Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro chronicle loss, courage, and the urgency of remembrance in Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

In Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, co-editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro have gathered around twenty writers, poets, journalists, activists, and illustrators to explore the genocide's immeasurable toll at both individual and collective levels.

Their anthology, published by Verso, provides an urgent and far-ranging compendium of accounts and perspectives into Israel’s unfolding brutal assault against Palestinians in Gaza.

All book royalties will be donated directly to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

“We haven't been able to end the genocide, but speaking about what it has done has proved to be very powerful and very unifying. And I hope that that continues to be the case,” Sonia Faleiro told The New Arab.

We caught up with her to discuss the book, her approach to editing such a project, and the cost of opposing horror. 

The New Arab: Gaza: The Story of a Genocide is a polyphonic anthology which includes essays, long-form journalism, poetry, infographics, and more. Can you tell us more about the editorial process behind the book?

Sonia Faleiro: The purpose of the book was to create a record and find a way to encapsulate the enormity of the genocide’s impact, obliterating entire families and tens of thousands of people, and also the impact it was having on children’s education, animals, the environment, neighbouring countries, and on the present and the future.

We wanted to tell the complete story of what it means to be at the receiving end of a genocide. With that in mind, we set about making a list of subjects we thought we had to cover, then we reached out to writers we admired and emerging writers we'd heard of, and put people and subjects together.

What has emerged is what we hoped to achieve, which is a very powerful, unforgettable account of the totalitarian nature of the violence that Israel has inflicted on Gaza.

How did you negotiate your role as non-Palestinian editors with a say over which stories to include?

Fatima and I were coming to this as human beings, from the perspective of people who were profoundly disturbed by what we were seeing, which is the live-streaming of a genocide. We wanted to mobilise our networks and use our resources to do something effective.

As writers from many decades, we’ve published many books and run a mentorship programme called South Asia Speaks. We have strong ties to the publishing industry, and our goal was to mobilise those links.

We have done it successfully before in relation to Gaza because Fatima and I, along with our colleague Julia Churchill, have an organisation called Books for Gaza, which launched a fundraiser for the Ghassan Abu Sitta Children’s Fund, reaching out to writers — everybody from Sally Rooney to Ali Smith to Pankaj Mishra to Omar El Akkad.

They donated books, which we then raffled off to people all over the world, and we raised the money. So we used our networks again. The purpose was to centre Palestinian voices, which we have done.

However, there were also allies, such as Joe Sacco and Mona Chalabi, because they had something important to say.

And speaking of centring Palestinian voices, poet Mosab Abu Toha asks in his introduction: “Why do we write? Why do we share stories? Why do we lend our ears to others’ stories?” What would you respond to these haunting questions in light of your own reflections?

One of our concerns was that people have begun mistaking retweets and other social media interactions for reporting, recording, or archiving.

This has given rise to the sense that everything we see on social media will be with us forever and that we are somehow exonerated from any responsibility. We don't have to do anything else.

One of the things that we understand as writers is that books are very powerful things, because libraries in Gaza have been targeted, schools, journalists, writers, illustrators, artists and painters have been targeted.

The word, the image, these things matter. The purpose of writing, publishing, mobilising people, and collaborating was to bring together something that would last beyond a post on Instagram, a retweet on Threads, and a reel on social media.

We wanted to create something with the potential to be permanent. And that's why we chose to produce a book as the next step for us at Books for Gaza.

In her powerful essay Final Earth, Susan Abulhawa resituates violence against nature as part of a genocidal project against life itself, abolishing the distinction between human and non-human. She recalls that 250 species of birds will become extinct because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and highlights the complicity of animal rights organisations like PETA in whitewashing Israeli crimes, which I think is not very much talked about. Can you share why it was essential to include a voice on this issue?

Susie has, of course, travelled to Gaza since the genocide began. She has made several trips, bearing aid, taking stock of the situation. She is a person of extraordinary moral and physical courage, and this is the story she wanted to write.

It speaks to her ability to empathise and her incredible talent as a writer. It’s such an extraordinary, shocking piece of work, and it had to be somebody like her who would come up with this idea.

We wanted to ask her to write about animals because she is an animal rights activist in addition to all the other things that she does. This piece shattered us, and you are right to identify it as a standout.

Pivoting to Fatima Bhutto’s interview with BDS founder Omar Barghouti, this chapter in the book underscores the genesis of the BDS project — focusing on complicity, not identity — and practical steps achieved in the past years. What would you say to those who consider that a boycott, for example, of Israeli academic institutions, may be going “too far” or suppress space for internal dissent within Israeli intellectual circles?

Several writers have highlighted, for example, the collaboration between universities and the Israeli military.

Many people have paid a very, very heavy price for speaking out against the genocide. One of our contributors, Maryam Iqbal, a Kashmiri student, was at Barnard College, where she had led the student demonstrations. 

She was doxxed. She had complaints filed against her. She had to flee, and she is currently at a different university in an entirely different country on an entirely different continent.

We know of people who have been branded as “anti-Semitic”, people who have lost their jobs, high-paying positions, fellowships, and residencies, all of that within the publishing system.

People have genuinely been made to pay for this very human, very obvious response to a genocide, which is opposition. One has to choose the form of opposition oneself — it’s not a decision that anyone else can make for you.

I would not tell anybody how to express their opposition. There is no doubt that everybody — anybody — who has made their opposition clear has paid a price.

But there's also no doubt that the price that people who are opposed to the genocide have paid is very, very small compared to the actual victims and their families.

Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic from France and Tunisia

Follow her on X: @farahstlouis