The origins of this essay lie in a recent visit to the Middle East shelf in a Washington, D.C., bookstore during a visit from my home in the actual Middle East. I was on a short break from the story I’ve been living and covering in Israel for three decades, and from the tragedies that have become routine for Israelis and for our neighbors since the war that began on October 7, 2023.
As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.
The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.
After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.
It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
The memorable cover of the genre’s most popular title, and the first one I read, shows a stylized girl with a bomb about to drop on her head. The author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and immigrated to Canada, where he reported for The Globe and Mail before moving to the United States. He’s now an American citizen living in Oregon.
In the pages of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad watches the war in Gaza unfold in portrayals on television and online, describing it as an era-defining evil that people will eventually claim to have opposed, like the crimes of the Nazis or the conquistadors. The war resonates for him as someone living with the displacement of his own migration from the Islamic world as a teen, with a heightened sensitivity to racism, and with the abiding discomfort of a Muslim man living in North America.
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The book’s title, particularly the word this, led me to expect an account of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, or the war itself, but the strangest aspect of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the author’s slim interest in any of those topics. We follow his travels in Oregon, and in Montreal. He listens to Nirvana. His backyard deck collapses in a way that feels emotionally significant, an episode that gets more space in the book than the entire ideology of Hamas—including the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews in pursuit of the supremacy of Islam—which is never mentioned at all. He writes sentences like “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance,” and “Fear obscures the necessity of its causing.” His daughter, we learn, “turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.” The book won last year’s National Book Award for nonfiction.
El Akkad complains about racism from officials on the U.S.-Canada border, about the hardships of the writer’s life, and about the immoral Israeli investments of people who once gave him a Canadian book prize worth $100,000, which he doesn’t mention giving back. “I’ve sat through a wildly uncomfortable book tour interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate, and the interviewer believed me,” he tells us. We’re meant to sneer at this prejudice and sympathize with its victim, but why wouldn’t the interviewer believe him? And why does an author claiming to have discovered the age’s defining evil seem to be concerned primarily with himself? This was confusing at first, but as I read Gazology more deeply, I realized this approach is a characteristic of the genre: In these books, Gaza is not a subject but a stage.
The author gives no indication of ever having set foot in Gaza or in Israel, and when he talks about witnessing events, the recurring phrase is “I watch footage.” Some events are “witnessed” in this fashion—that is, via images that are subject to Hamas censorship and intimidation in Gaza, often curated by Western activists practicing journalism as agitprop, and then supercharged by the various Qatari, Chinese, and Russian information campaigns bending our online algorithms. Other events are not witnessed but ignored to the extent possible, most notably the October 7 massacre that began the war. In what turns out to be another feature of the genre, El Akkad sidesteps the butchery of that day by homing in on one false story promulgated after the attack about Israeli babies who were beheaded or put in an oven. That didn’t happen. But a reader doesn’t learn what did happen: namely, a premeditated mass murder committed by teams of terrorists going house to house through Israeli communities, burning families in their bedrooms, kidnapping toddlers and grandparents, and gunning down more than 350 young people at a music festival. To a reader of this book the motivation behind the attack remains mysterious. Though it was carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by the Arabic acronym Hamas, the words Islam or Islamic appear in the entire book a total of four times. The word genocide, on the other hand, appears more than 40 times.
In these books, Gaza is not a subject but a stage.
This word is key to this book and to the entire Gazology genre: Genocide is the equivalent of water in Dune, the substance that moves the storyline along. If the Jews have committed genocide, everyone else can finally stop thinking about the genocide committed against them, can turn without guilt against the state that allowed Jews to protect themselves for the first time, and can sink with relief back into pre-Holocaust thought patterns—because by committing the ultimate evil, the Jews have finally proved that those thought patterns were correct. The accusation serves to justify violence against Israelis, including, retroactively, the violence of October 7, thus making them responsible for a war launched by Palestinians. The “Gaza genocide” may be an obvious falsehood, but it’s an irresistible story.
