Originally published by the Markaz Review
Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.
A little less than a year ago, I sat down to write my first editorial for TMR, for the special Palestine issue we put together, one week into Israel’s genocide on Gaza. I had just begun working at the magazine the month before, in September 2023. Then, October 7. Even before I knew of any violence or of the Israeli death toll, just seeing the images of Palestinians from Gaza bulldozing the fence built to keep them inside, trampling over it in the rush to break out of their open-air prison, I knew the retribution for that transgression alone would be fierce and horrific.
But then came the reports of what had happened when Hamas fighters breached the settlements surrounding the strip: The soldiers taken captive; the killing in the kibbutzim; pandemonium at the music festival. And, the people burned alive in their cars, fleeing — though, we all wondered, had the fighters carried giant barrels of kerosene in with them to enact that kind of fire damage? I will admit, too, when I first heard the claim about the beheaded babies, I was skeptical, but didn’t dismiss it out of hand. Forty certainly sounded implausible, but surely there must have been at least one or two if there were eyewitnesses claiming it? If the president of the United States had professed to seeing photos of it? Who would lie about such a horrific thing? Such an easily disprovable thing?
In their assessment of the Hamas attack, reporters the world over were unequivocal. Atrocity, we heard. Atrocity, atrocity, slaughter, savagery, barbarism, wickedness — vicious, monstrous evil. The enormity of it, the horror of it, the individual humanity of the lives lost, was never in question. Nor was the depraved nature of those who committed the crimes. The very attempt to provide context, to merely imply that history hadn’t sprung fully formed out of the ether on that day, October 7th, was deemed obscene.
Israel declared war immediately, and the first airstrikes on Gaza were launched that afternoon. By evening the death toll in Gaza was already at over 200 people. On Sunday, October 8, we in Lebanon knew that Hezbollah had entered the fray. It was impossible to imagine they wouldn’t. The streets of Beirut were eerily quiet in the oppressive heat. Stores, restaurants and cafés were shuttered, all of us anticipating war. But war didn’t come for us then. The “rules of engagement” between Israel and Hezbollah shifted but held steady. South Lebanon was pounded, journalists targeted, our agricultural fields burned with white phosphorous. But what was happening in Gaza was so preposterously violent, it was impossible to think of anything but.
It was so preposterously violent that we all felt it imperative to acknowledge, to respond, to say something, anything about it, particularly those of us living in or working in the region. I declared my intent to write an editorial for TMR and pounded it out in a frenzy over the course of a single evening. “If they change a single word with the intention of toning it down in any way,” I seethed to myself, “I’ll quit.” I didn’t fully know yet how principled and supportive and committed our whole team was. I’d only just started working here. I had no idea yet whether this was the type of operation more worried about appeasing funders than challenging readers.
I go over this now because, looking back, one year on, I can see how so many things were clear right from the outset. First, the violence was so earth-shattering it had immediately hacked the world in two: into those who knew what was happening and those who denied it, and it felt imperative to take your stand and determine who stood with you. Second, this was so undoubtedly a genocide I had no problem using the word in my editorial. The Israelis, after all, had declared the intention so brazenly that the statements would end up as evidence before the International Court of Justice. Third, that Israel’s actions, and unwavering US support, suggested that a regional war was not only “possible, [but] imminent.”
“This moment,” I began, “as I’m writing these words, this moment, as you’re reading them, Gaza is being ground to dust under Israeli bombardment.” I ended the editorial with an assertion that while “there is no recompense for all this death, destruction, and ongoing trauma […] let us at least use the words they don’t want us to use: Occupation. Apartheid. Colonization. Forced expulsion. Ethnic cleansing. Nakba. Genocide. Let us keep using them, insisting on them.”
Now, nearly one year later, as I write these words here, it is no longer only Gaza, but Lebanon too, and the West Bank, being ground to dust under Israeli bombardment. The so-called “rules of engagement” have all been pulverized, as has every humanitarian law, and every red line past which we couldn’t have imagined the war would be allowed to go. And yet it goes on. And on. And on. And on. For an entire year, taking us all with it into an abyss which cannot be exited but only traversed. We have indeed used all the words that once seemed unthinkable to use in public to describe Israel. Yes: occupation, apartheid, colonization, forced expulsion, ethnic cleansing, Nakba, genocide. We have used them all, shouted them from megaphones in the streets and cities of the world, spoken them to news anchors, decreed them from podiums, in international courts and repeated them in writing — in arguments and articles and editorials and social media posts and comments and flyers and and and. We have used them all, used them up, in fact, repeated them to the point of semantic satiation. And still the war goes on. And on. And on. And on. Nothing changes. But everything has changed.
In the arena of the war, nothing has changed, except everything changes: the death counts, the severity of atrocities, the number of hospitals bombed, schools bombed, universities destroyed, journalists targeted, the records broken — largest cohort of child amputees in the world, fastest man-made famine in the world — the territory blasted and caught up into the flames.
And in the watching world, everything has changed, except nothing changes: the statements, the same, the excuses, the justifications, the same, the silencing, the censorship, the crackdowns, the same, the indifference of world leaders, the insistence on “Israel’s right to defend itself,” the full-steam-ahead-into-world-war-three, all of it the same.
Many of us go over the seminal horrors of the year like a macabre reel of highlights. This was the moment (when they bombed the first hospital/when they shot people rushing to get rations of flour/when they sniped toddlers in the head when they murdered Hind Rajab then murdered the paramedics sent to rescue her when they let the babies die in incubators set a dog on a young man with Down’s Syndrome burned people alive in tents raped and rioted to rape when) everything changed. And still nothing changed.
