who wakes before the house,
loads the dishwasher, does the school run,
then rushes to work.
I am the Liverpool fan,
cursing the team beneath my breath,
yet wearing the red jersey,
singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.
I am the Jordanian,
pouring rich Arabic coffee from the pot,
Eating Mansaf by hand,
frowning and joking and self-deprecating.

I am full of contradictions.
Love, hate, joy and anger.
I can hold them all, at once.
I am not one thing.

I am the man walking for miles,
listening to Peace Train, setting fire to the rain,
enjoying Suicidal Thoughts,
on the Highway to Hell.
Arabic songs,
Persian and French ones

Languages I do not understand,
and poems, so many poems.

Do not ask me to explain

I am the Palestinian in London streets,
walking with hundreds of thousands,
chanting for a free Palestine.
And I am the immigrant on the Underground,
listening to Macbeth as an audiobook,
intermittently playing Candy Crush on my phone
while the city carries me to work.

And somewhere, someone is deciding
whether I am English.
What must I leave behind
to make myself belong?

I have come from every direction.
North. East. West. South.
Like the NEWS,
I am every direction

And full of contradictions

All at once.
And if you need me to be only one thing,
the limitation is not mine.

 

 

Ahmad Baker

October 2026

 

The Importance of Being Right

Political parties, leaders and members often wrestle with a dilemma: which matters more, being right or winning? Some say being on the right side of history is what counts. Others say that if you’re winning, you get to write that history.

The Green Party voted at its conference last week to approve a motion that Zionism is racist, and I wholeheartedly agree. Zionism, or any movement that believes in an ethnostate where one group has more rights than others, is racist. You don’t need a degree in political science or human rights to see that. But calling out Zionism, or opposing it, is not the same as making it a headline plank of a party’s platform.

Many Green members are devoted activists with a strong moral compass about right and wrong. I think they believe in being right first, with everything else a distant second. That mentality often shifts politics. Make an issue your top priority, and it may never win you a seat in Parliament. But it pushes the other parties to talk about it, until the ground shifts. Whatever you think of Nigel Farage and his motives, for a long time it arguably mattered more to him to be right, in his own belief, than to win. Eventually his outsider views became mainstream, and he forced David Cameron to call the EU referendum.

So can the Greens do the same with Zionism? I don’t think so, and this is where the comparison ends.

First, the issues are not alike. Most British people have great sympathy for Palestine and are happy to call out Israel’s actions, knowing that Israel and Judaism are not the same thing. But start a conversation about Zionism, with its many strands of ideology and its long history, and you lose the audience.

Second, the methods are not alike. Farage is a “far” right populist who used tactics like fear-mongering, twisting the truth and stirring racial tension, and they worked. In effect, he was immoral in everything he did, in order to shift the nation’s morality towards what he believed was right. Would the Green use such tools/ tactics to push their values and agenda? An activist who cares about being right more than winning will never lie or spread misinformation to push an agenda.

 

“Being right without winning is like having a great theory you never get to test. “

 

 

Opinion on the plight of the Palestinians swings like a pendulum, pulled from two ends at once. At one end, a small fraction but a real one, are those who blur anti-Zionism with antisemitism and reach for old tropes to make their case. At the other, the majority, are people with genuine concerns about human rights and the oppression of Palestinians. The Greens, and most pro Palestine movements, belong at the second end. But the more a party turns its conviction into a headline declaration, the easier it is for opponents to paint the whole swing with the colours of the first, and we have recent lessons to learn from.

Being right without winning is like having a great theory you never get to test. Imagine having the best theory of everything, that ends up on a dusty library shelf. The challenge of navigating the world isn’t having high morals, important as they are. It’s how you interact with people, get involved and change things.

 

 “Sometimes being right is the unkind thing to be”

 

On a personal level, I sometimes have to navigate awkward situations by being polite: “I love this dish”, “you look great”. Sometimes being right is the unkind thing to be. I also try to be morally right in politics, but I don’t have to win the trust of millions to do it. If you’re trying to be right at scale, you need to learn an important skill: compromise, not necessarily on your principles but on your priorities, and articulating those principles in a way that appeals to the masses. That’s how you earn the trust you need to change the world.

Some will say you’re betraying your principles and your constituents by acting this way. I’d say you betray them if you don’t. We like to think of the world in black and white, where you’re either right or wrong. I have questioned my own conflicting beliefs many times, wondering how I could be right and wrong at the same time. Most of us live in shades of grey on morality, politics and ideology. Yet we expect leaders and politicians to have complete clarity of position and act on it, and if they don’t, we call it betrayal.

