TORONTO 2024 — At the Dinner Table: “Watch out for your hate, you do not want it to turn into what happened to Jewish people in Europe.” These words are uttered by a friend after I share that lately I have been carrying a sense of enmity towards Israel. My good friend and I are sharing a meal on the carpet of my overpriced rented studio apartment. We are in Toronto, a city with barely any redeemable qualities, to me, a Montrealer by way of Palestine. After spending close to a decade in the city-state of Istanbul, to me, Toronto is a godforsaken place. But since the violence of genocide began on October 7, my loathing for the city has been eclipsed by a bottomless grief, and increasingly, a sense of enmity—rage of seeing my loved ones disappear in a live-streamed genocide. Witnessing the collective annihilation of family and kin seeds something in my insides, and I want to let it out to a friend.  I offer the word enmity, but she keeps defaulting back to “hate.” I tell her that hate is not a term I work with. In Canada, “hate” is taught to us in schools as an irrational emotion that comes when a person has a hard time with differences. In the North American vernacular, “hate” is often dealt with in an a-contextual, a-historical fashion. It is this thing that you either hold or do not. She offers advice to focus “on love rather than hate” because there is something ugly about enmity.