CS Due to my German background, the title of your book resonated strongly. After the Second World War, almost nobody admitted to supporting the Holocaust. Was this attitude in the back of your mind, or did it originate purely from observing what’s happening in Gaza?

OEA It came primarily from pattern recognition. I was thinking about the end of apartheid in South Africa, and how it’s very difficult to find someone now who would ever say that they used to be for it. But there could be a mirror version of this book titled Some People Will Always Be For This, Vehemently. I was thinking about the chronological safety net of liberalism that affords, once a certain amount of time has passed, the ability to move backwards into a position that, at the time, would have been considered too unsafe. There are many ways in which I have lived that kind of life, in which I’ve kept my head down and waited for “safety” before I made my decision. But in addition to everything else, this situation allows me to calibrate my level of entitlement. Every day for the last 20 months, I have woken up watching video, audio and documentary evidence of the worst things imaginable. It’s not like I suddenly became braver – my reference point for what constitutes discomfort, or an absence of safety, has changed by orders of magnitude.

CS In the book, you mention having tabs open on your screen that deliver a constant flood of atrocities. I don’t, but I do read the newspaper. I’m not only afraid that I will see something horrible online, but also of being a voyeur – a passive consumer of other people’s catastrophe.

OEA I have been in the same place that you’re in, for the same reasons. I don’t judge anyone who takes that approach, because I wake up most days and want to do the same. But this isn’t an abstract horror that I can keep abstract. I am involved in the killing of those kids. My tax money is doing that. But there are valid arguments for looking away, including that the sheer emotional toll of watching all this might render me useless to the cause. I am a much less functioning person than I was two years ago – much of the joy has gone out of life. But I am invested right now, with whatever means I can summon, in bringing an end to an ongoing genocide that is the culmination of three-quarters of a century of occupation and theft and humiliation and eradication. I am not interested in winning an argument in a bar.

To be in support of colonialism in the long run is exhausting in an existential way, because you have to wake up every morning and pledge allegiance to a fundamentally fraudulent narrative

CS You mention Susan Sontag and her seminal book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Sontag claims the impact of images of war to be contingent on the socio-political context you are within – you can only grieve for those whose side you are on. However, I cannot imagine that the photographs of the skeletal, anonymised remains of homes on the scale as in Gaza can be viewed with indifference, not to mention the images of the dead. But Sontag also claimed that our consumption of war imagery has confused our sense of empathy and hardened it. Do you agree?

OEA As I’m speaking to you, it is not particularly anomalous for the daily death count from these eight so-called distribution stations in Gaza to reach triple digits every single day. There used to be a time when it would make headlines if 100 Palestinians were murdered in a day, and it simply doesn’t anymore. Their killers are not named. There is no active tense – they just disappear from the narrative. I shudder to think how many Palestinians need to be killed on any given day before this is on the front page of the New York Times. At this moment, there is a level of enforced obliviousness that is in no small part a function of fatigue. I know a lot of people who were more engaged last year but are simply coming apart by the weight of it. And I suspect that I, to a certain degree, am suffering from a similar fatigue, and this is largely enabled by a media environment in which there are no consequences for paying zero attention to any of this. There are modes of living in the United States where I can quite simply cease to believe that any of this is happening, and it wouldn’t affect most of my day-to-day life. You can’t have that and simultaneously have a sustained level of concern and a level of resistance to the horror that is happening. This mental space scares me because I know what has come before, and I know what’s coming soon: we’re all going to be very sorry about this. The white Western reporters are eventually going to make their way into Gaza, and they’re going to tell us what the Palestinian journalists have been saying for 20 months straight. But because it’ll be coming from a voice that has a natural, albeit racist authority attached to it, we are all suddenly going to feel like we have a narrative to express the kind of horror that we should have expressed from the beginning.

CS You begin your book with a poetic description of a girl with severe injuries being whisked away on a stretcher. The gentleness of the men who try to save her seems like a tiny antidote to what you call the incessant “industrial violence” committed against Palestinians, including children. Throughout the book, you apply a similar dialectic confrontation with contrasting thoughts. Have you used this strategy in your writing before, or has the situation in Gaza inspired you to?

OEA Jorge Luis Borges once said that “no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered.” This is one of my central tricks – I don’t think it’s particularly clever.

CS It’s effective, clever or not. You pay attention to a moment when an injured girl’s breath turns shallow and her body turns limp and quiet, you linger on an existential moment that would otherwise be obliterated by the noise, the dust and the smoke of war. You turn your reader into another kind of witness. Is this effect something that the situation in Gaza has inspired in you?

OEA I don’t want to participate in a conversation or an argument or a narrative in general that is predicated on something false: politicians are discussing issues of Jewish safety while masked agents are snatching students off the street. Many of the politicians in this current administration are, I suspect, raging antisemites. We are here as a consequence of thinking of Palestinians as subhuman, as nonexistent. And so, it was a very deliberate attempt on my part to write a book that begins with the kind of humanisation that, had I done so with another group of human beings, would be considered just normal.