The war goes on. And on. The murder, the atrocities, the slaughter goes on. The justification for it goes on. Israel’s right to self-defense remains endless, ever-expanding, the words “right” and “self-defense” plastic and malleable enough to swallow up any transgression against humanity you can imagine and a bunch you can’t besides and spit them back out in digestible little soundbites fit for the evening news or for headlines from which every mention of the murderer is excised. The Western press translates us into the language that makes them most comfortable with our elimination. Our neighborhoods aren’t the places where we played and grew up and raised children and visited friends, they are “strongholds.” The bodies of our men are not the beloved chests we lay against or hands we held or were held by or the strong arms that carried us or the soft lips that kissed us good night. They are “suspects,” they are “militants,” they are “terrorists” and their deaths are always justifiable because they are men and our men are villains and that’s the way it has always been, that’s the way we’ve always been, to them.
Nothing has changed. Because the world has always seen us — Palestinians, Lebanese, Arabs, Middle Easterners — this way, only now we are seeing this, too. Or rather, we see the extent of it, the inescapability of it. The fact that even those who thought of ourselves as exceptions — because of our passports or our languages or religions or politics — are not.
As a writer I have never not believed in words. The right words, the right combination of words, always seeming like some kind of magic incantation, able to unlock a passage, no matter how small, into another kind of world. “Since words are so important, so dangerous” I wrote in that first editorial, “then let us call what’s unfolding in Gaza, right before the world’s eyes, exactly what it is: a genocide.”
And yet I have come to the point where words fail. Not because the words themselves aren’t up to the task of describing the savagery. But because I’m coming to terms with the inability of those words to effect any change in some listeners. To convey the magnitude of loss and horror, to affirm the unique, irreplaceable humanity of those we’ve lost over the last year — and the magnitude of each individual loss — to those disinclined to see us as human. The failure is not that of language itself then but of the rotten substructure of the world within which this language is meant to function. For what is difficult to understand about a doctor in Gaza describing the amputation of limbs undertaken without anesthesia, or a doctor in Beirut saying that he’s “never had to remove more eyes”? What further eloquence might aid in the comprehension of such horror?
I came across a post on X last night in which the user had posted the following testimonial by a pediatric nurse practitioner: “Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clear water to feed them, so they starved.”
He captioned it: “no words.”
Truly though, what other words might be needed?
No, the problem isn’t with language. It’s that some of us are so deliberately dehumanized that no description of the barbaric manner of our suffering or deaths could suffice to prove our humanity. In fact, the greater the barbarism, the more insistent the gleeful assertion that we deserved it. The West seeks to preserve the image of its own humanity at the complete erasure of ours. How can they be guilty of murder when those they kill are merely “terrorists” or “human animals”? In fact, not only are they not guilty of murder, they are heroes, cleansing the world.
I don’t know what language it’s possible to use with people who will never see you as human. Who will always hear an animal braying when you speak. Aware that we will be misinterpreted, we too try to translate ourselves for the West in every sense of the word in order to make our suffering intelligible. We speak to them in their languages. We say: imagine this was your city. Imagine these were your children. For we cannot simply assume that they will see our children and ascribe to them the same innocence, the same promise, the same irresistible sweetness as theirs. We translate our landscapes. We say, imagine 2,000,000 people packed into a strip of land the size of… We say, “Beirut is a cosmopolitan city with a vibrant nightlife.” Imagine, we exhort them, your children killed, your city bombed, your future gone, your sense of self erased.
Because, ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.
On the last day of 2023, I wrote out a long thread on X in which I anticipated the spread of the war to all of Lebanon. “I walk around Beirut,” I wrote, “trying to memorize all its beloved details. I have no idea how long my city will stand. Every time I feel horror over this, every time I think, no, this could never happen to Beirut, it could never be allowed, I realize how profoundly stupid this is. How is Beirut better or more deserving than Gaza? How is any Lebanese different from the people of Gaza who have watched their entire universe get wiped off the map while the world allows it? And what have I ever experienced in or from the west that allows me to labor under the delusion that Lebanon, that any country in our region besides the Zionist entity, is perceived any differently than Palestine?”
Now that this is a reality, now that my beloved Beirut is being sadistically pulverized, and I’m forced to see the repetition of the same justifications and excuses that were used — are still being used — to justify and excuse the wholesale destruction of Gaza, I’m finding it more and more difficult to figure out what to even say. I know only that I’m not interested in translating myself anymore. I’m not interested in “writing for the West” the way I was before, or for seeking out places based on the prestige of their platform. “Do they see us as human?” This is the only litmus test I’m interested in at this point. I don’t want to have to try and convince anybody.
It’s been a blessing at least, in this year of silence, to have the job of an editor. To work with writers from the region and beyond, who have all helped me think through the radiating pain of this moment and out to a possible future. My TMR colleagues not only didn’t object to anything I had to say, but everyone has mobilized to try and figure out how best to rise to this occasion, how best to respond to this grave emergency in which our words and our humanity are being denied us. Beyond that though, I have been one of those lucky few this last year working with colleagues who have left me with space enough to grieve and grieved with me, who have gently picked up the slack when I couldn’t function for anxiety or sorrow or terror, with fellow writers who have struggled with energy and deadlines and with making sense of the current moment and found ways to overcome all these obstacles.
I can no longer declare some sort of unified theory of belief in writing. I used to think it was a way in which we asserted our rights to life and joy. In which we appealed to our fellow humans and tried to form community. But at this point in the genocide, it has become clear that we aren’t appealing to human beings but to systems. You cannot plead with a system. You must topple it.