After two-and-a-half years of a brutal war fought by Israel against an enemy that makes itself indistinguishable from civilians by design, the population of Gaza is alive. Hamas’s own statistics put military and civilian fatalities—a distinction the group doesn’t make—at just over 3 percent of the prewar population, and the people of Gaza are largely displaced and suffering but have increased in number since the beginning of the war. The genocide charge is not an analysis of Israeli operations but a tool designed to shift attention away from the people who started the war and built the twisted battlefield on which it would be fought, and to mass-produce a verbal weapon that can be used to anathematize opponents and obscure their concerns. Using the term is a way not to think, for example, about the real options available to an Israeli officer approaching a Gaza town containing 15 miles of Hamas tunnels, 1,000 jihadists dressed like civilians, and several dozen Israeli hostages alive or dead in unknown locations.
El Akkad, watching on the internet from Oregon, is convinced that he’s seeing “the wholesale murder of a people” and “one of the largest killing sprees of Muslims in recent history.” The practice of inversion, I found, is a habit of the writers in this field, which explains the following sentence: “Of all the aftereffects of the War on Terror years, the most frequently underestimated is the heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence.”
Gaza Faces History
Enzo Traverso, an Italian historian on staff at Cornell, opens his own contribution to the genre, Gaza Faces History, with an admission: He is “not a specialist on the Middle East, nor on the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor on Palestine.”
Nevertheless he would like to share his thoughts. “We are not dealing with two armies, given the disparity between the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and Hamas, but with executioners and victims, an army and a civilian population—precisely the conditions associated with genocide,” Traverso writes. He does admit “a gap” between what we would usually call a genocide and the events in Gaza—the gap presumably being that the victims in this case aren’t dead. But genocides, he assures us, “differ in scale and may be committed using a variety of means.” The professor then proceeds to his real topic, which isn’t Gaza but Jews.
The Jews, we are to understand, have used the Holocaust to justify their own crimes, culminating—with a kind of literary inexorability—in their transformation into Nazis. The word jihad, which is Hamas’s word for its own ideology and actions, doesn’t appear in Gaza Faces History, but the Warsaw Ghetto appears four times. When the word tunnels makes its single appearance, this is the context: “[T]he destruction of Gaza by the IDF recalls the razing of the Warsaw ghetto by General [Jurgen] Stroop in 1943, and the combatants leaping out of tunnels to strike at an occupying army that sees them as ‘animals’ inevitably suggests the Jewish fighters in the ghetto.”
He goes on to discuss Al Jolson and minstrel shows, and includes a tangent about a scholar who once wrote that the medieval blood libel against Jews was actually true. It’s hard to understand what he means by this, but it’s clear that in the mind of this European scholar, “Gaza” exists not in the Islamic world but in the mental plumbing of Christian Europe, his home court. When he does turn his attention to the place mentioned in the book’s title, he begins to trip over his own ideas. “Nothing can justify” the actions of Hamas on October 7, he writes, and then justifies them repeatedly: Gaza was an “open-air prison,” so massacring Jews at a rave in southern Israel is not, he assures the reader, like massacring French concertgoers in Paris. “All that Hamas can do, not being a state, is to take hostages and launch rockets. Hamas’s terrorism is just the dialectic twin of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is never pretty, but the terrorism of the oppressed is generated by that of their oppressor.” And we must understand why so many people rejoiced on October 7, an event which, like El Akkad, he avoids describing in detail: “[S]chadenfreude is a human emotion, like the wan smile on the faces of Auschwitz inmates when they heard the news of the bombing of German cities.”
By now Traverso has forgotten that he is “not a specialist,” and also that Hamas’s atrocities can’t be justified, and continues with decreasing coherence. Israel “has every right to exist,” he writes, and continues, in the same sentence, “but the future of this nation is threatened by the political entity governing and representing it today.” There seems to be no editor on hand to intervene. “Faith,” the historian declares, passing judgment on poor souls who don’t share his clarity, “often calls for a denial of reality.”
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
Andreas Malm, a Marxist academic from Sweden, would like to widen the lens: Israelis are responsible for the destruction of Palestinians, to be sure, but that’s not all. They’re also complicit in the destruction of the entire planet. In The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth—part of a new Gazology series from Verso Books, whose website boasts a commitment to “radical publishing”—we learn that Zionism and fossil fuels are not merely the dual evils facing the world but conjoined twins.
The author quotes Theodor Herzl: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct,” which Malm explains is a reference to “the construction of racial colonies.” In fact, this line from The Jewish State refers to writing, and specifically to Herzl’s method for building an argument on the page. Malm clearly hasn’t read the text. In his defense, the author apologizes for his busy schedule: “Work on other projects has prevented me from giving more than a rough (and lightly referenced) account,” he writes in his introduction.
