Writing About War as Bomb Fall by Marwan Bishara

 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.

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