House Arab
September 24, 2025 at 01:01AMIsmail Ibrahim was a fact-checker at a magazine when October 7 happened. (That magazine was The New Yorker, though Ibrahim doesn’t say so outright.) He details what it was like to be the only Arab on staff as Israel pivoted its policy vis-a-vis Palestinians from apartheid to genocide:
I stopped checking movie reviews and spent the ensuing months verifying how many people died in Palestine and the ways in which they died, calling people on the phone to ask how, precisely, their relative had been killed. The work fell to me because none of the other checkers spoke Arabic. At first, it seemed important to me that the language we used reflect the horror of what was happening. But I was defeated in trying to secure the most basic changes:
from: terrorist to: militant
add ‘occupied’ before ‘West Bank’
from ‘Israeli War of Independence’ to ‘the Nakba’I wrote up a style guide and circulated it among the checkers and copy editors, though I don’t know if anyone ever used it. I started to feel a target growing on my back and stopped fighting as much. I was exhausted. The work was shredding me, and I was not sleeping well. I stayed up late scrolling Twitter and watching Al Jazeera, the tide of images of destruction and death washing over me, leaving me feeling raw and psychotic. When people asked how I was doing, I laughed. Horrible, I said, like it was a great punchline. Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.
Around four months into the war on Gaza, scholars of genocide were reaching a consensus that what was happening in Palestine was a genocide, the crime of crimes, and I waited for the magazine to say so, too. I tried to talk to the editor-in-chief about using the word in our coverage, but he said he didn’t think it was a genocide. The word’s conspicuous absence led me to suspect that he had prohibited its usage among the editors. This was a notable exception to the accepted epistemology; a few months into the job, I overheard another checker cold call an addiction scholar to confirm that gambling was, in fact, addictive. But I did not have it in me to keep fighting. I justified this to myself by saying that the war machine would not be halted by any linguistic alteration I might make in a magazine mostly skimmed over by American suburbanites while they pooped.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/23/house-arab/
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