 

So, do I prefer to be right, or to win? Both. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. I’d rather be as close to right as possible, and win.

 

Perhaps the trouble is that we ask only one question. What do I believe is right? Activists answer that one brilliantly. But there are two more: how do I persuade others, and what am I willing to do to turn my belief into reality? Without persuasion and power, principles stay on that library shelf.

Of course, you can refuse to compromise. You can stand firmly on the right side of history and keep your principles intact. But what good is a clear conscience if you have no power to change anything? Imagine how clear it feels while the suffering continues because you didn’t win.

Ahmad Baker

October 2026

 

Foreigner’s Language

I am writing a poem in English.

Which means
every other line
I stop.

Not because I've run out of ideas.

Because I've run out of language.

What rhymes with language?

Baggage.

Well...
that'll do.

I have plenty of that.

Physical.
Emotional.
50 years worth off.

Damage.

There's another one.

The damage I do
to English.

Or perhaps
the damage English does to me.

I keep writing.

I keep opening dictionaries

like they're a well for this thirsty foreigner.

Maybe I should stop at English instead.

What rhymes with English?

Childish.

My sense of humour,

As I translate my jokes
with an Arabic passport.

Extinguish.

Distinguish.

Is there a difference?

There must be.

I'd Google it.

Anguish.

Relinquish.

Finish.

See?

Even the rhymes
are trying to convince me
to give something up.

but I have much to say

I know lots of words.

Discombobulated.

Quintessential.

Oxymoron.

Ubiquitous.

Beautiful words.

Words that walk into a sentence
like they own the place.

I know exactly what they mean.

I just don't know if they are too big for my poems,

Can’t share a sentence with others

So I stick to smaller words.

The sort that don't mind
sharing same bed with many siblings
and my sentences come across complex with contradictory meanings and all over the place

Oxymoron, discombobulated.

Final step, let me cleanse the poem of all the Bees

You know;

B (P) for Peter, not B for Brother?
I ask because I don't have a P in my language

Done:

I love English

But do not have the language

I know, it is childish

I am sorry for the damage

And if this poem sounds simple,

good.

That means
I stopped
trying to write
like an English poet

and started writing

like me.

Ahmad Baker

July 2026

An Open Letter to a Man I Saw Marching Yesterday

Britannia Rules the Waves

---

I saw you yesterday.

Flags out, chest proud, chanting about taking your country back.
About greatness. About the Empire.
About the good old days when Britannia ruled the waves.

You want the empire back. I understand the feeling: the world felt ordered then. Britain was on top. Strong. Certain. Respected — and feared. Which would fill a lot of people with pride.

But I need to ask you something, honestly:
In that empire you're mourning — who were you?

Not who do you imagine you were. Who were you actually.

You weren't Churchill. You weren't Cecil Rhodes. You weren't the admiral on the ship or the governor in the mansion.
You were the man in the mine. The child in the mill. The woman in the workhouse who was told that poverty was her own moral failure.

In the 1850s — the golden age you're gesturing toward — a working man in Manchester or Liverpool could expect to live to his mid-twenties. Your children had a one-in-three chance of dying before they were five. Not in Calcutta. Not in Kingston. In England. In the empire's beating heart.

You worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week. There was no NHS. No sick pay. No pension. No vote. Only 1 in 5 men had that right — and it certainly wasn't you.
If you fell on hard times the state offered you the workhouse — deliberately designed to be more miserable than the worst job available. That wasn't an accident. It was written into law. Your dignity was removed on purpose, to keep you grateful for whatever scraps the mill owner threw down. Sounds familiar?

And when you dared to ask for the right to vote — when the Chartists marched, when workers organised — the same imperial army that put down rebellions in India and Ireland came home to put down you.

---

My ancestors knew the empire too. They knew it through different eyes — dispossession, extraction, being told their culture was barbarism and their language was embarrassing. That was a specific kind of wound that I won't pretend was identical to yours.

But here is what we share, you and I.

The same class of men who sent your great-grandfather to die in a trench in a war fought to protect trade routes and foreign investments — those men also stripped my grandfather's country bare. Same logic. Same ledger.

They gave your grandfather a uniform and a flag and told him he was part of something magnificent. They gave him an empire to be proud of precisely because they had taken everything else from him.

Pride is cheaper than wages. Always has been.

---

Your town is struggling. So is mine. The high street is gone, the NHS is on its knees, and the food banks are full. We are living the same crisis. And somehow, I am the villain they're selling you.

