THE FAST VIOLENCE has for now, in theory, ended; the slow violence will continue. So many of Gaza’s schools and mosques and libraries and flour mills and wells have been destroyed, and Palestinians’ ability to rebuild Gaza is limited, by design, by the siege. People’s immune systems are tired, people are tired. People are hungry. Every hospital in Gaza has been targeted; thousands of medical staff have been killed. Cancer rates will continue to rise in the coming years: thanks to American weapons a fresh layer of carcinogens now blankets the earth, and thanks to American-supplied immunity Israeli soldiers spent the past year recording themselves among other things destroying the equipment used to detect these cancers at all, let alone before it’s too late. (Many cancer treatment regimens haven’t been allowed into Gaza for years.) And it will take decades to clear the unexploded ordnance Israel has dropped (including one-ton bombs with 360-meter killing zones) to ensure the fast violence will continue after the ceasefire goes into effect.
In that same video with the boy who plans to visit his mother’s grave, other children share that they are excited to sleep, finally, in their own beds, without the sounds of drones buzzing overhead. They know their homes might not exist anymore—some preface their wishes with, “after we rebuild it.” It’s a question of when not if, and, as Hammad writes,
We see clearly what we are up against. Others understood this better and faster than I did, so this may be my own personal moment of recognition. To face a reality that on some level I knew all along, but that I did not want to know.
Alienation can be its own beginning. Theirs is a world that does not intuit other people’s humanity. And ours is Palestine. {read}