Rubble in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on Thursday.Credit: Eyad Baba/AFP

In the first days after the Gaza cease-fire began, it seemed for a moment as if the curtain had finally fallen on the October 7 war. It was possible to breathe. I rejoiced that Gaza’s residents would be able to breathe for a moment without fear of missiles and bombs. Granted, the disaster and the tragedy were still at their height, but at least the killing would stop.

In Israel, too, people spoke about being able to breathe again, about rebuilding, and also about vacations, about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial and about the global boycott that seems to be in no hurry to dissipate. It was a return to the Israeli routine.

But it turned out that the war – at least the one in which Israelis were participating – had ended in only one sense. Now, it seems, what remains is only the usual war, the one in which Palestinians continue to die.

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I thought then, “I cannot and do not want to move on so quickly. Israel is striving to move on, but I refuse.” How is it possible to write these days about the violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities, or about settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, as if we hadn’t just witnessed a genocide, as if we could now fold it away like yesterday’s newspaper?

Something in this return to routine is necessary for our exhausted, broken souls. But at the same time, it’s chilling.

I would like to say that I was wrong, but the genocide has only transitioned to a new phase. It’s slower and quieter, but no less consistent and no less lethal. In the last two days alone, more than 100 people have been killed in Gaza, dozens of them children. The blood hasn’t stopped flowing; it’s just that the nightly news has stopped reporting on it – though in Israel, the media never did.

Where do we go from here, and how? The past pursues the future, and the future looks like the past. But in Israel? People have moved on. And now it’s time to settle accounts with the world – which, to Israelis’ shock, isn’t rushing to welcome the country back into the family of nations.

I would like to say that this is just blindness. But the more I look at the people who share this homeland with me, the more I tend to think that it’s evidence of insanity, or of paranoia, or both. A country that lived in a bloodbath for months, broadcast the genocide on live television and then continues to speak about “normalcy” has lost all grasp of reality. There’s nothing normal about a country that sees itself as a victim when it is destroying others.

Rubble in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on Thursday.Credit: Eyad Baba/AFP

Maybe there is no way to “move on.” Not after what we saw, not after what was done. Israelis will continue to live their lives as if the genocide were over, as if this were a closed chapter, while Gazans will continue their countdown to death.

But what was buried there won’t remain there; it will return, in reality or in memory, and demand its rightful place. Because it’s impossible to build a future when the present is nothing but repression of the past. The earth itself refuses to forget.

Or maybe the only way to move on is to stop running forward and really look at the past – to recognize the injustice, to accept responsibility. Only a society that looks directly at the crimes it committed can start to wean itself from its violence.

And after that, maybe it will also be possible to talk about dismantling the violent hierarchy that has been established here, of occupiers versus occupied, lords of the land versus their subjects. As long as this structure exists, there is no future – not for the Jews, and not for the Palestinians.

The future will begin on the day that Israel is forced to recognize the necessity of civic and national equality. Occupation and living by the sword are not divine decrees; they are choices.

Hanin Majadli