I’ve been writing this column for a year now, and mostly it’s been a blessing. It has been, for the most part, a welcome weekly change from the otherwise incremental rhythm of my writing, a way of forcing me to think through my responses to the bewildering flux of world events, and an opportunity to do so for a readership that might not otherwise seek out my writing.
But there are times, too, when I feel as though I am merely contributing to what is already a gross oversupply of opinion, when I struggle with a sense of futility around the whole enterprise.
I’ve never really thought of myself as one of God’s natural-born opinion columnists because I don’t tend to generate a lot of opinions, or for that matter to especially value the ability to do so – in writers, or people more generally. If I were to characterise what I’m mostly trying to do with this column it would probably have less to do with other people, with trying to persuade them of this or that, than with myself. I think what I’m trying to do most weeks is just to say, as simply as possible, what I see.
And this is what I remind myself I am doing when I am confronted with the problem of writing about Israel’s assault on Gaza, as I have done fairly frequently in the time I have been writing this column.
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As a writer the last thing you want to wind up doing is saying some version of the same thing repeatedly. You want to find fresh territory, new subjects to test yourself against; you want to keep yourself interested. You don’t want to be saying the same thing, week after week, column after column – that, for instance, Israel is engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, that its explicit policy is now the destruction of all possibility for civil life in Gaza, and that in their support for it the liberal democracies of the West are exposing the hollowness of their supposed values.
But, on the other hand, what am I going to do – not write about it? That doesn’t seem much of an option either, or not for me at any rate. The sense that there are only so many times you can repeat the same basic point seems obviously, and troublingly, bound up with the sense that there is only so long people can stay interested in this particular campaign of slaughter – that eventually it will simply form part of the overall texture of our world’s ambient horrors.
And so I’ll say what I have seen in recent days, what all of us have seen, if only because it seems morally preferable to not saying it.
What I have seen is the report that 15 Palestinian paramedics and other rescue workers were killed in southern Gaza by the IDF – killed, as the UN put it, “one by one” – and that they were then buried in a mass grave.
What I have seen is the IDF claiming that these medical workers and their ambulances were in an “active combat zone”, and that they fired on them because they were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”, and that they were not aid workers or paramedics at all but “terrorists”.
And what I have seen, some days later, was indisputable proof, obtained and published by the New York Times, of what everyone already knew: that those denials by the IDF were nothing but lies. This proof came in the form of a video recorded on a phone by one of the Red Crescent paramedics, in the moments before his murder, depicting him and his colleagues arriving on the scene with their ambulances’ emergency signals flashing.
In the video a voice declares that there are Israeli soldiers present; immediately there is a barrage of gunfire, and the paramedic who is filming begins to recite a declaration of his faith because he understands that he is about to be killed. “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God,” he says, his voice trembling in fear. “Forgive me, mother, this is the path I chose, mother, to help people, forgive me mother, I swear I chose this path only to help people.”
The video stops shortly afterwards. We know that this man, and 14 other aid workers, wearing the clearly marked reflective jackets of their trade – their hands bound, in some cases, with zip-ties – were executed by the IDF, and that their bodies were thrown in a pit. We know that their vehicles – ambulances, a fire truck, a UN vehicle – were crushed and flattened and bulldozed into the pit too, and that their murderers then covered the pit with dirt in the belief that the evidence of this massacre would likely never be found, and that if it were to be found they would in any case never be brought to justice for it.
Almost certainly those murderers were right about this. It seems unlikely that they will ever face the consequences of their actions. In a sane world they would be prosecuted for this war crime, and they would spend the rest of their lives in prison. In a sane world their prime minister – along with the other architects of the genocidal campaign of which their crimes were a part – would be brought to justice too, and would face the charges brought against them by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
And in a sane world no one would ever again believe, or pretend to believe, the lies told by the Israeli government to cover and distract from its crimes against Palestinians. No one in such a world would believe that government when it said, as it did after the discovery of the footage of that massacre, that its soldiers had “mistakenly” identified those 15 paramedics as a threat, and that the massacre was “under thorough investigation”.
But that’s not the world we live in. It may be that, given the world we do live in, we will have to make do with saying what we see. It isn’t nothing and it might be all we have, at least for now.
