Bombed hospitals, buried children: We have become numb to the destruction of Gaza
Last May, when the image of a child being decapitated in Rafah began circulating, my friend messaged me: “This is the image. This is the right one. Now the world will roar.” For many of us, this has been the reality of the past few months: waiting for the image that will shatter complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so stunning that it will be non-negotiable. A child amputated. A body torn to pieces. A girl hanging from a building. We are still waiting.
Dehumanization is a prerequisite for most forms of violence. Long before a bomb falls on a school where children are sheltering—because you ordered them to shelter there—you have to make that act acceptable. The more dead, starving, crying, and torn Palestinian bodies the public sees, the more the brain becomes accustomed to them. Palestinians disappear in “hordes,” in “masses,” in numbers so great that it becomes impossible to imagine their nicknames or favorite songs. A Palestinian body is a negotiable thing—a child becomes a “minor.” The dead become “presumed,” numbers in unreliable mouths. It is a common sleight of hand on brown and black bodies: to remove them from the imagination, to age them, to refer to them in the collective. So when they are torn to pieces, burned, lynched, assaulted, when we see a black man begging for air, when we see the piles of limbs at Abu Ghraib, we are conditioned to accept their fate as inevitable.
The most common challenge to criticism of Israel revolves around exceptionalism: the idea that the Israeli state is unfairly criticized, that it is held to different standards, that it is singled out. This is a fascinating inversion of the narrative of exceptionalism that Israel uses for itself: its claim to land is exceptional. Its citizens have an exceptional right to water, resources, and freedom. Even its political framework is exceptional. It somehow manages to be both an ethno-religious state and a democracy. It claims both modernity and a right to God-ordained power.
The actions of the last ten months show a state that clearly believes in its immunity and its right to external protection. We have seen a relentless assault on Gaza that is multidimensional, both militarily and psychologically, displaying a tactical understanding of what induces despair, exhaustion, and psychic numbness: relentless bombing, blocking of aid, continued displacement of civilians through countless evacuation orders, and, perhaps most insidiously, the dehumanization of Palestinians through policy and narrative. Gaza is cited as the most dangerous place to be a child. Gaza has the highest number of pediatric amputees in history. Gaza is the deadliest place for a journalist since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data. In ten months, during the gestation period of human life, Gaza has become one of the most uninhabitable places on the planet.
There is a saturation point of horror, where the collective psyche either recedes or normalizes, where the measure of horror begins to shift. What is another dead child compared to twenty thousand? If you have already obtained consent to slaughter one lineage, two, three, then ten more do not matter. On October 17, the question of whether Israel had bombed al-Ahli hospital was the subject of intense debate, with countless talking heads and representatives rushing to prime time to talk about self-defense and moral armies. Less than a year later, Israel has openly and relentlessly bombed dozens of hospitals, UN schools, and every university in Gaza. The threshold of what is acceptable has shifted at breakneck speed.
For those of us watching—let alone on the ground—the search for Israeli or American responsibility seems increasingly futile. Meanwhile, no Palestinian response to Israeli aggression is acceptable. The long and vibrant history of nonviolent Palestinian resistance—almost always in the face of Israeli violence—is delegitimized or ignored. Boycott movements are dismissed as offensive. In the spring, campus protesters, most of them peaceful and student-led, were dismissed as dangerous, stupid, or both, and were eventually confronted by the National Guard.
For nearly a year, this country’s administration has been flirting with red lines. But a red line that isn’t a red line is, in the end, permission. American rhetoric can be summed up in a single phrase repeated on microphones across the country: right to self-defense, right to self-defense, right to self-defense. To ask whether that right is applied equally is blasphemous, probably because the underlying question is who gets the right to a self, a body, a life. And that’s the most unspeakable question there is.
Meanwhile, Palestinians—even outside Gaza—live in a system where families wake up to find themselves summarily expelled, where they can be detained indefinitely without charge, and where seeking accountability requires pleading with the very system that oversaw the injustice. In the past few weeks alone, Israeli parliamentarians have defended the right to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners, Israeli protesters have rioted outside the Sde Teiman detention camp to prevent the arrest of soldiers accused of raping Palestinian prisoners, Israeli forces have destroyed a water facility in Gaza, and there have been two assassination attempts on foreign soil. Israel investigates itself, we are told in American press briefings. Israel has its vetting process. Then, months or years later, Israel exonerates itself.
In our society, we love the concept of “bad apples” because we want to believe in social order. It is much harder to read about a dog that mauled a man as he whined “please stop, my friend,” about another massacre in a refugee camp, about Palestinian prisoners being sexually assaulted with fire extinguishers and electric probes, and consider the possibility that this could be the natural progression of an ideology that has never been forced to confront its abuses. It could be a system, unfettered, carried to the logical conclusion of its core principles: who deserves what kind of life.
Kamala Harris inherits Joe Biden’s position on Gaza. Many are holding their breath to see what she will do with what she inherited. Many are not bothering to do so. What Ms. Harris has the opportunity to do now is to represent her administration’s constituents and answer the call for accountability. Because the truth is that any violation of international law—targeting hospitals, targeting journalists, collective punishment—is a rupture that should alarm not just Palestinians, but every entity and individual seeking to live in some kind of world order.
Unfettered power is rarely self-correcting and relies on the strategic use of silence. Audre Lorde wrote, “We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.” Therein lies the seed of true responsibility: committing to it despite enormous cost.
Israelis do not have a unique right to security, no matter what their parliament or an American president says. Neither do Americans. We must not believe for a second that relentless dehumanization is only the problem of the dehumanized. They pay an unimaginable price, but it is a multidirectional phenomenon. What oppressive systems fail to realize is that engaging in dehumanization—in thought, in word, in action, in policy—is a slow, isolating exercise in siphoning off one’s own humanity.
So many children in Gaza have been buried. Or orphaned. Or found clutching their dolls under the rubble. Or died of heart attacks from terror. So when Netanyahu, a man facing a potential arrest warrant for war crimes, receives a standing ovation from our Congress, it’s not just Netanyahu’s legacy. It’s ours. And the time to amend it is running out.
Translation: JB for
Source: The Guardian