CS You discuss the Empire being behind barbed wire, armed to the teeth with its own language – with words that sanitise the unspeakable. These euphemisms for incredibly violent acts committed against Palestinians do not only protect the perpetrators, you say, but also “the liberal, easily upset middle,” people who need to be protected, because they don’t want to live in “barbarous circumstances.”

OEA I’ve learned that after a certain magnitude, physical violence cannot exist in a vacuum: it needs to be supported by other kinds of violence. The execution of tens of thousands of children cannot erupt from nowhere. Because I worked as a journalist and covered the War on Terror for years, I became intimately aware of how complex and deep linguistic violence is. In the book, I write about speaking of “collateral damage” as opposed to calling it “the bombing of a wedding party”. “Detainees” who are, in fact, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay: their hunger strike was called by the governing system “asymmetric warfare”. This terminology is vital to the enterprise. If I’m going to call myself a writer, I have an obligation to stand in opposition to this use of language.

CS There are endless examples of the killing of children, and the first chapter of your book begins with a bullet wound to the head of a child. A recent podcast reported on an American paediatrician who went to Gaza to treat wounded children, who soon became aware that many babies who were brought to her couldn’t be helped because they had been shot point-blank in the head.

OEA When I talk about all joy having gone out of life, I understand that I’m in a privileged position because my family hasn’t been wiped off the face of the earth. But I have found myself frequently in a position where I am listening to someone deliberately not speak. Their reaction to exactly the kind of horror that you are describing is incompatible with the prerequisites of being in the world as a human. I don’t know how someone could look at a video of a child in the rubble after the missile, screaming for help, as his sister is in two parts behind him because she’s been split in half by the force of the blast, and not feel compelled to help. If your response is to wait to find out the ethnicity of these children so you know whether to grieve or not grieve, I’m not frustrated with you, and I’m not angry at you: I simply don’t know how to exist in the same universe as you. But there is an incredible narrative power to the workings of colonialism and the large-scale theft of land and resources.

CS The obscenity of Trump’s idea for a “Riviera” in Gaza supports your argument. You addressed the violence against nature, which reminded me of Where Olive Trees Weep, a 2024 film about the killing of olive trees in Palestine as an act of cruelty against the land, against the people, their livelihood and their culture.

OEA Yes, they are a symbol of the country and, literally, its roots.

CS You grew up in a relatively privileged position – your father, an educated man – ran the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo. However, as a kid, you had an epiphany when his papers were torn apart in front of him by some low-level, contemptuous official, rendering your father a bureaucratic non-entity. This incident taught you how people are turned invisible. In a city like New York, there is a constant confrontation with homeless people, who offend by not being invisible. They are a daily reminder of our desire to overlook inconvenient people.

OEA A lot of it boils down to someone effectively saying, I don’t hate you – I just wish you didn’t exist. No one wants to say that, but it is the way a lot of us behave a lot of the time.

CS You write that people in the part of the world where you come from experience a change of power by way of a coup or revolution, maybe an unsuccessful revolution. What do you envision for Gaza?

OEA I have no doubt that Palestine will be free and the Palestinians will be free – and I say this as somebody who doubts virtually every facet of his own existence and the world around me generally. But the reason I say that is because the opposition to colonialism is always more exhausting in the short term, when you must deal with every level of violence – physical state violence, the violence of excommunication, and narrative violence. To be in support of colonialism in the long run is exhausting in a much more existential way, because you have to wake up every morning and pledge allegiance to a fundamentally fraudulent narrative. If I wake up every morning and try to avoid the reality that my benefits are predicated on someone else’s misery, that has a cumulative effect over time. For me, the future, not just in Gaza, but for all Palestinian people, is self-determination. I don’t believe that there is a path through more colonialism that leads to peace that is dependent on the absence of colonialism. I say this while, in the back of my head, I have the reality that thousands of human beings have been slaughtered over the last 20 months. I have no idea how much more horror stands between this moment and my optimistic vision of where we end.

CS You talked about the invisibility of the Palestinians, how there isn’t an accurate death count. Right after the Hamas attack in October 2023, there were reports of 40 beheaded babies. In the book, you call this story “an essential unburdening”. Who had to be unburdened? Later, you compare it to other fictional stories made up to stoke revenge and war.

OEA The more asymmetric the violence, the more it becomes dependent on what the recipients of that violence are believed to be capable of doing, rather than what they have done. This isn’t unique to the situation in Palestine. I remember being 19 years old and watching the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I remember watching the debate over nuclear weapons in Iran last week. Over time, you understand that the material facts of the situation are unimportant to the policy-makers, because in their minds it is not done to human beings but to people who are capable of horrendous cruelty.

CS You see this also in the refrain that Palestinian people voted for Hamas, never mind that most of those killed in Gaza are too young to vote and that the terror inflicted on Palestinians predates Hamas. Are there counter-narratives to these kinds of fabrications?

