I will start this column with a question for you, dear reader. What connects you with your country, and makes you feel it is yours? What gives you a sense of identity and belonging? It’s the physical things, of course – where you live, where you were born, where your family and friends reside. But underlying those practical aspects, I suspect, are all the other things that you don’t think about, that you take for granted. The music, the literature, the humour, the art and cinema and TV – all the abstract touchstones of an identity that form a connective tissue between you and your country.
I ask because the corollary of the question “what makes a people?” is “what erases one?” And what is unfolding in Gaza has made that question an urgent one. Because alongside the horrors of death and displacement, something else is happening – something existential, rarely acknowledged and potentially irreversible.
