Se la "ragazza beduina" potesse parlare. "Noi" dinanzi al genocidio di Gaza

How can we write about the war of total destruction that Israel is waging against the inhabitants of Gaza, which we are all witnessing? The book, written between January and May 2025, attempts to do so by recounting an episode from the past: a "Bedouin girl" captured, raped, and killed in the Naqab/Negev desert by a group of Israeli Army soldiers sent there in 1949 to control the border with Egypt after the formation of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israeli war. Retracing this story and following the figure of the "Bedouin girl" in very recent texts that mention her—newspaper articles, theoretical reflections, history books, an autobiographical account, a novel, a photo essay—the horizon of that historical period of the past emerges: the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the founding of the State of Israel, Zionist colonialism, the destruction of Palestinian villages, changes in the territory and place names, and the experience of the kibbutzim. At the same time, another level of writing occasionally interrupts the description, because the present of war and genocide bursts in with all its drama: the book then deals with censorship, with how to refer to October 7, with the arbitrary arrests of Palestinians, with torture and sexual violence in Israeli prisons, with the term genocide/Gaza-cide, with the images coming out of Gaza. Finally, in a dialogue with Maram Masarwi, a Palestinian researcher, the focus on the intersections between the past and the present shifts to Palestine.