In his real life, the author seems to be an employee of the Swedish welfare state as an associate professor in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. His fantasy life is quite different: “If I lived in Gaza, I would, I imagine, be a long-standing member of the PFLP,” he writes, referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. If he were a woman, “I would have joined the women’s brigades of the DFLP,” that being the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (Both are leftist factions famous from the days of Palestinian airline terrorism and eclipsed since the 1980s by jihadists.) He believes that the Gaza war is not just a genocide, but possibly worse than past genocides because it’s supported by countries in the West: “I must confess to some naivety here: I had not expected quite this voracious an appetite for Palestinian blood.” He’s not thrilled by every aspect of October 7, but admits with refreshing honesty that he did greet the massacres with “cries of jubilation.”
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth argues for a special link between Israel and global environmental degradation. The author’s thesis revolves around the year 1840, when the British Empire first used armed steamboats in the Levant, demonstrating the supremacy of coal and also sparking the early glimmers of Christian Zionism among British aristocrats. “Here is the first moment of articulation: the moment that ignited the globalization of steam, through its deployment in war, was also the moment that conceived the Zionist project.” Steam can obviously be linked to nearly every historical development on Earth since its invention, and the unique connection to Zionism remains elusive to a reader despite the author’s passion, which is expressed in sentences like: “However mighty they may be, the fossil fuel and Zionist lobbies are epiphenomenal excrescences from deep structures that have operated over a very longue durée.”
The central irony of Malm’s thesis is that until a few years ago Israel had no fossil fuels to speak of, unlike its traditional enemies, who include the world’s greatest oil producers. Replying to a colleague who seems to have politely pointed this out, the author concedes that the issue is less fossil fuels than who’s using them. When the Soviet Union used oil revenue to defeat fascism or to fund his own heroes from the PFLP, that was good. Oil is also good when the Islamic petro-dictatorship Qatar uses the proceeds to fund its propaganda channel Al Jazeera, which the author describes as the “single source of sustained sanity in the global media landscape.”
From his command post in the faculty lounge at Lund, the author calls for bloodshed. “Limiting, stopping, reversing the destruction of Palestine and the planet therefore require, as a logically unassailable condition, the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and racial colonies,” he writes; however, “not necessarily their physical destruction; but necessarily their decommissioning and repurposing, in the cases where that is possible, and where not, on the path to their abolition, yes, their physical destruction.”
The World After Gaza
A reader of Gazology discovers not only that Jews are committing a great sin, which they are trying to hide, but that these actions exist at the heart of the age. Once again, it turns out, some “physical destruction” may be necessary to save the world from them. As the Irish novelist Sally Rooney recently told an audience, echoing the title of Malm’s book, “By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on Earth.” Or in the words of another English-language novelist, the American writer Susan Abulhawa, referring to the “vile colony” of Israel: “The only way humanity has a fighting chance at a moral future is if this cancer is excised from our political, moral, and social reality.” This belief is held by figures as seemingly divergent as Candace Owens, the popular American podcaster, who told her followers this month that “There will never be peace in the world while Israel exists,” and the defense minister of Pakistan, who posted on X that “Israel is evil and a curse for humanity.”
The World After Gaza is the contribution from Pankaj Mishra, a writer who was born in India and lives in Britain. In keeping with the genre, the book’s subject is not Gaza. It’s about literature, and specifically Jewish literature, and more specifically Jewish literature related to the Holocaust. The words Holocaust or Shoah appear more than 250 times in The World After Gaza, four times as often as the word Gaza.
The book begins with a blizzard of quotes from Jewish writers like Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud before proceeding to Isaac Babel and, eventually, to five whole pages about a novel by Saul Bellow. A reader gets the impression that Jewish writers are being stacked here like sandbags against the suspicion that the author may be engaged in something other than honest analysis when he describes the Israeli war in Gaza as “an act of political evil,” a “livestreamed mass-murder spree,” and a genocide to rival the Holocaust. There are other tragedies on Earth, to be sure: “Yet no disaster compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity, and bad conscience.”
