From the outside, the War on Gaza has settled into those surreal doldrums that happen with wars. From the inside, the suffering continues, and the IDF continues to pummel the enclave with artillery, drones, and bombs, and Israeli soldiers stumble over the rubble of their own making. The official death toll has hovered around 38,000 for a couple of weeks now, but I am always skeptical of “official” death tolls.
There is something ghoulish about counting the dead. It is necessary work; the cost of war must be known, to measure the suffering and make it knowable in a way that cannot be denied, and also to ensure that there will be a clear, quantified bill of indictment when the time for justice comes. But, in real, concrete terms, it means that 38,000 bodies have been seen, identified, and tallied. People have looked upon these bodies.
But I am doubtful that they have looked on all of the dead. How many bodies lie under the ruins of collapsed buildings, in the obliterated town squares and neighborhoods in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah, now drifts of mortar and brick pounded to fine powder the color of sand? The Gaza Health Ministry estimates 10,000, but they concede this might well be a very conservative reckoning. Last week in the Lancet, three public health scholars noted that it is “not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
That is a staggering number, and nigh inconceivable except, perhaps, as a number. And that is why Gaza has drifted into the Horse Latitudes of the global imagination. For those of us outside of the killing zones, the death and suffering of Gaza has become a blur; the outrage that we can feel when we see the faces of every person destroyed by this war is harder to summon when we cannot actually see their faces. Or know their names. How can we retain our fury after nine long months?
Over time, as the cycle of death grinds on without interruption, adding one murder and one atrocity upon another in an unremitting, steady rhythm, it all becomes normal, and we become accustomed to it. This is the economy of outrage, and we know it from the grim attrition of the war in the Ukraine. We can sustain our outrage for the crisis, but when it becomes unexceptional, normalized, a day-by-day accounting of horror, we begin to flag. My fury at the State of Israel is not going to stop it from murdering thousands… And I cannot face every day wanting to tear my hair out in despair.
Besides, there are so many horrors demanding my attention: Donald Trump’s impending white nationalist dictatorship, the dumpster fire of Joe Biden’s presidential bid. And today, I find myself terrified that a failed assassination attempt on former President Trump will unleash the neo-Nazi and Christian nationalist terrorists whom we know are just waiting to be provoked to perpetrate a bloodbath. And then there is the greatest abomination of all, the heat death of our planet, which I feel as a reminder on my skin every day as I walk out into the oppressive, unprecedented heat of 2024.
They call it “outrage fatigue,” or “compassion fatigue” and, as our attention is distracted, even momentarily, to a different apocalyptic horror, we forget Gaza. We forget the rubble, the uncounted dead, the gnawing hunger in the bellies of malnourished children, the elders who die of treatable diseases because there are no more hospitals to treat them, the genocide case before the International Court of Justice. It has become normal. And then it isn’t.
On Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike killed 31 people and injured 50 more at school serving as a displaced persons center in Khan Younis. On Friday, an airstrike killed 70 Palestinians in Gaza City. Yesterday, Israeli warplanes pummeled a refugee encampment in a designated “safe zone” at Al-Mawasi in an attempt to assassinate Mohammed Deif. It is not yet clear whether the commander of the Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades was killed or injured, but the official toll of the airstrike was 141 Palestinians killed, and more than 400 injured, almost all noncombatants – and this is only the official estimate. The number keeps climbing as more remains are recovered.
The State of Israel, of course, justifies dropping heavy bombs and missiles – reportedly including American-supplied 4,000-pound GBU-28 “bunker buster” munitions that created what eyewitnesses called an “earthquake effect” – on civilian targets in a designated “safe zone” because they might kill a single “enemy asset.” We know by now how highly the “most moral army in the world” values civilian lives. Only brutal aggressors, confident in their ability to completely erase the evidence of their violence insist that the cost of war does not matter.
Yet the atrocities this week have been so exceptional and vile, so inhuman, even by the standards of Israeli brutality to which we have become accustomed, that our eyes have snapped back to Gaza, and away from the bloodied, would-be dictator, the stumbling president, the dark future that awaits us in November, and even the self-immolation of humanity.
