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Writing About War as Bombs Fall

While the Israeli government launched a well-orchestrated offensive of disinformation and hyperbole that would make the illegal permissible in the war on Gaza.

When the Gaza war started three years ago, I took to the keyboard. In those dark times, writing was my only sanctuary amid the mayhem. I had written extensively about war in my career as a scholar and a journalist, but nothing prepared me for this war. The words that came to mind felt jaded, even inadequate for what was unfolding in front of our eyes. I wasn’t alone. Veteran colleagues at Al Jazeera, battle-hardened reporters who had walked through the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the Balkans, and Ukraine, confessed that they had never seen such merciless devastation.

On October 7, the day Hamas launched its bloody offensive against Israel in an attempt to shatter the status quo, I wrote that Hamas’s shocking attack should have surprised no one. Not after Israel’s decades-long military occupation, repression, and siege, and endless years of contempt, humiliation, and dismissiveness of basic Palestinian rights. In those early days, stating the obvious—that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”—was construed as controversial, even condemned as blood libel. But context is indispensable; without context, there can be no real understanding. And explanation must not be confused with justification for the killing of civilians, regardless of whether the victims are tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, or hundreds of Israeli civilians.

On October 12, five days into the war, I warned that Israel was “manufacturing the case for genocide.” My warning was aimed at those who granted the Netanyahu government unconditional support, and echoed its dangerous analogies to the Nazis, the Holocaust, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and 9/11—those who might, wittingly or unwittingly, pave the path for the crime of crimes. A warning, not a prediction. The notion that Israel might add genocide to a long history of dispossession, occupation, and domination of the Palestinians was too outrageous to stomach. That such an act would be supported by most Israelis, justified by most Western allies, and tolerated by its neighbors was too consequential to contemplate.

My cautionary writing continued unabated during that ill-fated October, especially as I followed the Hebrew Israeli media. Aside from government ministers threatening to starve, destroy, or to empty Gaza of its inhabitants, Israeli journalists, former generals, and even celebrities competed to see who could scream the loudest: Punish them! Kill them all! Nuke them! But for me one particular statement captured the national frenzy more than any other. In a response to a fellow Arab MK, Meirav Ben-Ari of the “centrist” Yesh Atid party, a mother of two, rejected any symmetry between Israeli and Palestinian child victims, telling the Knesset 10 days into the war, “What symmetry! The children in Gaza, the children in Gaza have brought it upon themselves.”

The children in Gaza have brought it upon themselves.

Writing became even more critical as a campaign of deception paved the way for the military offensive. The Israeli government launched a well-orchestrated offensive of disinformation and hyperbole that would make the illegal permissible in the war on Gaza. For example, Netanyahu invoked images of Israeli babies burned alive and men........

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