Something Like the Weather

by Ben Ehrenreich

Yesterday the Israeli military bombed a school in Gaza.

I wrote that sentence earlier this month, but it is true again today and would also have been true if I had written it on any of many dozens of other days this year. Between last October and the middle of August, the Israelis bombed more than 500 schools in Gaza. Most were being used as shelters for refugees who had fled their homes to avoid being bombed elsewhere, a category of people that now includes almost the entire, considerably reduced population of Gaza. It feels quaint, stupid even, to observe that it is a war crime to bomb schools.

The one bombed yesterday was north of Gaza City in the Jabalia refugee camp, which over the last year has been largely flattened by Israeli bombs. Or, more accurately, by American bombs dropped by Israeli pilots. The school I had originally been writing about was the Kafr Qasim School in the Shati refugee camp, a little to the south and west. Shati means “beach” in Arabic: the camp there was established in 1948 by refugees pushed out of Jaffa, Lod, and Beersheba who had nowhere else to go. Many of the people sheltering in these schools, in other words, were taking refuge from the refugee camps in which their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had once taken refuge. Back in 1948, al-Shati must have looked a lot like al-Mawasi, the tent camp and “humanitarian zone” on the beach just west of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military has assured Palestinians they would be safe from bombing and where they nonetheless have repeatedly bombed them.

At least seven Palestinians were killed at the Kafr Qasim School, Al Jazeera reported. The coldness of that “at least” is the exact temperature of the Earth at the moment, no matter the local conditions. The temperature the day before can be deduced from the following sentence: That day, at least another 22 people, more than half of them children, died in another Israeli strike on the Zeitoon School (“olive,” it means), north of Gaza City, where thousands of people displaced by other bombings had sought shelter. Many others were wounded, some with severe burns. At least thirty, reports say. And at least eleven more were killed yesterday at the school in Jabalia.

This sort of news is no longer news. American bombs and Israeli pilots are killing Arabs in a different country now, which for the moment counts as news. Otherwise real news involves poll numbers and hundreds of bottles of baby oil and pets in Ohio who are not actually being eaten.

Genocide, on the other hand, is something more like weather. Despite all reports to the contrary, the Earth is cold and getting colder.