This week’s Palestine Letter falls on the anniversary of October 7. Our Palestine reporters, Qassam Muaddi and Tareq Hajjaj, have both written personal reflections on the past three years and what they have meant for Palestinians across their splintered geographies. Entire worlds were wiped out during this period, and the lives of Palestinians will never be the same in the periods to come.
In Gaza, a new generation of children brought up amid the genocide has no conception of what life was like before it. Their entire existence has been one of displacement, bombardment, and life amid the rubble and in tents. Tareq Hajjaj takes us through what this has meant for his nieces and nephews still in Gaza, who asked Tareq, while he spoke to them over video call, how he managed to fit a sofa into his tent.
In the West Bank, the quiet assault on the conditions for the continued existence of Palestinians on their land has erased entire communities. What is today regarded as “normal” life in the territory would have been inconceivable three years ago, and it is that normalization of their conditions that is both a perpetuation of those conditions and a necessary mechanism of survival. Qassam Muaddi recounts how this has unfolded in his hometown of Taybeh, which lies at the nexus of Israel’s aggressive escalation of settler violence, and how its residents’ world has contracted over the past three years.
The common thread running through the two pieces is how the unspeakable has become commonplace and how the horrific has become banal. In this sense, the Gaza genocide was a watershed moment, not only for Palestine, but for how the rest of the world came to understand the limits of the permissible. We see this “new normal” unfolding across geographies far away from Gaza, from the kidnapping of the head of state of Venezuela, to the assassination of the Iranian Supreme Leader — and the countless other war crimes that have laid waste to the facade of the international rules-based order, from Iran to Sudan.
Amid these global developments, Palestine is ground zero. But the precedent set in Palestine is now laying the groundwork for an even more terrifying phase of accelerating annexation, erasure, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a full realization of the genocide in Gaza. That means that what happens next in Palestine will likely reflect the fate of the rest of the world, as more and more tectonic shifts become the new “normal.”
