Why We Document Gaza
On joining the Gaza Genocide Center, and why preserving the record is itself an act of resistance.
A note before the essay: This year I joined the Gaza Genocide Center as its Executive Director. The Gaza Genocide Center is a documentation and memorial institution. Its mission is to preserve the historical record of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza through rigorous and transparent methods. The Center is a long-term public resource built to serve researchers, journalists, legal professionals, educators, advocates, and affected communities.
The essay below first appeared at www.gazagenocide.org. I am republishing it here for readers of this Substack. The Center is preparing to launch its full public platform later this year.
Visit www.gazagenocide.org to learn more.
Documentation is a moral act. It is not only the work of preserving fragments or counting losses. It is the work of making sense: of understanding how a crime unfolds, who chooses it, what sustains it, and what conditions make it possible. To document Gaza is to refuse erasure. It is also to answer a question that belongs to all of us: how do we prevent this from happening now, and how do we prevent it from happening again?
The genocide in Gaza did not begin in October 2023. It began decades earlier, in a system built on the total dehumanization of Palestinians, the denial of their national existence, the systematic exclusion from rights and dignity. When such exclusion becomes normalized, when deprivation of land, resources, movement, and basic dignity is treated as ordinary, genocide does not appear as a rupture. It appears as the inevitable consequence of a machine that was always designed to consume and destroy.
This machine has a history. It began with denial: the denial that Palestinians existed as a people, as a nation, as beings worthy of self-determination. It continued through exclusion: from land, from citizenship, from political voice, from the ability to build institutions or shape their collective future. Each act of exclusion was layered onto the last. Each normalized the next. Over decades, the logic became settled: Palestinians are not entitled to the things all humans deserve. They are not entitled to live on their land. They are not entitled to movement, to resources, to dignity. They are not entitled to exist.
When a state builds its entire architecture on this foundation, when it trains generations to accept the unacceptable, when it creates legal systems and political languages to rationalize the irrational, genocide does not arrive as a shock. It arrives as policy. It arrives as the next step in a continuum that was already underway.
In this sense, Gaza is both particular and universal. It is the lived reality of millions of Palestinians who have endured siege, bombardment, and systematic destruction. It is the mourning of families, the collapse of institutions, the erasure of entire neighborhoods and lineages. But it is also a microcosm. It is a case study in how states justify the unjustifiable. It is a record of how identity becomes grounds for exclusion, how occupation and apartheid become normalized, how far individuals and groups will go to sustain ethno-nationalist and apartheid projects. To understand Gaza is to understand something about power, oppression, and the fragility of the protections meant to prevent mass atrocity.
This is why we document.
Documentation serves three moral purposes. First, it makes sense of the crime. Not merely as statistics, but as a system. Documentation traces the machinery: the choices of perpetrators, the intent behind policies, the cascade of decisions that turned deprivation into death. It shows how genocide is not random violence. It is organized, deliberate, and rooted in a logic that precedes it. To document is to expose this logic.
Second, documentation holds perpetrators accountable. It creates a record that cannot be denied or forgotten. It names those who chose this path. It preserves evidence so that responsibility can be assigned, so that justice, however distant, remains possible. For Palestinians, documentation is an act of defiance. It says: you cannot erase us. You cannot rewrite what happened. We will remember. We will testify. We will ensure that those who committed these crimes are known.
Third, documentation prevents repetition. When we understand how genocide became possible in Gaza, the dehumanization, the normalization of exclusion, the international complicity, we see the warning signs elsewhere. We see the patterns that precede atrocity. We create knowledge that can be used to interrupt those patterns, to name them, to refuse them before they metastasize into mass violence. Documentation is a tool of prevention. It says: this happened. This is how it happened. This must never happen again.
But documentation cannot be borne by Palestinians alone. Yes, Palestinians must lead this work. It is their history, their pain, their responsibility to their victims and their future. Palestinians must be the primary authors of their own record, the guardians of their own memory, the ones who decide what is preserved and how it is told. This is not only a right. It is a duty they owe to those who were killed, to those who survived, to generations yet to come.
And yet there is a universal responsibility as well. Especially for those of us in societies where governments have materially and militarily enabled this genocide, the obligation is clear: we must support, amplify, and defend Palestinian voices and Palestinian institutions. We must provide the resources, the platforms, the security, and the solidarity that allows Palestinians to document, to remember, and to speak. We must use our positions to shield Palestinian documentation from censorship, from suppression, from the growing punishment directed at those who dare to tell the truth.
We must also look inward. We must document the complicity of our own governments, our own institutions, our own societies. We must create a record of how power operated, how denial was manufactured, how atrocity was enabled. This too is our responsibility.
The work of documentation is urgent and long. It is urgent because platforms delete content, links rot, memories fade, and perpetrators move on. Every day that passes, evidence disappears. Every day, the record becomes more fragile. And it is long because understanding genocide requires time. It requires care. It requires the willingness to sit with complexity, to verify, to listen, to honor both the scale of what happened and the particular lives that were lost.
The Gaza Genocide Center exists to do this work. It exists to preserve the record in ways that resist erasure. It exists to document not only incidents but systems, not only deaths but the machinery that produced them. It exists because Palestinians deserve to have their history preserved by institutions they can trust, and because the world deserves to understand what happened in Gaza so that it never happens again.
This is the moral significance of documentation. It is not neutral. It is not only practical. It is a refusal. It is a claim. It is an act of solidarity and accountability. It says: your lives matter. Your deaths will not be erased. Your history will be preserved. And the world will know what was done to you, and who did it, and why. And we will use that knowledge so that no other people suffer what you have suffered.
This is why we document Gaza.