The other day I found, tucked in my copy of Colette’s Earthly Paradise, a bougainvillea blossom, still a vivid fuschia, plucked and pressed during a holiday in Lagos last year.

That time feels ages ago. We returned home only a few days before Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel retaliated. “It’s complicated,” I was told at times. Never mind all the violence from the Nakba onwards. “[A]n incremental genocide” since 2006, according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

Shortly after the liberation of France from German occupation in August 1944, Colette wrote: “Fifteen hundred days. A thousand days, and then more than five hundred on top of that. As many days and nights as it takes a baby to be born, to grow, to start talking, and to become an intelligent and delightful human being; enough days for other human beings, completed and flourishing, to go down in terrifying numbers to their deaths.”

One hundred thirty-odd days: more than 28,000 Palestinians have died; or 1 in 100 Gazans. How many more?

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