What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out | Nesrine Malik

Artists killed, journalists silenced, libraries and mosques destroyed. What will be left to bind the survivors together?

I will start this column with a question for you, dear reader. What connects you with your country, and makes you feel it is yours? What gives you a sense of identity and belonging? It's the physical things, of course - where you live, where you were born, where your family and friends reside. But underlying those practical aspects, I suspect, are all the other things that you don't think about, that you take for granted. The music, the literature, the humour, the art and cinema and TV - all the abstract touchstones of an identity that form a connective tissue between you and your country.

I ask because the corollary of the question what makes a people?" is what erases one?" And what is unfolding in Gaza has made that question an urgent one. Because alongside the horrors of death and displacement, something else is happening - something existential, rarely acknowledged and potentially irreversible.