Amid the horror visited on Israel on October 7th and the ensuing 10 months of relentless killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military, armed chiefly by the US but also Germany, Britain and others, I have found little comfort. This has been a time of great woe and discombobulation.
One may have assumed – incorrectly, obviously – that were the horrors of “war” (if you can even call what has been happening to Gaza that) made visible, the effect would be so visceral that those with the power to stop it would use that power. This has proven once more to be a great, heartbreaking fallacy. Naive, even.
Every day, more death. Every day, more denial. Every day, more lies. Every day, more suffering is inflicted. We know what the immediate cost of this is: innocent Palestinian lives. But there is also an existential cost to all of our spirits. The moral injury the world is collectively enduring by watching this unfold without any meaningful action being taken to stop it is profound. Ultimately, all of us in the privileged situation of feeling pain from a distance are lucky to escape with a mere moral injury.
The only comfort I have found at all is in the protests against killing, and any actions anyone takes to defy, resist or speak out against this onslaught against the Palestinian people, wherever that solidarity occurs in the world. These protests and actions have formed a network of activism and outcry that can feel threadbare but which demonstrates far more courage and resolve than the cowardice of bombing a population from the air.
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I’ve turned to the writing of Susan Sontag, particularly On Photography (1977), and the work that forms something of its sequel, 2003′s Regarding the Pain of Others. “People don’t become inured to what they are shown – if that’s the right way to describe what happens – because of the quantity of images dumped on them,” Sontag wrote in the latter. “It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anaesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.”
What I feel most grim about, obviously, is what’s happening right now to innocent Palestinians. The next grim thought is a longer one, and orientates around what Israeli authorities’ disgusting actions in Gaza mean for all of our futures. The strain on the soul this is causing us daily, as we consume images of innocent children butchered by air strikes, is one thing. The other thing is where this leads us. If we construct our context every day, then what on earth is being built before us? Who’s next? What does this set in train?
Nobody can deny that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in Gaza. This has happened and it continues to happen. For all the obfuscation and the “right to defend itself” cliche that spins and spins to create a vortex of its own emptiness, there was, can and will never be any justification for the mass killings of Palestinians. We hear reports and testimonies of torture. We see IDF soldiers grinning as they claim “trophies”, and torch homes. We hear Israeli politicians dehumanising innocent people.
There is no justification for any of this. Even the most deluded, callous, propagandised Israeli solider or far-right extremist within the Israeli government knows that. Given that this reality is established, then the only moral position is to call for it to end, and for justice and consequences for those who presided over this terror.
Have the mass killings in Gaza been normalised, or are we just adapting to the horror? When we look at the bloodiest stains in the pages of history books, even a child can wonder: why did no one do anything? The realities of massacres, genocides, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing programmes are often seen in retrospect as unfathomable. How could the families of Nazis go about the mundanity of their daily lives in such proximity to mass murder in death camps, as so powerfully depicted recently in the film The Zone of Interest? How could taverns have been operating in Irish cities during the Great Hunger? How could the genocide of Muslim men and boys have happened in the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica? How could jingoistic lunacy have cascaded to the point of the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If we didn’t live through those, well, now we know what it feels like. It feels disgusting. It feels hopeless. It feels as though one’s faith in humanity has been truly broken.
“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering,” Sontag wrote. “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent – if not inappropriate – response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”