We’re genociding again. You can take an alternative tour online. The rubble keeps growing. My timeline is full of dead babies. I can’t look but can’t stop scrolling. I can’t find Godzilla, so maybe I’m Godzilla again. Some of the babies lost their hands before they knew they had hands. There are so many names it will take generations to read them out loud in the city square. Some of the babies didn’t know they had names either, but we learn them and remember.
What does one do on such an evening? I check on my children’s beds, confirming their general un-blown-up-ness, frames uncollapsed, mattresses intact. Here they are, our babies. I kiss their foreheads, but it doesn’t wake them like I’d hoped. For the first time ever they are determined to sleep until morning. I leave the room like I’ll see them again. It’s more than many families get. Stumbling on my way to the stairs, I drop my phone and dead babies spill out all over the carpet.
A dead body is a fact. A dead baby is an imperative. They are an indictment of those among us who delay, who unsee, who hide in plain sight, who sigh in sadistic relief. We gave ourselves professorships but don’t bother to figure out what we’ve made everyone miss. Now our articles and panels can’t un-kill a single baby, not these. The world will forever be deprived of the fact of their laughter. I hope there’s an alternate universe, or some plane of reincarnation where all of those babies live on having never heard of us. I would step through a wormhole to that world without blinking twice, carrying our babies on my hip.
It's always effective to blame people for their own genocide, given they can’t talk back by definition. But someone always crawls out from underneath the pile. Someone always holds their breath in the back of the closet. Sometimes there are millions. The living people of Gaza brandish their phones, throwing their cries round the world, farther and braver even though all hope, all surprise has already been murdered. Day and night Palestinian parents lift up their dead babies so that someone might agree that once here, a baby grew, chubby with dimples.
What kind of digital human zoo is this? Why are they being forced to bear witness to their own killing? How do I wash a dish or fart or do absolutely anything when Gaza has gone so long without bread or passports or internet or a quiet that didn’t mean complete obliteration? At this point the IDF have massacred so many Gazans it’s stadiums full of dead babies. There’s one in every seat, the stairways overflowing, a baby stampede.
How is that a phrase it’s possible to conjure let alone make happen? How many bits must a Palestinian baby be blown into before it becomes human? Meanwhile all of us ineffectual non-Gazans are somehow still living. We routinely forget to care for each other, ourselves, babies, children, adults, elderly. Now stadiums of Gazan babies are coming for us, and it’s not a joke. It’s a Houthi fleet doing 20 knots northwest, and I’m not sad for once.
Babies, children, adults, elders, Gazans, Yemenis, living and dead suddenly or in stages: these are the invisible ships for those of us who do the least, though we could achieve the most. They’re a portent we look at without seeing. The invisible ships are a myth of sorts, a coat of white lacquer over another genocide that’s still happening. Supposedly it began as Joseph Banks, the botanist for Captain Cook, approached the coast of Australia. Their ship provoked little reaction from the locals, who aggravatingly kept living. Banks couldn’t believe it: How can people ignore this wonder of civilization? How dare they continue walking, gathering, fishing, chuckling to themselves? Motivational speakers still cite the invisible ships as evidence of indigenous people’s alleged indifference to supposed progress. So obviously it’s a projection on the part of the white Europeans.
The thing is, the aboriginal people didn’t need the ships, those pale-ass grim reapers. They only had to lift their woomeras, their own lightweight technological marvels. Woomeras are flat pieces of sculpted wood, a hole in one tip for the end of a spear. They’re used to extend the arm of a warrior like a lever, to throw spears ever farther. I wonder if Banks came close enough to see the woomeras at first, or if he turned one over in his hand only after deciding to decimate those who made it, to steal the food they had invented and only give it back after he had eaten it.
The settler progressives among us grew up with this selective sight. We don’t see bomb trails whispy in the sky. We don’t see the spears in our own hands even once. Our luck was made for us from centuries of congealed blood. We don’t have to continually look to the sky in terror. We’ve learned to count before looking, to rely on the facts instead of having them detonate all over us. So how would we recognize a genocide even if it’s coming for our necks? A genocide isn’t a fact at all but a sanitized pile, an exclusively rational evolution, growth without mind-bending mutation or beautiful perversion. From afar you can tell because after a few weeks it’s quiet and clean and hardly in the news except to say they must have deserved it.
But how do you know it’s a genocide anyway? Other white people keep asking me this. I’ve known for ages and it’s not from looking at facts. After all, a fact says This is in the world. See it? but some of us went all the way to a new continent and didn’t even see a woomera. A woomera is not a fact at all, but better: so precise and lightweight and potentially unraveling of everything. But it just looks like a flat stick if you’re too sure-footed on the deck of your stupid ships.
I too have paid my moderate dues. I made facts, followed in their bloody footprints. I kept trying to let the facts speak for themselves, but I was too busy sobbing. Now some of us have been fighting for years, meaning one one thousandth the effort of your run-of-the-mill Palestinian mechanic or accountant or nurse’s aide. And here it is despite everything. And who are we to the babies and grownups of Gaza if anything, except for the assholes who keep making this happen?
