More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble.
Mashallah is orchestral.
Used this way, it finds its principal purpose, as an expression of joy. Look at this wonderful thing God has done.
I have on countless occasions been made to stand in for and speak on behalf of every Muslim, every Arab, every Brown person on earth, by people who are not monsters, not even actively malicious, but simply have no other point of reference to consult. I’ve smiled and nodded. I was nice about it.
It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.
It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.
Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.
While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.
When next this happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child),
In time, there will be nothing particularly controversial about using these words to describe the things they were created to describe.
very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution,
Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.
Here, when we name the dead, when we name these dead in particular, it is customary to note the number of children obliterated, because the men are assumed to be terrorists and the women might be terrorists or at the very least go on to create them.
This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.
Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.
As of July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. There is nowhere else on earth with an even remotely comparable death toll. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day.
In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator.
I am reminded of what the actor Helen Mirren said of her time in Israel in 1967: “I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here.”
watch former vice president Mike Pence write messages of support on the side of bombs.
It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny
As their eradication continues, they must transform into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened.
Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.
for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.
this will be known to those who have seen it before, who have seen their land or labor stolen, their people killed, and know the voracity of violent taking. Those who learned not to forget the Latin American death squads, the Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian villages turned to ash, the Congolese rubber then and Congolese coltan now, the nice clean beach an hour north of Tel Aviv that sits atop a mass grave.
There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher.
Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.
the most unhinged Republican will always be able to say: Look, these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gestures; I’ll do away with gestures, and make the right people suffer.
one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.
Don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the reality that a Trump administration would be so much worse.
can’t be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight, and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.
there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.
“Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.”
this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you’re happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.
The Bush- and Obama-era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies
When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all. Maybe they will have all been terrorists or supporters of terrorists or whatever adjacency to terror is sufficient to scare off those who, in possession of something approximating a soul, might otherwise look upon such obvious assassination and say: This is wrong.
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.
sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue
the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the International Court of Justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean.
In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing.
No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice.
It all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities—loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend.
what shocks the most isn’t the cruelty or indifference. Many people’s governments are cruel, many people’s governments are indifferent. It’s this relentless parachuting of virtue. It’s these speeches and statements of eloquently stated concern for human rights and freedom and the demand that those who abuse human rights or withhold freedom be held to account. And it’s the way every ideal turns vaporous the moment it threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches and statements,
I read piece after lengthy, erudite piece about the need for a nuanced, both-sides discussion of a genocide, about how words are so easily weaponized, and we must be very careful because weapons can hurt—as all the while very real weapons raze entire Palestinian neighborhoods and their occupants.
I marvel at the casual, obvious, but unstated corollary: that there is an Indigenous population being colonized, but that we should let this unpleasantness run its course so we can arrive at true justice in the form of land acknowledgments at every Tel Aviv poetry reading.
Hemingway’s Iceberg principle—the notion that the vast majority of what is known about a story should exist beneath the surface of that story, unseen.
some would undoubtedly respond the way Barbara Bush once did when asked about the Iraqi dead: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
Marwa Helal’s “poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids”: this is where the poets will interject they will say: show, dont tell but that assumes most people can see.
One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing.
describe Donald Trump’s appeal as a function of some kind of “economic anxiety.” The alternative—that millions of Americans want desperately for people who don’t look and live and believe the way they do to suffer without end—was
But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you? —
