Plumbing the Depths

For years now, the news from Gaza and Sudan – insofar as it reaches us at all – has been horrifying, day after day after day. How do we make sense of what is going on?

Is it just, as some insist, that ‘shit happens’? But why does it always seem to happen in the same places? Is there a pattern here – and if so, what is causing it, and how can we disrupt it?

This talk is hosted jointly by Bath Friends of Palestine and Bath Stop War.

The image above is taken from the recent film Ocean with David Attenborough and shows the devastating impact on the seabed of bottom-trawling. It seems an apt analogy for Israel’s ‘war on Hamas’ in Gaza, which has turned a thriving human ecosystem into a virtual desert.

Nesrine Malik is a columnist and feature writer for the Guardian, and author of the widely acclaimed We Need New Stories: Challenging the toxic myths behind our age of discontent (2019), praised by the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra for its ‘immense moral courage and intellectual power’. Her journalism has also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Policy among others.

She has twice been longlisted for the Orwell Prize, and was shortlisted in both 2019 and 2020 for the British Journalism Award for ‘comment journalist of the year’. In 2022, she was one of three recipients of the inaugural Robert B Silvers Prize for Journalism. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

She was born in Khartoum, and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.