The thing about statehood is that Palestinians first had to prove they no better than some unexplained us whose boundaries kept shifting around them. And so far they’ve desperately failed at being inferior. They brought emotions and when we couldn’t feel they brought reports and legal cases and expert statements and observations. Palestinians carved facts out of olive wood, but we graded them down because they were too beautiful, too brown, too true. Their woomeras launched spears that flew too fast, too far past every new checkpoint and border and spy net we set up.
What would the internet say if someone massacred 30,000 cats? Every time I edit this text there are 10,000 more. I can’t even envision that many. I demand a world where cats and Gazans can all go on living as they want to be. Palestinians already know how to hold up a phone like a woomera for TikToks, to generate electricity in a rainy camp with an old charging cord and a stick of gum, to seek out 4G on the beach, to fabricate cat videos from piles of dust. But somehow some of us keep trying to teach them stuff they wouldn’t need if we just let them be.
Liberalism is a force field of protection against woomeras, spears, stones, phones, and piles of the dead wrapped in the white sheets from their own hospital beds. Humanitarianism is a throttle, a gate, a method of crowd control: the need to strive for accuracy, to go genociding just the right amount. Don’t forget to debate the missile as it explodes in your mouth. When the boot’s on your neck, take note of the tread. Count those bullets as they barge their way in.
The liberal worldview only makes sense if you consider its overlap with the worldview of the settler, whose only facts are the bomb and the fear of its absence. X dead Palestinian children are a liberal impossibility, not because they couldn’t be counted, but because the number keeps going up. Once they’re all dead then we’ll be sure to find out how many babies there once were. Otherwise how will the settlers make the right trophies?
Meanwhile the liberals and fascists keep doing it. One is the firing squad, the other the blindfold. One is the rocket, the other the chalked message Kisses from the New Jersey! One claims Palestinians don’t exist but then climbs through their windows with an axe in each hand. The other looks at Palestinians as oversized babies who keep crying at their own execution for some reason.
So there’s fascism and humanitarianism and liberalism all tangled up in a love triangle with mass death caught in the middle. For some of us these facts are within us, our very meat and earth. How many facts are just disembodied numbers fleeing us? I should learn to carve a woomera. Or maybe not—I've already taken so much from people I murdered before I could meet them.
I was born a settler colonist, then fled backwards to Europe, trying to avoid the next genocide like we evaded the last, by sheer poverty and luck. We ran so hard we rounded the world and started chasing. Now back on the mothership, I blame the Holocaust for the abysmal Dutch deli culture. In Amsterdam the bagels are all frozen and unboiled. Their holes take like the memory of genocide as it happens. You can get fresh bagels in Jerusalem if Israel lets you in, but they taste like rubble. These days we’d never get in anywhere, but no matter where I grew up the IDF would let me carry one of their machine guns around at school, in the mall, on the bus, as long as I pointed it away from myself and towards the right kind of baby.
Without liberalism how are we supposed to know anything? You can’t knowledge your way out of a genocide. Some ignorance, once manufactured, is irreversible. You first have to realize that your skin and their skin is connected even if they only ever see each other through a screen or a shroud. For those who get that far, or were already there for ages, here are some realizations about facts, for what it’s worth, dedicated to all Gazans wherever you are:
Facts always have an edge. No one puts in all the work of making facts about things that are fine as they are. Liberals want you to understand that your death won’t be nearly as bad for them as you seem to think. They want you to piece a human form back together from the pulverized cloud of your house. I’ve been there. I know how to count and tally. I’d just much rather the people were simply alive again, would prefer to bless their lives instead of their memories.
Facts have direction. They are a vector. The IDF claimed Hamas burned babies, committed sexual assault, but wasn’t that them, wasn’t that us? My baby throws my phone against a wall. I let her douse it in the bath. To think of all that joy just gone from the world. Beheaded babies are not a fact that counts. The number of heads is irrelevant. They are a reminder, not this is in the world but rather we will burn our own house down as long as you’re in it. A beheading asks liberals to stop peeking, to look away on pain of being next.
Facts are made not to feel or relate or contextualize or envision. When some count babies and others terrorists, what does the number matter? Facts justify their crimes like a murderous local sheriff: He’s dead because he needed killing. Or: it’s not a killing if he was always already dead to us.
Facts aren’t on the ground, but within it. They’re down there in the Earth with Rachel Corrie and Ghassan Kanafani and every other assassinated genius and unmade woomera and depopulated Palestinian village. In Palestine the Israeli bulldozers turn facts over and over in the ground until they’re indistinguishable from each other, bone and stone and granules of dirt, little brown refuse bullets. Facts don’t count how much earth there is, they tamp it down and walk on it.