It is right that these massacres call our attention back to Gaza, and remind us that, what is normal for the State of Israel and the IDF is not, and cannot be, normal for humanity. The official death toll in Gaza is now around 38,600, two out every one-hundred Gazans – a number proportional, by population, to six million Americans. I have little doubt that the State of Israel is capable of killing many thousands more and that many, many more will suffer injuries and starvation.
And, when we look away again, just for a moment, at some other enormity whose looming shadow troubles our site, there will doubtless be yet another abomination to remind us of Gaza.
14 July 2024
***
At this point, I have become accustomed to the accusations and insults. Depending on who says it and, I suspect, which way the wind is blowing at any given moment, I am either an antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist apologist for Hamas, or a mindless stooge of “international Zionism.” (I see that a lot, the insistence that Zionism is some kind of international conspiracy tied to the “Davos clique” and “Global banking.”)
Depending on who you ask, I am either an ignorant, unthinking radical leftist or an ignorant, unthinking “reactionary neoliberal conservative” (this is, apparently, a thing) or something in-between. Most of the comments that I get in social media and on this site are supportive, informative, and thoughtful. I appreciate when my friends and followers challenge me and make me think. I find little so satisfying as being sent to my books by an interlocutor and learning something new.
What I appreciate quite a bit less is the kind of invective that has become so common in social media and on the Internet, generally. I know that the medium shapes the content (the “Medium is the Message” as Marshall McLuhan put it), and social media allow for such attenuated connections that many people feel perfectly free to express themselves in the most insulting ways possible. I would never dream of calling someone a “self-hating Jew” or “stupid kike intellectual,” or of saying “I hope you die.” Yet there are people who, girded with the anonymity and distance of social media, believe that this is entirely appropriate.
It doesn’t hurt my feelings; often enough I find it kind of pathetically funny (and I feel a pang of guilt at laughing at such manifestly pitiful people). On the other hand, it seems like such a waste of time and energy – mine, as I waste a few seconds reading the comment, and then a few more second deleting it – that I resent it a little. And as much as I am accustomed to being hated by some people, both as a commentator and as a Jew (the people everybody hates), I also know that, in our times, hate turns often enough to violence.
I know it won’t happen – my antagonists almost certainly don’t have any inclination to leave their parents’ basements. I’m pretty safe.
Still, accusations and insults speak volumes about the people who sling them. My entry in Gaza Journallast week attracted four revealing critical comments. This was the first entry in nine months that did not directly reference Gaza. Rather, I commented on how the State of Israel’s War on Gaza and the arrogation of the accusation of antisemitism by its government and Zionist proxies to deflect legitimate criticism, has created a fertile environment for the efflorescence of antisemitism on the right and left.
I traced the long and dark history of antisemitism, noting that it has been a constant of Jewish history. It “is pervasive even on the left and has become a common part of pro-Palestinian rhetoric, thanks to the best efforts of the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies, so I find myself in the position of being in solidarity with antisemites. And the future doubtless portends a new golden age for antisemitism. It all makes me feel like an ‘Uncle Chaim.’”
Yet, I concluded, “the cause of peace is more important than anything else right now, and the struggle for Palestinian autonomy and human rights is not about me. I refuse to accept antisemitism anywhere, at any time, but that cannot be a justification for abandoning the cause of justice and peace.”
My four interlocutors all laced into me for even deigning to mention the collateral effects on Jewish life of the War on Gaza. The mildest declared “I do not see how you can call this the ‘Gaza journal.’ We [sic] you barely even mention what is happening to people in Gaza.” One insisted that I was “just another Zionist Jew complaining about anti-Semitism. Its your fault stop whining!” And the most abusive of them concluded with “go back to your Jew home land [sic] and shut up Jew.”
I had suspected that an entry solely devoted to the “collateral damage” that this war is inflicting on my community (the only one I have posted) might not be the most popular thing that I have written. Still, I didn’t expect the vehemence of the response, nor could I have expected it to so effectively illustrate my point. Perhaps I should be grateful.
12 July 2024