No doubt you’ve noticed. There are rational men and women engaged in the mainstream media of the Western world who still allow eroded figures of speech to inhabit their common parlance when they write about the deranged horrors in Gaza, as if what is happening there is a “war,” typically an open and often prolonged, garden variety military conflict between the armed forces of two nations or groups.
What we are in reality witnessing in that tormented, 142-square-mile strip of land — once described as an open-air prison camp but now as an open-air death camp — is clearly not a war but the most anguishing humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, one that challenges the shared sense of morality inherent in our global dialogue of cultures.
We need not describe these horrors inflicted on the 2.3 million souls who “live” – yes, this word needs to be enclosed in quotation marks– in Gaza, a people now hunted beyond all human endurance.
We know these horrors already. We’ve read about them. We’ve watched them on our screens. And they have shocked us to the core of our humanity.
Two worlds
The enclave we call Gaza is today a wasteland whose destruction has been Carthaginian in scale, where starved Palestinians are neither dead nor alive. They and their skeletal children have been ghoulishly described as “walking corpses.”
You see them at dangerous food distribution centres where trigger-happy Israeli soldiers gratuitously kill dozens of them daily, and where their humanity is so reduced to a fragment that they are willing to die for a bag of rice, a quart of milk, a jerrycan of water.
Yet, a few kilometres away, across the border, supermarkets are loaded with food and people go about their quotidian lives. Walking their streets. Drinking their coffee. Watching their films. Reading their Torahs. Visiting their dentists. Hugging their children. Listening to music. And making love.
Surely, these are two orders of reality whose spatial and temporal coexistence the mind baulks at reconciling and the imagination recoils at envisioning.
Questions crowd upon us.
What justification do those who deny children access to food have for preventing them from meeting their basic needs? What propels the need in one people to calculatedly inflict such repeated, unspeakable savagery on another?
And what drives the seemingly normal Israelis to give such a massive echo of approval to the racist bellowing of their political and military leaders, instead of turning away from it in nauseated disbelief, thus reducing whatever there is in them of the human and restoring what there is of the beast? (It is a sad fact that progressive Israelis have always failed to insinuate into, let alone impose on society, the humane rigour inherent in their beliefs.)
Writers, like other laymen, would do well to abstain from taking part in a debate such as this that the therapeutic community considers its own. But reasons there must be, albeit dark and disquieting ones.
