Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

Journalists and Books for Gaza cofounders Bhutto (The Runaways) and Faleiro (Beautiful Thing) bring together a “record of the human toll” of Israel’s genocide in Palestine in this arresting anthology. The collection contains a moving mix of history, personal essay, and poetry on what contributor Yara Hawari describes as “one of the most brutal assaults on human life in recent history.” Tareq Baconi offers an impressive overview of the Palestinian struggle in “Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance,” while Mosab Abu Toha’s “Unsafe Passage” is a chilling and vivid account of the author’s imprisonment while trying to cross from Gaza into Egypt. Mary Turfah’s “The Feeds of the IDF Depict What Zionism Can’t See” considers brutally violent online content posted by IDF soldiers, which, Turfah notes, “is, on the whole, well-received” by Israelis, and “Why BDS Matters” is an insightful interview conducted by Bhutto with Omar Barghouti, a cofounder of the BDS movement. The question of how useful writing is at all in the face of such atrocities looms large: “How many stories do we need to write? How many poems,” asks Mosab Abu Toha in the introduction, while contributor Eman Basher writes that “words can’t feed the hungry or stop Israeli tanks from crushing the bodies of our children.” The result is a maddening glimpse of the massacre unfolding in real time. (Oct.)