Every day for the past six months,
an average of 200 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed by the
Israeli army in Gaza.
Every day for the past six months, homes, schools, hospitals, ambulances, universities, factories, bakeries, shops, markets and farmland have been bombed, burned or looted.
Death hangs over Gaza like a dark cloud, like a legendary monster. We see it, we live with it, we receive on our screens the images and the cries of its victims. The atrocities, the agony and the tears become notifications on our social networks and news that we watch while drinking coffee, working, shopping or waiting for good weather.
It's as if we've become accustomed to witnessing live genocide just a few hours from home. It's as if what we're seeing is a foretaste, a déjà vu. And even though we're aware of it and overwhelmed by it, sometimes all we can do is delay starting our computers or turn off our cell phones to interrupt the broadcast of the massacres in progress.
So for six months we've been living with the horror in the eyes of a little girl with cyanotic lips, staring into space, badly wounded and then amputated without anesthesia by her father, a surgeon himself threatened with death. We follow this mother carrying the body of her son, killed in an Israeli attack, whom she did not want to abandon. She walks from her hometown in the north to the south, deported with hundreds of thousands of others like her, trying to save what's left of their lives.
Some of us try to write about it, to soothe the rage by typing on keyboards and railing against the helplessness that accompanies us. As if it were our duty to write about Gaza and the new Nakba of its people. To write to say that despite everything, we haven't given up. That we will never leave Gazans alone in the face of tanks, planes, cowards and accomplices, racists and mediocrities.
But do words really have any power against genocide? And besides, who are we addressing? A public that might be moved by the trembling fingers of cold, panicked children, or by new bodies buried in the mass grave in front of which female soldiers take a selfie? To leaders who, after more than 35,000 deaths, still call for the "protection of civilians" while continuing to sell arms and ammunition to genocidaires? Or are we writing to support people like us, devastated and grieving? Maybe we write so that one day the starving, displaced people who read this will know that we didn't turn a blind eye as they wandered under the bombs and the indifference of the "world"?
What more can we say than what has been said for six months, six years, six decades? About the occupation and the murderers, the sieges, the expulsions, the confiscations and expropriations, the settlers and fascism? About the meaning of human rights and the disappearance of a so-called "international community"? About the executions of people who asked for nothing more than to live a normal life on their land? What more can we say about the resistance of doctors, nurses, teachers, photographers and journalists, men and women who set out in search of food for their children, sometimes never to return? From the charming smile of the little girl who says, "She was prettier before the war," or the question, "Why are we being shot at?" of another little girl who has barely learned to speak.
What would happen if we stopped
writing, turned off the screens, and the next shells fell on those two little
girls? Or on the children in the schools of Rafah, where tens of thousands of
displaced people now live, sharing "one toilet" for every 200 people?
Probably nothing that would change the tragic course of events. But what would become of our consciences?
We will continue to write, in spite of everything, to wash our eyes of the remains of the corpses that haunt us, to suppress our anger. We will write to carry the stories of people we see from far and near, of living beings whose tears, blood and sorrow flood their souls. We will write so that the impunity enjoyed by proven criminals will not continue without witnesses or evidence. Finally, we will write to express our contempt and disgust for the many silent ones around us.
The world will never be the same
after the genocidal war that devastated Gaza.
Gaza will never be the same. And
neither will we.
Ziad Majed
Published originally in French in L'Orient Littéraire
