Selma Dabbagh

In the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I got into an argument with an Israeli woman who was tearing down Art Not Genocide Alliance signs from around Vera Tamari’s work, part of the exhibition In Minor Keys curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition assistant had already told her that the artist wanted the posters to be there, but the woman insisted that Tamari was Israeli, that she had looked her up. She was so adamant that I might have doubted myself if I didn’t know members of Tamari’s family.

Last Wednesday, the reporter Amal Khalil and photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were on assignment in south Lebanon when Israeli drones struck the car in front of them. The women sought shelter in a building that was then destroyed by a direct hit. Despite continuing Israeli fire, emergency workers eventually managed to rescue Faraj from the rubble. ‘She kept hugging me,’ Faraj said from her hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages. ‘I begged her not to sleep.’ Khalil’s body was recovered by the Red Cross the next day.

The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives by the regime in Israel and its backers in the United States. According to the Israeli government, the invasion was a rescue operation to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman who disappeared forty years ago. Residents of Nabi Chit and the Lebanese army chief told the BBC that Israeli special forces entered the town ‘disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hizbullah’s Islamic Health Organisation’. They headed to the corner of the graveyard, dug it up but found nothing there. The town fought back, causing the Israeli soldiers to withdraw. To cover their retreat, Israel carried out more than forty airstrikes in five hours, killing 41 people.

When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, the destruction was writ large in newspaper headlines and widely condemned. A year later, the Israeli army bombed the old town of Nablus. The Palestinian architect and writer Suad Amiry wrote about it in her memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Her first thought was ‘Oh, God, not the soap factory!’ She then remembered the thirteen people who’d been killed and felt ‘rather ashamed’. And yet since October 2023 five thousand years of cultural buildings and ancient libraries have been bombed into dust in Gaza with hardly a whisper from the international media or cultural institutions.

The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.