Once a Gazology reader realizes that the goal is not an analysis of an actual war in Gaza, the search begins for the real use to which “Gaza” is being put. Mishra’s project, as far as I can tell, is to replace the genocide of Jews in the Western mind with a genocide by Jews, and then to replace the Jewish writers whom the author admires with—well, with himself. He returns repeatedly to the celebrated Italian novelist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who is mentioned dozens of times in a book that has “Gaza” in the title, in which the name Yahya Sinwar is not mentioned once. Mishra seems to want to be Primo Levi, and even if we understand this is impossible—because Levi is gifted and Mishra is not, because Levi is a witness and Mishra is a voyeur, because Levi’s Holocaust was real and Mishra’s is an ideological fantasy—one still finds something authentic and plaintive in this longing.
The slipperiness of Mishra’s book made me miss the Swede who identifies as a PFLP commando, and who at least says what he means. Mishra regrets that the Palestinians have been outmaneuvered by “internationally connected and resourceful Zionists.” He sees “the insidious racism that had helped prioritize the interests of the West’s chosen nation in the Middle East while demeaning Palestinian suffering in Western eyes.” Getting insidious racism and chosen nation in one sentence is, a reader senses, what he considers daring. He quotes Roald Dahl: “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Mishra calls Dahl an “antisemite,” and seems to agree with him.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Any worldview that places Jewish malfeasance at its center will draw Jewish adherents who see the advantage of being at the center of something, and on the Gazology shelf we find a sad little volume by Peter Beinart, an American journalist. This one begins, as usual, not with Gaza but with the author, in America: He’s in college, or at a conference in Colorado, holding forth on the Bible and on an alphabet soup of American Jewish organizations he doesn’t like.
Unlike the other books, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning takes the trouble to describe and humanize some of the Jewish victims of October 7. But the author thinks Hamas gunmen are akin to anticolonialist rebels in Haiti or the Mau Mau of Kenya—that is, that their actions are an effect, not a cause, and that their grievance is justified. Hatred of Jews who live outside Israel is bigotry and a feature of the political right, Beinart explains. Hatred of Jews in Israel is rational.
The project of this particular “Gaza” book is to find a place for Jews in a Western left increasingly gripped by anti-Zionist conspiracies, while simultaneously offering other leftists a Jewish reassurance that their current preoccupation with Jews is unrelated to the historically recurring preoccupation with the same group of people. The chant “from the river to the sea,” which is a call to replace the single Jewish state with a Muslim-majority state, expresses a “democratic vision,” he writes, so there’s nothing to worry about unless you oppose democracy. He endorses the idea that the Jewish side of the recent war must be at the center of the world’s understanding of injustice: “In its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our age.”
Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide
The last category on the Gaza shelf is different from the others. It consists of testimony from people actually in Gaza, rather than of the thoughts of foreigners energized by this tragedy. Displaced in Gaza, for example, introduces 27 Palestinian civilians rendered homeless in the devastation of the war. A woman named Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa gives a harrowing account of being on the move under fire with six children, living in shelters: “We just want the war to stop and to return to our lives before the war.” Another account is from Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, a mother of four: “I feared for my children due to intense bombardment. Occupation forces bombed several houses adjacent to us, and dozens of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones were martyred.” Her son Odai is killed.
The correct response to these suffering people is compassion. No one would want to be in their place. An observer can only point out what isn’t in any of the testimonies: Hamas, the group that has ruled Gaza for two decades, which started the war, prolonged it for two-and-a-half years, and fought it from inside and under the houses of the people in the book. Whether because of coercion or ideological sympathy, these Gazans do not admit to seeing any of the group’s tens of thousands of armed fighters, or any of the thousands of tunnel entrances across Gaza. They didn’t see the Israeli hostages and corpses paraded through their streets on October 7, and weren’t in any of the cheering crowds.
The disappearance of Hamas is the key tactic in making Israel seem irrational or malign.
I don’t mean that the presence of Hamas is played down in Displaced in Gaza but that the word Hamas doesn’t appear even once. The same is true of a recent New York Times essay written by Ghada Abdulfattah in the same vein, “Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future,” and it’s true of most first-person accounts from Gaza aimed at Western audiences. In Hamas messaging for Middle Eastern audiences, by contrast, like speeches from the group’s leaders and viral videos with red triangles marking Israeli targets, the brave fighters of the Islamic Resistance are said to be striking the Zionist enemy with the support of a population committed to victory and martyrdom.