It wasn't immigrants who cut your Sure Start centre. It wasn't refugees who sold off your council houses. It wasn't foreigners who closed your factory or mine.

It was policy. It was choice. It was people with names and addresses — seats in Parliament, offices in the City, and money in tax havens. Decisions made in rooms you and I will never be invited into. The same kinds of rooms, the same kinds of decisions, as 1850. Just slightly better suits.

---

So when I see you marching, flag in hand, nostalgic for Britannia — I don't see a villain. I see a man who has been sold a story.

A story where the problem is people like me. The immigrant. The foreigner. The one who is different.

And I understand why the story is appealing. It's simple. It's angry. It points somewhere.

But I am not the answer to your question. I am just the distraction from it.

---

The Britain worth being proud of was never the empire.

It was the men who came back from the Second World War — broke, exhausted, having given everything — and said: never again. And they built the NHS. They built the welfare state. And immigrants came — staffed the hospital wards, drove the buses, kept the lights on — because Britain asked them to, and because they believed in what was being built.

That is your inheritance. Your Britain. Our Britain.

The Chartists who demanded your vote. The suffragettes who demanded your mother's. The trade unionists who bought your grandfather a weekend with their blood and their livelihoods.

Those are your people. That is our glory.

---

You and I are not each other's enemy.

We never were.

We are just two people, from different parts of the same story, still being told to fight each other so we don't ask the same question at the same time.

And I think, somewhere underneath the noise and the flags and the anger, you already know that.

---

I came here and worked. Paid taxes. Raised children who call this country home. I clap for the NHS, dine on a roast, and hope that this summer — football is coming home.

And like you, I want to be safe. I want this country to do well. I want my children to have a future.

And just like you, I am not optimistic.

But trust me, mate — I promise you — it is not my fault.

---

With more solidarity than you might expect,

Ahmad Baker
17.05.2026

---

Nakbah 78

Palestine, by Choice

I am Palestinian.. 

I was born in Syria, but not Syrian. Given a Jordanian citizenship, but not Jordanian. Living in England, but not English. 

Our village was uprooted and erased from existence — I have no home in Palestine — and still I chose to be Palestinian.

Not because my parents are. Because that is where the sun likes to shine on a golden dome, where the mountain is holy, the river is holy, the olive groves are thousands of years old. Assyrians, Pharaohs, Romans, Crusaders — all came and went. We remained, like our olive trees, vineyards, valleys and meadows, we remained Palestinians. 

The 15th of May was the 78th anniversary of the Nakba — and it is no different from any other day in the Palestinian calendar. Israel will kill a few Palestinians, arrest a few more, injure many more. The refugees will wake up as refugees and go to bed as refugees.

Nakba: catastrophe. 

People think it happened decades ago, but take a look at how Palestinians live and you realise it is happening to the Palestinians every day. 

The genocide, the attempt to erase Palestinian identity has been going for 78 years…

Meanwhile the world will watch. Most will stay silent. Many will hesitate to condemn. A few will blame the Palestinians. And some will try to do something.

Which one are you?

Our existence is our identity — and our identity is not occupation, not massacres, not refugee camps. Our identity is Palestine.

I am a Palestinian.. 

And Palestine should be free.

Ahmad Baker

16.05.2026

These Are Our Streets

On May 16th, the streets will be filled with different voices. Some seek to divide us — and they have had some success. But many others will be marching for unity, humanity, and solidarity.

There has never been a moment in decades where the choice has been this clear. The sides are defined. There is nowhere left to hide — not behind soft, silky words, not behind meaningless gestures.

Today, you either stand for humanity or you don't. Against genocide, against fascism, against injustice — or you don't.

And we will be judged accordingly:

Celebrated by those who hold universal values. By our bravest souls who oppose genocide. By those willing to pay any price to be on the right side of history.

Vilified by those who call the killing of children self-defence. Who call the starving of babies a security measure. Who call the bombing of hospitals precision warfare. By those who profit from the genocide — who market their weapons as battle-tested. Tested on whom? On children. On civilians. Those are the ones who stand with Israel today. And the same crowd that are looking to divide us.

I know what I choose.

I choose my humanity. I choose our fellow human beings — our equals — regardless of colour, creed, religion, or any label the world tries to divide us with. That is my choice. It has always been, and will always be my choice.

But I have to be honest:

I am a coward.

I fear for my job. 

I fear for my status. 

I fear being targeted, being intimidated. 

I fear the uncomfortable conversation, the awkward silence, the cost of being seen.

And I know I am not alone in that fear.

But now — 

Now we must undress our souls of this fear and set them free.

