I am, as I write this, sitting in a quiet air-conditioned room in a comfortable, modern library. The window to my right looks out on a bright, sunlit plaza. The plaza hosts a series of high end restaurants, each of which is set up for outdoor dining, with umbrellas to ward off the sun and heaters to keep out the chill. There are maybe a couple of dozen people out there enjoying the warmth of the evening. In observing this scene, a non sequitur of a thought occurs to me. Five thousand seven hundred miles away, a genocide is taking place. People are being starved, shot, and bombed to death with obscene abandon. The contrast is so stark as to be surreal. And yet it’s real.

We’ve been at this for almost two years, and yet despite the abundance of words I’ve generated here, what’s obvious to me is my total failure to do justice to Gaza. Most of what I’ve written is in draft form; who knows when or if it’ll see the light. I obviously don’t write fast enough to keep up with mass death. A writer is always torn between the imperatives of originality, rigor, and urgency: say something that others haven’t already said better than you; say it so that it’s invulnerable to criticism; but hurry up and say it before it’s too late. I’m obviously not up to that task. But in some ways, the last of those imperatives has now come to overtake the first two. I said right from the beginning that this war would be a Final Solution. We’ve watched it unfold before our eyes. And now the Final Solution is here. It’s obscene enough that it’s happening. Whatever the reasons, it would compound the obscenity to let it go unmentioned.

There’s no such thing as the single authoritative source that produces the slam dunk argument for genocide. There are, instead, hundreds, maybe thousands, of credible sources arguing for the occurrence of genocide in Gaza. Anyone is entitled to skepticism about anything, but skepticism has to be more than a disengaged shrugging of the shoulders. A responsible skeptic has to engage the evidence in its entirety, finding a way to doubt it in good faith without contradicting whatever he or she believes about the rest of the world. Feel free to try that when it comes to Gaza. Just don’t pretend that it’s easy to do. This source can get you started, the Wikipedia entry on the Gaza genocide.

From “Gaza genocide,” Wikipedia

Some advice: First read through the whole document. Then click every link within it. Then read as much of the supporting material as is relevant to bearing out the claims in the text. Remember that the supporting material listed here is far from exhaustive right now, and obviously far from exhaustive of whatever will be produced in the future. Bear in mind as well that this item is only about Gaza, not East Jerusalem, or the West Bank, or southern Lebanon, or Syria, or Yemen, or Iraq, or Iran, or Libya, or any of the other places that the United States, Israel, and “the West” have joined forces to destroy. Cross reference what you read here with whatever arguments you’ve encountered against the thesis of genocide. Then help yourself to your skepticism. Not before.

You’ll find that the inquiry takes time. Take as much time as you need. Just remember, when you get to the end of your inquiry, that you may well reach the conclusion that a genocide took place. If so, a genocide happened while you spent time wondering about its occurrence. There’s no sin in that. You can’t be expected to sign on to so momentous a conclusion without the benefit of a full inquest. The sin is in evading or forgetting what it means once you reach that conclusion. It means that you had a privilege that the victims lacked. They suffered, starved, and died while you read about it. Either one’s life changes as a result of that realization, or not. The world after Gaza will be one divided between those two camps. It already is.