In the work of Mosab Abu Toha, for example, a writer whose vivid essays in The New Yorker made him perhaps the most prominent Gazan voice on this war, Hamas does appear by name, but as a distant actor in the background of a catastrophe engineered by Israel. It would be interesting to read what Abu Toha, who fled Gaza and now lives in the U.S., actually knows about Hamas; he likely has acquaintances or relatives in the organization, as do most people in the Hamas-controlled territory. But this knowledge is out of bounds. When a library he founded was destroyed early in the fighting, he blamed “Israel’s genocidal campaign to erase Gaza and everything that breathes of life and love,” and in February, Abu Toha could be found on X accusing Israel of trafficking in the skin of dead Palestinians. Early last year, around the same time a book of his poetry was published by Knopf, Abu Toha decried the fact that the Israeli hostage Emily Damari, who was shot and seized from her home near the Gaza border on October 7, was considered a hostage even though she was a police officer; the poet’s post ended with the phrase, “Fuck your language.” Last spring he won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.
The disappearance of Hamas is the key tactic in making Israel seem irrational or malign. It’s like describing the American war in the Pacific without mentioning Japan, or describing all Japanese on every Pacific island as civilians. If you understand there’s a Hamas commander in a given house, for example, it’s possible to perceive the reasoning behind the air strike that destroys the house, even if you think the civilian casualties are tragic or immoral and feel sympathy for mothers like Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa. If there is no Hamas, the strike is just a massacre.
The genre I’ve called Gazology makes three central claims. Firstly, that the war in Gaza is not a response to the attack of October 7, which was either unimportant or justified, and was in any case unrelated to the faith and ideology of the attackers or of the hundreds of millions who support them across the Islamic world. Secondly, that no firsthand experience, language skills, military knowledge, or even proximity are required for an author working in the genre, because all relevant facts are incontrovertible and available online. And lastly, and most importantly, Gazology rests on the idea that the Gaza war is not just Israel’s fault, a bad decision, or even a crime, but the doorway to the dark workings of the world.
It’s in the last point that a reader glimpses the battery powering the genre. Gazology is a literature of Jewish evil. Its origins lie not in journalism or academic inquiry but in the pseudosciences that have sprung up over the centuries to explain the problems of humanity with stories about the malevolence of this group of people.
When I began working as a correspondent for the international press in Israel 20 years ago, I was surprised to find myself participating in coverage guided less by curiosity than by activist ideas that were then taking hold in the Western left. One of these ideas, common in Soviet propaganda and in Marxist circles since the 1970s, portrayed the Jewish state as the prime embodiment of the ills of the West—particularly imperialism, racism, and militarism, if not apartheid and genocide. A similar process of ideological capture was playing out in those years across much of the storytelling apparatus of the West—the academy, human-rights groups, the United Nations, publishing—merging to create an information bubble that was inflaming public opinion while making the real world harder and harder to understand.
I had a sense of what one result would be. In 2014, after leaving my job as a correspondent for the Associated Press, I wrote two essays describing what I’d seen and warning that the kind of journalism now being produced “laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” Just over a decade later, the Gazology shelf shows that the migration is complete. These alarming ideas are now accepted by many as so self-evident that they no longer require defense.
It’s tempting to mock these writers as the grandchildren of phrenologists. It would be honest to point out how shoddy the inquiry, how poor the writing, how evident the pathologies at work. But dismissing them would be a mistake. This is an old poison, and a strong one. It shows every sign of working.
I've written on other sites how on a visit to the Jewish Museum some years ago I perused the books for sale....one anti Zionist tome after another. My public library may install a Gazology section. It's got LGBTQ and Native American shelves. Also some time ago at Kinokuniya NYC Japanese language book store....Pappe's Ethnic cleansing book in English was front and center as you entered. In my in box from Academia.edu, one PHD and Journal screed after another re "settler colonialism" and the criminality of Israel. Thanks for your report and description of these new additions to hate Israel hate Jews unchecked and endorsed. More books for required reading for Zionism 101 taught by Mr. Mamdani at Columbia. Plus his own book on the evil of Zionism that is coming out. Jewish Studies hire Jewish and Israeli Jewish anti Zionist professors. The worst seem to be the Israeli anti Zionists....like you they have been born and or lived in Israel and they claim to know that of which they write.
Hi Motti, Thank you for this very important article! This is the product of decades of propaganda and Jew hatred, and is also shocking that some of the writers are educators of our young. As if it could be any worse, I shutter to think about the criteria being used by the literary organizations that are awarding these scandalous works, and the media that are aiding and abbetting this dangerous genre. What happened to truth? G-D help us!