Sarah Aziza in The Baffler:
THERE IS NO PROPER ENTRANCE to an essay that undertakes things which should never be uttered, which have already been said. There is no way to reconcile the knowledge that the hours I spend writing will also mark the death of numerous Palestinians, and an endless interval of hunger and agony for many more. For Palestinians in the diaspora, there is no body but the uncanny body now—this set of bones and skin which I have inexplicably been granted, while so many others languish, rupture, decay. In New York City, I watch the tree outside my window flicker into bloom, and I shudder at this sign of spring. It is the advent of the third season, and the seventh month, of the Gaza genocide.
In the beginning—the chilled and chilling autumn when the annihilation commenced—time moved like an accordion. Interminable nights, bitter-bright mornings, weekends compressed with urgency. I burned with an electric grief, my veins timed to the hammer-pulse of war. With millions around the world, I read our death, wrote our death, protested our death, measuring each hour in corpses, in outrage and fear. The enduring Zionist fantasy—to finish the job, to solve the Palestinian question—hulked on the horizon, a rapacious body, steel-toothed and single-willed. In its path, the last, fragile membrane of Western pretense, which, for all its hypocrisies, still feigned belief in red lines, in keeping up appearances of restraint.
On the knife’s edge, not only Gaza, but all of us.
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