Elbayoumi: In the Middle East, solidarity with Gaza isn’t dead. You just have to listen.

Publisher’s note: This piece is the author’s personal account of a month he spent in the Middle East — not part of our standard coverage, but one we’re sharing for the perspective it brings from close proximity to a crisis that has increasingly shaped political discourse here at home, including at Queen’s Park. The views expressed are his alone and do not represent the views of the publication.

“O God, deliver this from us to Gaza. Forgive us, our brothers. Forgive us. We are unable to do anything for you.”

Those were the words of an Egyptian man earlier this month, seen in a now-viral video tossing plastic containers of grain and flour into the sea — hoping, against all odds, they would reach Gaza.

His act wasn’t just about food. It was symbolic of a helplessness that’s become all too familiar in the Middle East.

It was an act of desperation that mirrored a wider feeling in the region: people broken by the scale of ceaseless, live-streamed devastation unleashed on their neighbours — or, as they say in Arabic, ikhwatna — “our brothers and sisters.” It’s a reminder that, for most, Gaza’s pain is not remote — it’s immediate, visceral and personal.

Since March, over 500 days since the war started, Israel has blocked the entry of food, medicine, fuel and other essentials into Gaza, claiming it would force Hamas to free the remaining Israeli hostages. Instead, a dire humanitarian catastrophe has ensued in the besieged, 365 km² strip.

Images of frail, emaciated children have spread. More than 125 people, including 85 children, have died from malnutrition, and according to the Palestinian Authority, almost 200,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — have been killed or wounded since the war broke out.

Back home, one question has continued to surface in much of the Western discourse: “Where are the Arabs?”

Some pose the question out of sincere inquisition: if Gaza is in such a dire place, why aren’t those nearest to it doing more? If they’re not acting, why should we in the West, nearly 9,000 kilometers away, even try? If people can rally near-weekly in North America and Europe, why hasn’t the region erupted in the same kind of outrage for those who speak the same language, share the same faith, and live just beyond the border?

To others, it’s a rhetorical sleight, meant to invalidate anger and vilify those who dare to care too loudly. If Gaza’s closest neighbours are quiet, they must not care, so why should I? “What do the Egyptians know that we don’t?” one ex-PC MPP asked, claiming Egyptians were “protesting their own government to keep Palestinians out of Egypt.” Empathy is framed as performative and solidarity as misplaced. It’ll make you second-guess your place in the conversation — as if compassion in the face of catastrophe is owned by any geography or identity.

I don’t write this as someone far removed. I’m Egyptian. Though born and raised in Canada, the Middle East has never felt foreign to me. The stories, the culture, the people and yes, even the pain, weren’t distant; they felt like echoes from a place that was always, somehow, mine.

Yet, as a journalist, you’re trained to observe, to listen, to stay just outside the frame. Even when the story is personal, you learn not to centre yourself in it. You ask questions, but hold your own back. There are times — for me, and for many colleagues — when the line between the personal and the professional blurred. But we keep our distance. We owe that to the reader.

Then and now, it’s not my place to tell you how to feel — or to justify it if you don’t. My job is to report what I see, and to confront the questions most would rather avoid.

In June, I set out for a month-long trip to the Middle East. It was a vacation, a long-overdue reunion of a family over ten years apart and a much-needed break from the grind of covering Queen’s Park. The first stop was Saudi Arabia, after an 11-hour flight. From there, I made my way to Egypt.

I wasn’t travelling as a journalist, but the journalist in me came anyway. Some stories insist on being told. They emerge in conversations you don’t expect to have and in things you can’t unsee. This story kept finding me — in prayers, in car rides, in small talk and in the weariness in people’s eyes when the topic on everyone’s mind, Gaza, came up.

While the Western conversation around Gaza is normally punctuated by a familiar refrain — “Where are the Arabs?” — the region I saw was neither absent nor apathetic.

I saw solidarity that didn’t always announce itself. Where protest comes at a cost, there were no mass demonstrations, nor roaring in the streets. Instead, there were glances, sighs, half-finished sentences — and the kind of silence that doesn’t mean indifference, but grief that can’t afford to be loud. Grief that is inherited, carried and constant.

On cars and minibuses, stickers bear the striped black, white, green and red Palestinian flag. In coffee shops, like one in Al Mansoura, a 3-hour drive from Cairo, the flag hung quiet but present. The concept of “economic boycott” wasn’t controversial — it was a way of life.

Described as a “Palestinian-led movement” promoting “economic sanctions against Israel,” critics have condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “antisemitic,” a characterization the movement denies.

In the Middle East, it doesn’t need a name. It’s just what people do. Coca-Cola, once ubiquitous, had vanished from shelves. Stores had quietly switched to local or alternative drinks. For example, Bazouka — a popular and fast-growing fast-food chain — introduced “Kazouza” as an alternative; sweet, fizzy, and unapologetically local.

