On: Israel's West Bank camp displacements could be crime against humanity, UN says

5 September 2026

A report of the United Nations asserts that the emptying of three camps may constitute a crime against humanity. The government answers that the report spreads misinformation. I notice that neither document disputes the fact at issue: thirty-three thousand people are not in their houses. The dispute concerns only the name of the absence.

In an apocryphal treatise on jurisprudence - De Nominibus Vacuorum, attributed to a jurist of whom no other record exists - there is a chapter proving that a law which forbids an act can never forbid the undoing of that act’s consequences, because the consequences, once accomplished, belong to the past, and no court has jurisdiction over the past. The treatise concludes, with perfect logic, that any crime committed slowly enough becomes geography. The author is imaginary; the conclusion is not.

I think of a chess problem I once saw printed in a Buenos Aires paper. White to move, and the position was such that every legal move lost. The composer had achieved something subtler: the board after the game was identical to the board before it, except that the pieces had exchanged colours. Whoever reads the UN report and whoever rejects it are reading the same page; only the ink has been reassigned.

The camps had names - Jenin, Nur Shams, Tulkarm - and the names persist in the reports, which is to say the catalogue of the destroyed is longer than the destroyed. A city erased leaves a bibliography. I do not know whether this is mercy or a further cruelty: the map outlives the territory it was drawn to replace.

I am old, and I have watched my own country commit its erasures, and I confess I no longer believe in the verdict, only in the record. The record is the punishment. It is not enough. It is all there is.