Earlier this week, in Gaza City, Israel carried out an air strike on a school which about 350 displaced families were using as a shelter. Many of these families had recently arrived from the nearby town of Beit Hanoun, after the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had ordered them to leave their homes. Part of the building also served as a mosque; when the strike hit, dawn prayers were being held. About 100 people were killed in the bombing. As always, many of them were children.
As is now customary in this continuing mass slaughter, almost as soon as the air strike occurred scenes of overwhelming barbarity began to flood the internet. Humans blown bodily asunder; parts of corpses scattered and strewn; children screaming over the dying and the dead. Such horrors are now routine, having over the last 10 months become part of the texture of daily life. Over our morning coffees, still bleary and barely awake, we read of the latest atrocities, and choose either to watch or ignore footage of suffering on an almost unthinkable scale (“This video may contain graphic or violent content”).
It can be hard to process this information, to make sense of the horror and to connect it with our own relatively comfortable and secure reality. The day after the air strike on the school in Gaza, I saw on Instagram a video of a little girl screaming over the body of her father, who had been killed in the attack, and I found myself wanting to know not why this was done – Israel’s stated rationale is nothing if not well known, worn so smooth by endless repetition that it scarcely registers to the touch – but how, and by what precise means. A moment or two on Google yielded the information, courtesy of CNN, that the weapon that killed the girl’s father, along with dozens of other civilians, was something called a GBU-39 small diameter bomb. Another moment on Google took me to the website of its American manufacturer, Boeing.
Looking through the website of a weapons manufacturer is an interesting exercise, an object lesson in cognitive dissonance. In the “Our Values” section of the site, I read the following: “Across our global enterprise, Boeing employees are united by a shared commitment to our values, which serve as the guiding principles for all we do. As we innovate and operate to make the world better, each one of us takes personal accountability for living these values.” You can also read a good deal of material on the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, its celebration of Pride month and its respect for LGBTQIA+ team-mates, and its record in sustainability.
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Elsewhere on the site can be found the catalogue listing for the GBU-39, the bomb that killed that little girl’s father, and which scattered the body parts of dozens of civilians throughout the remains of the school they were sheltering in. This “low-cost, precision strike weapon system”, as the catalogue describes it, is “effective against a wide variety of stationary targets” including “bunkers, air defence assets, airfields” and so on. The list is a long but by no means exhaustive one; it does not include, for instance, such stationary targets as schools or mosques.
There is a particular horror that arises from the juxtaposition of the abstract language on the Boeing website – the language of sales, of corporate values, of technological specification – and the concrete fact of what their products are for, what they do in the world. It makes me wonder about the people who work for these companies, and how they justify to themselves the work that they do. There must, presumably, be some psychic membrane by which the experience of such work is cordoned off from the distant fact of its effects. There must be some mechanism through which the company’s celebration of Pride month, say, becomes a more meaningfully felt reality than the Palestinian child weeping over the corpse of her father.
It seems to me that the jarring contrast, on the website of the Boeing Company, between the abstract language of liberal values and the concrete reality of colossal violence, reflects a larger tension between the humanistic rhetoric of the liberal democracies of the West and the killing they facilitate and support. Think of Ursula von der Leyen, who speaks of the EU’s role as a “force for peace and for positive change”, but who for many months provided unconditional support to the assault on Gaza on the principle of Israel’s “right to defend itself”. Consider the Biden administration, with its unwavering commitment, at the level of rhetoric, to peace, diplomacy and restraint, and its even more unwavering commitment, at the level of policy, to providing Israel with American-made weapons such as those which were dropped on that school.
As I looked at the Boeing website, it struck me that the same company which made that bomb also made the machine that, only days earlier, took my family and I to Greece on holiday. The Boeing 737 aircraft that flew us to Athens so that we could see the Acropolis and visit museums and lie by a pool for days on end; the Boeing GBU-39 that was dropped on that school by another aircraft: both of these technologies originated in the same place, produced and sold by the same multinational corporation. They were made for very different reasons, to do very different things, but for the benefit of the same shareholders.
And perhaps this fact doesn’t make me as complicit as the employees of Boeing – united, as they are, by a shared commitment to their company’s values – or its shareholders. But it deepens my insistent and unnerving sense, as a citizen of the supposedly peaceful and civilised West, that as long as this annihilation of an oppressed people continues, none of us can ever be innocent.
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