OEA If we are talking about collective guilt for supporting Hamas, what is the consequence for the Israeli government supporting Hamas for many years?  The notion that Palestinians exist at all is, in and of itself, an affront to a colonial effort, which is a narrative that is seen throughout history. Any claim that starts to determine that a certain group of human beings is not allowed to exist is when it begins to feel like a prelude to nonexistence. It feels absurd to talk about these things when an entire group of human beings has never had any claim to this land, to presently have no claim to this land, and in this moment, their mass execution.

CS Seven months before the October attacks, the Times of Israel published an article titled, “When Genocide Is Permissible”. It was retracted because it indicated that mass killings are not popular even among the paper’s readers.

OEA They published another one that discussed how Palestinian children are time bombs, which was also retracted. It wasn’t because it proved unpopular – I think it was because it made for bad press. Time and time again, opinion polls regularly show the majority of people in Israel support these policies. Whenever I have these kinds of discussions, I’m always inclined to say, forget about my book. Watch Israeli television. Read Israeli papers. On these channels, things are routinely said without a hint of shame or embarrassment.  If they were repeated in American media, there would be an onslaught of comments about how offensive this is. There’s a station in the Arab world that every night simply runs a feed of Israeli news, which I find myself often lured to.

CS It is interesting that Nicaragua has sued Germany for supporting genocide, and South Africa has sued the US. Would this be an effective way to save Palestinian lives?

OEA This comes back to the great necessity to feel as though one is supporting an active case rather than a negative one. However, historically, it has never been presented as the complete and utter absence of support in the face of the obliteration of Palestinian people. I struggle to think of a situation where this level of slaughter is happening, and a narrative device of it being a “special case” to justify it. It may well be the case that in Germany, this narrative is so strong that the very last person in Gaza could be murdered tomorrow, and that narrative would still hold.

If you had told me two years ago that the potential mayor of New York would be a man who even speaks the word Palestine, I would have thought you were out of your mind

CS I had a conversation with my aunt today, who lives in Germany. At the beginning of this current conflict, she sided unconditionally with Israel, and now she is firmly on the Palestinians. She wants Israel to be sued for committing genocide. The South Africans brought a suit against Israel before the Hague. Would this strategy help?

OEA My mindset these days is that nothing is enough and everything matters. Is the book going to change anybody’s mind? Probably not, but it allows me to talk about this. Is my writing going to change my elected official’s mind? Maybe not, but it’s something, and this, to me, is the statecraft equivalent of what I’m talking about. Do I believe that the same institutions that have been overwhelmingly used to punish the Global South are going to suddenly change track? Probably not, but it matters that the case be made, and it matters that it is made by a society that fully understands what apartheid is. Trump, obviously, makes things worse. But I received an email from a friend of mine, an indigenous poet who had read the book and was writing to me about it. There was a line in that note that stuck with me, about how this person felt such a great sense of calm and relief once they came to terms with the reality that the most significant changes that would come about as a result of their activism might not take place in their lifetime. One of the most infuriating and crazy-making things about this moment is that every day you wake up, and there’s no indicator of change. But change is happening, at a glacial pace. If you had told me two years ago that the potential mayor of New York would be a man who even speaks the word Palestine, I would have thought you were out of your mind. There are moments of change, an impending sense of shame that is waiting. The tragic thing is how much horror sits between now and then. But the consequences of publicly supporting the Palestinians are changing quite rapidly. I have seen that with this book, the level of tension and nervousness that accompanied the early stages of its conception, compared to how incredibly tame it seems now, is fascinating to witness.

CS You find it tame?

OEA There are interviews where I say that if this book is remembered at all, it’s going to be remembered as one of the tamest examples of its kind. The level of rage that I’m seeing everywhere makes everything in this book look quaint, and that level of rage is here to stay.

CS Who is expressing the rage?

OEA Across the board, the correlation is not ethnic. It’s not religious. Sometimes it’s generational, which is to say that people younger than me tend to find the book much tamer than people older than me. It has to do with one’s position within a system of power. When people have something to lose professionally, run organisations, or sit on boards, they don’t feel any of that rage, or they feel some of it, but their survival instinct smothers it. Along every other axis there has been immense rage, because whatever you and I talk about, whatever ends up getting printed in this article or not printed in this article, whatever anyone has to say about me, whatever op-ed appears in the New York Times tomorrow, none of that has the visceral power on the psyche as the image of a murdered child.

CS You call this a clarifying moment. It sorts out who sides with justice and who sides with power. Were there any surprises?

OEA Yes. It is fascinating to see young and new writers risk everything to speak up. For many of them, their careers might not recover, whereas some of the most established writers did such a magnificent job of saying nothing. Last year, I was asked to write an op-ed for my old newspaper, and I said, look, you won’t run this, because I will call it a genocide and state that Western governments are complicit. The editor said you’re right, I can’t run that. In January of this year, I was asked by the same newspaper to write an op-ed, and the same editor said, go ahead, knowing I would call it a genocide. Something is changing, and that came as quite a surprise to me. I’ve seen that change in real time by how the people who have the most to lose are often the most vocal. Perhaps in hindsight, that’s naive on my part, because none of this should have come as a surprise at all. .