Silence is standard in Canadian Ubers. In the Middle East, it’s practically unheard of. Drivers are eager to chat — a small window into the warmth Egyptians are known for. As the conversation warmed, Gaza found a way in. It wasn’t always direct. Some would open up about their daily struggles: about trying to make ends meet, about the loved ones they were working to support. Even in frustration, they’d put it into perspective — harsh, yes, “but nothing like what those in Gaza face.”

Many were curious about what I see living in the West. “What do people think about it in Canada?” one woman asked, as if the answer might carry some kind of relief.

“We might live far,” I told her in Arabic, “but so many people do care.” It revealed a mutual yearning — people in the region hoping their pain is seen abroad, and people abroad wondering why the region isn’t louder. Both sides, in their own way, are searching for signs that they’re not grieving alone.

Some just expressed grief. Not anger, nor blame — just sorrow. A quiet “God help them,” or a shake of the head when the topic came up. Words weren’t always necessary. The pain was understood and collective.

Gaza seeped into every conversation. Even in the hush of night, you could feel it — a presence hanging in the air. In the neighborhood where I stayed, children played soccer in the evenings, their voices carrying across the streets. They didn’t speak in the Egyptian dialect. I couldn’t say for certain if they were Gazans who had resettled, but the area was known as a hub for Syrian refugees — people who knew displacement intimately. Just as Egyptians had once opened their doors to Syrians, I saw that same instinct — a deep desire to help in whatever way they could. There was a quiet sense of guilt that lingered — a feeling that proximity to Gaza came with responsibility, and that somehow, not enough had been done.

But many Egyptians feel caught at a crossroads — torn between the sense that more could be done, and the fear that opening the border, as many suggest, could mean Gazans might never return — and that Egyptians would become complicit in their displacement.

It’s not a fear born of hatred, but of a desire to protect. It’s born in the belief that permanent displacement would be another wound inflicted on a people who have already endured too much. It’s rooted in care and a deep conviction that Gaza belongs to Gazans, and that exile, however well-intentioned, is not the solution.

Over in Saudi Arabia, solidarity was rooted in prayer, not protest. It’s the kind of solidarity that doesn’t shout, but aches. Solidarity was in the Friday sermon, where the imam — voice trembling — made a prayer for those caught in the middle of the war. The response — a resounding “ameen” — was the loudest of all. It was an “ameen” of heartbreak — the only thing some could give in a region aching to do more, but constrained at almost every turn.

In Mecca and Medina, people didn’t chant, but they cried. Gaza was in their supplications. During their pilgrimage, groups clustered around their guides, who raised their hands and prayed aloud for civilians whose pain has played out on screens for months. As the prayer echoed, so did the response: “Ameen.” Not just from the group, but from strangers passing by — drawn in by a single mention of Gaza, and compelled to respond.

It was a reminder that, even when words fail or action is out of reach, people still search for a way to be present.

So, where are the Arabs?

They’re in the silence that holds more weight than words. In the driver who would lower his voice when Gaza comes up. In the fruit seller who hurled clementines onto a passing aid truck — insisting on a gesture, however small, knowing it might not get through. In the prayer that breaks mid-sentence. In the loudest “ameen” echoing through the smallest mosques of Cairo.

I saw a tension between heartbreak and restraint — between wanting to do more, and living in places where “more” can cost you everything. They’re not absent. They’re navigating the impossible: how to hold grief for Gaza in countries that don’t always let them speak it out loud.

Back in Old Cairo, where the Church of Virgin Mary, the Amr Ibn Al-As Mosque and the Jewish Temple still stand beside one another, there’s a reminder that co-existence once lived here. That solidarity, too, beyond one people, one place or one volume, has a history.

Solidarity isn’t always loud. It isn’t always legible to those looking for a loud demonstration or people pouring into the streets. Sometimes, it’s quieter — lived out in everyday gestures, in aching restraint, in a whispered prayer between strangers.

And maybe that’s the point. The question “Where are the Arabs?” assumes that solidarity only counts if it looks a certain way — loud, visible and made for front pages. But solidarity can be quieter than that. It can be tired. It can be cautious. It can live inside a person without ever touching a placard.

What I saw was not absence. It was presence — restrained, fractured, but full of feeling. It was people still trying to do something, even when they felt that those who represent them aren’t doing enough. It was people holding their neighbours close — not because it’s a trend, but because it’s deeply personal.

So if you’re still asking where the Arabs are, look again.

In a region where pain, al-waja’, is a quiet companion, they’re exactly where they’ve always been.

They are neighbours who grieve as if Gaza were their own — just as they once grieved Iraq, Damascus, Sana’a, Beirut and now, Sudan. Not because they’re told to care, but because they never stopped.

They’re not absent, nor distant.

Just carrying the weight in ways the world doesn’t always see.

Hushed, perhaps.

But with hearts that have never once let go.