After the Genocide, the Genocide

“THE PRAYERS OF MILLIONS have finally been answered,” announced Donald Trump at a recent summit in Egypt, where he’d arrived to sign the paperwork for the ceasefire in Gaza. “At long last,” he added, “we have peace in the Middle East.”

But what we have isn’t peace. What we have is a continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has—for now—moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes—an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal. To quote a searing poem published last week by Fady Joudah: “After the genocide, the genocide.”1 Israel’s US-imposed “ceasefire” in Lebanon offers the blueprint: for the year since Hizballah ceased its attacks on Israeli forces, Israel has continued to fire, sending drones buzzing over Beirut, bombing randomly all over the country, killing hundreds of people, demolishing villages, burning olive trees. Now, in addition to an ongoing siege that shows no signs of abating, something similar seems to be Gaza’s fate as well. Genocides don’t end with ceasefire agreements: they only end with the termination of the conditions that brought them into being and the punishment of those who oversaw and conducted them. So far there is no evidence of a resolution along either of these lines.