We need to be seen. 

Seen as pro-Palestine. 

Seen as pro-unity. 

Seen as pro-humanity. 

We need to wear our hearts on the outside — not tucked away safely where no one can challenge them — but out here, in the open, visible to the masses.

Because when they see us — the ones still hiding in their fear, in their enclaves, in their silence — the ones like me and you, afraid — they will find the courage to come out, to be seen, to fill these streets.

Because these are our streets.

Our cafes, our pubs, our football clubs, our corner shops. 

These are ours: British and proud.

And we must stand together — because "we must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately."

We must defeat our fears.

We must fight division.

We must march, be seen, and stand united.

So on May 16th — show up. For Palestine. For humanity. For each other.

Ahmad Baker

09.05.2026

جمال الغروب..

  قصة قصيرة 

وضعتُ يدي خارج النافذة، أتحسّس النسيم الخفيف وهو ينساب بين أصابعي. كانت أشعة الشمس الدافئة الرقيقة تغمر جانبي الأيسر بينما كنتُ أتكئ إلى الخلف في مقعدي. اجتاحتني رغبة قوية أن أتوقف على جانب الطريق، لأستمتع بهذه اللحظة، بهذا الغروب، بهذا الجمال. راودتني فكرة أن أبحث عن شيء مميز أشغّله من هاتفي الموصول بسماعات السيارة — شيء لوردة، أو ربما أغنية لماجدة الرومي. لكنني كنت أعلم أنني إن لمستُ الجوال ستتبدد تلك اللحظة السحرية، سأتشتّت. فقلت لنفسي: لا. دعني أستمتع بالمشهد، بالإحساس، وبصوت السيارات العابرة.

على بعد بضع مئات من الأمتار، في الجهة المقابلة من الطريق، كان شخص ما يقود بسرعة مئة وخمسة وستين كيلومتراً في الساعة. لم أكن أعرف لماذا، ولم يكن ذلك مهماً. 

انحرفت عيناه لجزء من الثانية، ربما كانت الشمس، أو رسالة على هاتفه، أو مجرد فكرة عابرة خطرت في ذهنه.  ثم أدرك سريعاً وحاول تعديل المقود، لكنه بالغ في الحركة. انقلبت السيارة عالياً إلى الجهة الأخرى، ومرة تلو الأخرى. وكانت المعجزات تتوالى إذ لم تصطدم بأيٍّ من السيارات المارة، كأنها تلعب لعبة إكس أو، تقفز حتى هبطت أمامي، وأتمّت قلبة أخرى.

رأيتُ السائق في ذهول. التقت أعيننا للحظة — شاحبٌ، بطريقة لم أرَ مثلها من قبل. عيناه جاحظتان، وفمه مفتوح على اتساعه، لكن ليس ابتساماً ولا ضحكاً، لا صراخ،ولا ضحك، بلا أي تعبير حقيقي. كنتُ أتوقع خوفاً، أو حزناً، لكن لا شيء — فقط شحوب، وفم مفتوح، وعينان جاحظتان.

واصلت السيارة الانقلاب ببطء — أو هكذا بدا لي الزمن. كنتُ أرى الزجاج يتشقق قطعةً قطعة. أرى معدن مقدّمة سيارتي يُقبّل سقف سيارته قبلةً حميمية طويلة. ثم تحطّم زجاجي الأمامي، ثم اختفى، ثم استقرّت أبواب السيارة الأخرى فوق جسدي الساكن.

خبر عاجل: وقع عصر اليوم حادث سير مأساوي على طريق المطار في غرب عمّان، أسفر عن تصادم سيارتين ووفاة السائقين.

أحمد بكر 

نيسان 2026

ملاحظة.. الشمس بتغيب في الغرب. يعني بتكون ع يسارك اذا انك مروح من المطار، مودع، راجع...

Predicting Political Events

 or 

Why We Keep Guessing at the Wrapped Present

 

The future is the next moment. We live in a permanent transition between the past and what comes next, and the thin strip we call the present is mostly a polite fiction. Yet we spend enormous energy trying to predict what lies on the other side of it — and we are, with remarkable consistency, wrong.

The easy prediction is: predicting that our predictions will fail. The harder questions are the ones we rarely stop to ask. Why do we predict in the first place? What exactly are we predicting? And would our behaviour be any different because of our predictions?

I cannot answer these questions definitively. But I think they are worth unpacking, because how we answer them determines whether political prediction is a useful discipline or an elaborate form of self-reassurance, or self-destruction.