Facts are those old bones we stand on. Gaza is the new field of bones that progressives walk on. How many dead bodies does it take to fill in the site for an Israeli road, a stadium to host Eurovision, a plaza named after some town from the Bible or Germany? How many city parks are mass graves greened over, flattened evidence of lynching? The bodies of the enslaved still hold up the buildings they made everywhere these days. Facts are an outlet store. They are wormholes that connect time and space, that circulate soon-to-be-refuse of their own making.
Facts reproduce reality, but just a little bit differently. They cleave what is self-evident from what is impossible. No matter what happens, it’s impossible now to have a world with enough Palestinians in it. Entire family trees felled. Entire orchards. Entire arboretums ungrown. Entire indigenous cultivars, no more corn no potatoes no tomatoes no olives no peanuts no rice, only dead babies to plant in rubble from bombs made in that suburb right there over by your uncle’s trailer.
Facts are a task, a chore, another damned thing to do. Palestine has more than its share of woomeras. But sometimes people just want to go to the store or school or buy a used car. Sometimes people don’t want to keep drawing Handala forever in the margins of their notebooks. Sometimes people don’t want to have to go on remembering, or even just to forget for a short time and then feel the shock of coming back into it: Handala how’d you get so old? Darwish why so sad? Kanafani where did you go? Muhammad ad-Durra why are you resting your head against your dad?
Facts are nothing like Handala, the cartoon refugee child the represents all Palestine, who isn’t a fact but rather an uncountable emotion. Handala is everything the facts try to keep standing out in the rain. Handala is holding his own hand. Handala has less reason than ever to turn around. Handala you've grown and grown but we never let you count past ten. Handala put some shoes on I said, while wearing your shoes. Oh Handala, it’s not your fault we took you from your parents’ living room in the dark of morning.
Handala I wish for you a childhood of irreverent joy and gleeful stupidity, not these bent and broken rebar, crooked I-beams reaching up at an off angle. I wish for you a long life of everything, doing whatever you want and it’s none of my business. I wish you could grow old enough to zip up your own baby’s tiny puffy jacket while they kiss your head because it’s there, and they can. And that you’ll know they’ll still be there tomorrow with all of their limbs and joyful giggles.
Handala, where is your woomera? Did you leave it in the tent in the rain, or under your bed in the building that used to be there this morning? Didn’t your parents tell you not to leave the house? I see, your home left you instead. Handala why are you standing there in your underwear in the sun, chained to all those grown-up Palestinian men? Have you spent your entire childhood in prison, all seventy plus years of it? What was it for again, or will we still not tell?
Oh Handala where are your hands. I searched for them under the pile of yesterday's flattened apartment blocks. But I see so many of hands down here and all of them are yours, decades of lost wealth, unborn futures and unmade beings. We can't seem to gather all of them out no matter how many broken slabs we shift. We can’t possibly make pairs out of all the lonely limbs. If only the Earth could spit out all of this new dirt it never wanted. Handala where are all the rest of the Palestinians? I could’ve sworn they were right here until we showed up. Oh Handala, Handala come back.
A body is not actually a fact but its remainder or precipitate, a notice that someone has left the building. I can’t seem to hold any amount of dead babies in my thoughts. My friends are on fire. But it's presumptuous to call them friends. I write them emails that say things like, Apologies for this genocide I keep doing. I can't possibly send enough sim cards this month, but here I am standing in the aisle of some upscale grocery store complaining about bagels and marveling at the price of olives.
I’ve stopped tallying, stopped factualizing. But I won’t forget the babies as I keep on doing things, however pointless. We always despaired anyway and somehow this is still worse. I just wanted so badly to be wrong about everything. But all of the dirt, mounds, babies, adults, bodies and minds and poets and soil and apartments, the actually living humans and nonhumans: none of us forget. I remember one thing for certain. It isn’t enough, not the key to reincarnation, but I keep remembering even so: Palestine grows back again and again. It shouldn’t have to, but it does. Some babies grow up in the air some grow green shoots from the ground. The less you give them, the taller they get, the more nutrients they infuse into the air, the more oxygen. This memory is a woomera of sorts, a slim, flexible, uncountable, semi-invisible condition of living. A condition that was made and can be unmade today if we want. Something I don’t understand even as it hangs from my belt.
Above all I remember a word. We’re not supposed to say this word in the classroom, at events, in books, on TikTok, on the phone, or at home even quietly amongst ourselves over a deck of cards. Liberals won’t utter it but still somehow they can’t get it out of their mouths. It’s not a fact but an oath, this word, its letters form even where there’s no breath. A we continues around it, begins again, forming and reforming in prison, banned, fired, uninvited, unpublished, not a tree but a carefully cultivated strand of wood extending its limbs, un-extinguished, extending us all like a lever. Because despite the threats the genocide the pretend beheadings, there is one fact that matters. Because the fact is, nobody, no one, not a single one of any of us or them or the in-betweens, not a single unborn or living or dead or transitioning being, not a one of us has forgotten Palestine yet.
