‘A constellation of crimes’: Jaipur Literature Festival session confronts ‘Gaza as genocide’
Historians, poets and journalists at JLF accuse Israel of systematic destruction, while detailing media censorship and the ‘rehearsals’ for catastrophe.
4 min readJaipurUpdated: Jan 20, 2026 05:39 PM IST
A yellow block demarcating the "Yellow Line," which has separated the Gaza Strip's Israeli-held and Palestinian zones since the October ceasefire, is visible in Jabalia, northern Gaza Strip during searching for the remains of hostages, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP/PTI)
The title alone marked it as an outlier. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, amid sessions on fiction, memoir and translation, a panel convened under a heading that rarely appears without qualifiers or quotation marks: ‘Gaza Genocide.’
Only months earlier, moderator Navdeep Suri said, a woman in the audience at a military literature gathering dominated by retired generals demanded to know when anyone would finally use the word genocide to describe Gaza. “Today, we are saying it,” he said.
Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and author of ‘Genocide in Gaza : Israel’s Long War on Palestine’, opened with how he reluctantly changed his earlier stand that it was not a genocide. “The facts change and therefore I changed my opinion,” Shlaim, who is of Iraqi Jewish decent said. The turning point, he said, was “the stopping of humanitarian aid… using starvation as a weapon of war.” He called genocide “the crime of all crimes” but argued it was part of a broader system of destruction, which he termed “domicide” (of homes), “ecocide” (of the environment), “econocide” (of the economy), and “scholasticide” (of the education system).
Poetry as testimony against ‘rehearsals’ for catastrophe
Poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, whose latest collection, Something About Living, recently won a National Book Award, as a voice carrying “the conscience of Palestine” was asked about her decision to speak explicitly about Gaza during her award acceptance speech.
“I don’t know if it was an opportunity,” Tuffaha replied. “It felt like the only speech possible.” She said she named the date, time, and duration of what she called “the ongoing genocide,” emphasising it was a “bipartisan, American-funded” project. She critiqued a cultural preference for “ambiguity and passive verb tenses,” arguing instead for “clarity.”.
Tuffaha recited her poem “Running Orders,” written in 2014 during Israel’s assault on Gaza. The poem, based on Israeli military warnings to civilians before airstrikes, builds with a devastating refrain: It doesn’t matter. The poem recounts a phone call warning residents they have 58 seconds to flee before their home is bombed, a warning presented as humane, even as borders are sealed and escape is impossible.
Noa Avishag Schnall, a journalist and activist, recounted her experience aboard a Freedom Flotilla Coalition boat, the Conscience, on a mission to break the siege of Gaza. She described its interception by Israeli forces in a pre-dawn operation involving helicopters and naval commandos.
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She detailed being zip-tied, subjected to harsh restraint techniques she called the Palestine hold:”Our boat in specific was a medics and journalist boat. We were responding to targeted assassination… of doctors, medical professionals and journalists.”
A Documentary Shelved Over ‘Perception of Partiality’
Ramita Navai, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, discussed her film Doctors Under Attack, which investigates the detention and alleged torture of Palestinian medical personnel. She said the BBC, which originally commissioned the film, later dropped it. “Finally, they released a press statement saying they were worried about the perception of partiality,” Navai said.
Navai claimed that in her decades of reporting from over 40 countries, she encountered “a completely different set of rules… applied when you are covering Israel-Palestine.” She said editorial restrictions included a ban on using terms like “ethnic cleansing,” even when attributed,.
In later comments, Shlaim returned to the legal definition of genocide, asserting Israel’s actions and rhetoric fit the 1948 Genocide Convention. “The lesson of the Holocaust was never again,” he said. “Not just for Jews, never again for anyone… today the Palestinians are the defenceless victims.”
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Tuffaha and Schnall lay down the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. “Criticising a political ideology is fundamentally a right that we all have… That is not the same thing as criticising the Jewish people for being Jewish,” Tuffaha said.
Tuffaha framed the issue as domestic for all nations supporting Israel. “What you allow to take place overseas ultimately comes back to affect you in your own country,” she said. Her prescription was cultural: “Say Palestine. Read Palestinian literature… A genocide is made possible first by erasure.”
Aishwarya Khosla is a key editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads and manages the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections, driving content strategy and execution. Aishwarya's specialty lies in book reviews, literary criticism and cultural commentary. She also pens long-form feature articles where she focuses on the complex interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She is a proud recipient of The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections. This fellowship required intensive study and research into political campaigns, policy analysis, political strategy, and communications, directly informing the analytical depth of her cultural commentary.
As the dedicated author of The Indian Express newsletters, Meanwhile, Back Home and Books 'n' Bits, Aishwarya provides consistent, curated, and trusted insights directly to the readership. She also hosts the podcast series Casually Obsessed. Her established role and her commitment to examining complex societal themes through a nuanced lens ensure her content is a reliable source of high-quality literary and cultural journalism.
Her extensive background across eight years also includes previous roles at Hindustan Times, where she provided dedicated coverage of politics, books, theatre, broader culture, and the Punjabi diaspora.
Write to her at aishwaryakhosla.ak@gmail.com or aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com. You can follow her on Instagram:
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