Today, writing feels like planting the proverbial tree in the face of the apocalypse. Decades ago, I started writing to make words mean again. When I fled as a refugee from Bosnia to Sweden in the 1990s, there was a time when words stopped working in every way possible.

I could not even say “tree” and connect it to the big beautiful things outside the camp. I was crazy like Hamlet, crying “Words, words, words!” Sound and fury. Signifying nothing.

We Bosnians were reluctant to use the word “genocide” until the mighty court told us we could, and even then, or especially then, the industry of denial wanted to prevent us from calling a spade a spade. The deniers taught us words do have weight. The right words can lead to action. Not like these empty phrases we have been hearing about the genocide of Palestinians.

I learned English late in life, mainly because I was ashamed that Swedes spoke it well and I could not string two words together to save my life. With time, I learned that the stories of our forced exile, although unique, mirrored the experience of displacement of millions of other people. Somehow, they created magical intimacies with people who were so vastly different from us, who sometimes hailed from places I had never even heard of, but they had heard of me. They had read my stories.

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I imagined that this miraculous human connection was akin to me falling in love with this long-dead foreigner called Shakespeare at Stockholm University. His words came from the mouth of a tiny Pakistani professor with the biggest voice I had ever heard. Ishrat Lindblad, may she rest in peace, had grey hair, a colourful sari, and a British accent. “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” she would recite in class.

She would become my teacher, my fiercest critic, and then my biggest fan. Always a friend. She was the reason I became a teacher, too. She was the reason I understood why Muslims pray for their teachers five times a day, right after they pray for their parents. She was a good listener and did not speak a lot, but when she spoke, it mattered. Never an empty phrase. Never a wasted word. Always from the heart.

For the longest time I wondered why God keeps repeating in the Quran that there will be no idle talk in Paradise. It was one of the most puzzling things to read. I mean, everyone can understand that the allure of the afterlife is expressed through things like gardens, rivers of milk and honey, riches, and unimaginable pleasures.

But to state over and over that Paradise will be free from “trivial” or “wasteful” chatter was curious at best. I could not imagine anyone saying: “Hey, I’ll work hard and be good and sacrifice everything to skip all this empty talk.” Now I can.

Remembering and reliving my past as we watch the rawest forms of power exercised on the Palestinian people, I am once again brought to that moment when “tree” was not a tree and I could not string two words together even if you had me at gunpoint.

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I am sometimes disgusted in the halls of my university where people are supposed to say meaningful things but what I mostly hear is empty talk. I do not recognise my Sweden, the country that took in thousands of us Bosnians at a time of its greatest economic crisis and it did well after that.

A former head of a Swedish church told me how he once flew to Sarajevo with aid, landed on a dangerous tarmac, unloaded, and flew back. Everyone contributed. During World War II, Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Hungary by issuing protective passports and sheltering them in buildings declared as Swedish territory. I am a beneficiary of the Wallenberg Foundation which helped me finance my PhD 20 years ago.

Now Sweden is cutting aid. Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s budget for “sustainable peace” has been significantly reduced in just a few years, especially for the MENA region. We condemn and cut ties according to convenience. We aid according to self-interest. The insolence of office.

Sweden abstained on a United Nations resolution demanding a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Up there, in that big colosseum of nations, resolutions sound like New Year’s resolutions of us mere mortals, and the question is if one decisive thumbs-down can be moved to thumbs-up by the crowds. And so “enterprises of great pith and moment … turn awry and lose the name of action”, as Hamlet said.

It has been almost a year since I wrote “Schrödinger’s Genocide”, and I wish the world had proved me wrong on anything. I’ve been writing, for words are my tools. I’ve written to the Swedish government about the future of education in Gaza, once there is peace. Written to friends and foes. So much is being said and written right now. We are drowning in words. It is as if every word has become a meme on endless loops and writing anything still feels like planting the proverbial tree in the face of the apocalypse.

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Even now as the bombing has stopped and the long-awaited exchange of captives has started, I know from our own history of genocide that crimes continue under the pretense of a ceasefire, under the silence of the media and the meddling of foreign powers. If the war really does come to an end, there are other kinds of fires that will have to be put out by those surviving men, women, and children, whom we will eventually displace from our attention just as others before us have, allowing the cycle of their physical displacement to continue.

Their images might slowly disappear from our feeds but we must not allow condemnations and calls for action to remain mere words. We must not stop demanding justice and respect for Palestinian rights.”

“Words, words, words,” I hear the ghost of Shakespeare on the breath of my late teacher, and wonder, is it nobler “to suffer those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.