July 12, 2025
Introduction
When it was published in 2016, Steve Sabella’s memoir, The Parachute Paradox:On Love, Liberation and Imagination, won the 2016 Nautilus Book Award and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Award for best memoir, and it was a finalist for the 2017 International Book Award.
Reviewers hailed it as a “thought-provoking, compelling and beautifully crafted memoir” (Joanna Barakat) and described it as “part romance, part thriller, part political analysis” (Rabbi Yehuda Sarna).1 These are very different genres, yet Sabella brilliantly and compellingly weaves them together into a coherent account of his struggle as an artist to come to terms with his relationship to his birth city, Jerusalem, while choosing to live in exile. Sabella is a professional photographer who creates unusual collages that draw the viewer in and create a dynamic experience. In Jerusalem, London, and finally Berlin, the creative work that consumes him revolves around perceptions of and relations to Jerusalem, questions of identity, and exile. Throughout this period, he battles debilitating depression.
Sabella begins his account with his meeting of Francesca, the Swiss woman who became his muse and wife in 1996; he ends the memoir soon after the Arab Spring begins in 2011. (Every female reader of the memoir is going to be charmed by Sabella’s courtship of Francesca, first as his girlfriend and later his wife, involving a cast of characters, some of whom are complete strangers, in an extended declaration of his love and commitment to her.) In the opening chapter, Sabella describes a skydiving experience he had in tandem with an Israeli instructor, which he posits as a metaphor for his relationship to Israelis.
Over the years, I’ve come to see this situation in the air as a metaphor for what it means to be a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation. Life under occupation is like the reality of a Palestinian attached to an Israeli in a tandem jump. There is an Israeli on the back of every Palestinian, controlling all aspects of life—the Israeli is always in control. This impossible reality places the Palestinian under constant threat, in a never-ending hostage situation.2
This is a recurring metaphor throughout the memoir. Part of the personal struggle he describes is the process of shaking off the Israeli on his back—what might be described as a personal Intifada, though he doesn’t describe it that way.
Living in Jerusalem
Even as a 12-year-old, Sabella writes:
I could see for the first time the enormous effort needed to break free from the physical military occupation, and more importantly, from the Israeli colonization of my imagination.3
Growing up in a house in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was freeing, in a way; since he didn’t really belong there, he didn’t have to meet anyone’s expectations. From the rooftop, he had a panoramic view of the city and could see all the major landmarks, including the Dome of the Rock, Mount of Olives, Mount Scopus, the Church of the Holy Ascension, and Augusta Victoria Hospital.
As an adult, and as a photographer/artist, using the imagination to transcend reality would become even more necessary for his sanity. As he puts it, “it’s nearly impossible to maintain sanity in Jerusalem, a place that drives everyone to the edge.”4 He uses a telling simile to express what it is like for Palestinians living in Jerusalem:
Being born in Jerusalem as a Palestinian is like entering life as an immigrant, a refugee living at home—unlike the mass of Jewish immigrants who automatically receive their Israeli citizenship in envelopes as they disembark their planes in Tel Aviv . . . Jewish immigrants are able to “return” to a place they have never seen before.5
Sabella graduated from high school in 1992. By that time, he had lived through the First Intifada and the casual killing of young Palestinians, and he had also lived through the uncertainty of living in shelters, gas masks at the ready, during the First Gulf War.
Reading this account, one is struck by how much violence Palestinians are exposed to at a young age, whether directly or implicitly. Death is everywhere. Every Palestinian knows at least one family who has experienced the loss of a loved one to an Israeli bullet. During the First Intifada, he experienced depression; his family thought a change of scenery was in order, and so they sent him to the United States as an exchange student. (That experiment ended abruptly because his well-intentioned host family spoke to him as though he had come from another century, which offended him.) The Second Intifada, which erupted on September 28, 2000, introduced the unpredictable element of the suicide bomber. The events are terrifying, especially when they occur in places that one had frequented just minutes earlier. Sabella recounted a few instances where he had just missed a bombing site.
However, Israeli colonial violence and humiliation are persistent; there is no escaping it. Casual shootings are coupled with violence, sometimes overwhelming and sometimes thoughtless, designed to remind the natives who is the boss. In a stabbing incident targeting a Jewish settler, a soldier pushes Sabella to the ground, face down in a puddle, as part of the search for the suspect. The Palestinian is guilty simply for being a Palestinian.
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