 

Not all predictions are alike. At the quietest end of the spectrum sit predictions that neither affect our behaviour nor are affected by it. Scientists tell us that the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own in roughly two billion years. This is an educated estimate, grounded in precise mathematics and physics — and still, technically, a prediction, since a great deal could happen between now and then. But we will not reorganise our foreign policy around it. No government will call an emergency session. No pundit will appear on television to analyse the implications for the next election cycle. It is the one category of prediction that is genuinely free of us, and perhaps for that reason, the one we find easiest to accept.

A step closer to home are predictions that will not be changed by our behaviour, even if they change us. The weather is the classic example. We do not alter tomorrow's rain by predicting it; we only alter how we dress. The forecast does not make itself true or false — it simply describes what is coming, and we adjust accordingly. This category has limited but real application in politics: there are situations where the actions of one part of the world are simply too distant, too disconnected, to bend the outcome in another.

· · ·

The most interesting category, and the one that matters most in political life, is where prediction and behaviour fold back on each other. These are predictions that change the very thing they are predicting.

A teacher who tells a student they are likely to fail may be issuing a warning that becomes a wake-up call — the student works harder, performs better, and the prediction is proved wrong by the act of having been made. Or the same warning lands as a verdict, and the student stops trying, and the prediction fulfils itself with terrible efficiency. The prediction is not a passive observation; it is an intervention.

The mechanism is familiar from markets. When speculation about a potential war affecting oil supply begins to circulate seriously, traders do not wait for the shortage to materialise. They act on the prediction. They buy in advance. Prices rise. And so the prediction — higher oil prices — comes true not because of any actual disruption, but because enough people believed it would. The shortage was conjured into existence by the act of forecasting it.

British electoral politics offers a particularly clear version of this loop. For decades, polls consistently predicted that one of the two main parties will win any given constituency, which leads many voters to conclude that a vote for the Greens or the Liberal Democrats is a wasted vote, which leads them either to vote tactically or not to vote at all, which then confirms the poll's prediction. The forecast creates the conditions for its own accuracy. But that loop is not unbreakable. In 2024 it cracked — the Lib Dems surged, the Greens returned MPs, and Reform demonstrated that new predictions can generate new realities just as powerfully as old ones can suppress them. What is shifting now is not just the voting patterns but the underlying belief: once enough people stop treating a prediction as a fact, the prediction loses its grip. Elections may be the most honest laboratory we have for watching that process happen in real time.

 

So why do we predict at all, given that we know this is how it works?

Part of the answer is simple: impatience. We are creatures who cannot wait. Hand someone a wrapped present and watch as they before have touched the ribbon, they are already guessing. We watch a political situation unfold in real time and immediately reach for interpretation, projection, resolution. We spend hours listening to commentators analyse an evolving crisis, speculating about what will happen — and when the expected thing happens, we treat it as confirmation of our analytical powers, without pausing to ask whether the expectation itself shaped the outcome.

But we also predict because we are afraid of being surprised. The guess at the wrapped present is not only eagerness — it is armour. If I can name what is inside before I open it, the opening cannot shock me. And this fear-driven prediction is just as capable of making itself real as the optimistic kind: the candidate who believes they will lose and stops fighting, the movement that convinces itself change is impossible and stops pushing. The anxiety becomes the outcome.

Which brings us to the most honest thing one can say about why our predictions so often fail. We do not predict the future neutrally. We predict through a lens ground by the past — our experiences, our fears, our desires — and that lens bends everything. The optimist sees the conditions that favour the outcome they want; the pessimist sees only the obstacles. We say we are being analytical. We are mostly being autobiographical. And because that bias shapes which predictions we act on, it shapes which self-fulfilling loops we set in motion. The bias and the behaviour-change are not separate causes of error. One feeds the other.

When I flip a coin, I know I have a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails. I can predict with confidence because the system is closed and the possibilities are finite. But most political coins have an infinite number of sides. Some of those sides only come into existence depending on what I do before the flip. Others emerge only from what I do after it. In a system like that — which is to say, in any system involving human beings in large numbers — prediction is not really prediction at all. It is a declaration of intent, or a confession of fear, dressed up as analysis.

We are also seduced by pattern. History does not repeat itself — but it rhymes, and we love the rhyme. The danger is not that we notice it. The danger is that we approach every new situation already looking for where it rhymes, and in doing so we miss what is genuinely new about it. The notes we cannot place are usually the ones that matter.

 

 

Ahmad baker

30.03.2026

 

PS: I originally wanted to write about this self-acclaimed professor Jiang and his predictions. instead, I found out that I wrote a long academic piece on predictions.