There is a short video, posted on social media a few weeks ago, that I cannot get out of my head. In the clip, a man in Gaza is holding two plastic bags that carry the body parts of a child, presumably his. There are other details. The look on the man’s face. The way those around him avoid eye contact once they realise what he is carrying. I see these details often now, sudden and unbidden. The emotional and psychological impact of the war on those outside Gaza – no matter how intense – is a sort of privilege, happening, as it is, only on our screens. But there is something lasting about these images. Others I know are haunted too, by different visions. By the doctor who came across her husband’s body while treating bombing victims. By the father stroking and rocking a dust-covered baby on his chest one last time.
In the course of everyday life and in my social media feeds, I see people who say they feel they are going mad. That there are things they will never unsee. That they can’t sleep, that their interactions with the children in their lives have become tinged with a sort of queasy guilt. The feeling seems to be not just grief, but bewilderment at the fact that it has all carried on for so long. But they keep watching. To stop looking is to admit that you are helpless. It means you have resigned yourself to the fact that there is nothing you can do, and that you will eventually succumb to that enemy of justice – a fatigue that seems already to be setting in.
The truth, too hard to accept, is that there is nothing you can do. You can write to your MP, you can march, you can protest. And the killing continues. As that happens, a jarringly bloodless account of the conflict is given by political leaders in countries like the US and UK, one that seems to omit the sheer fact and number of the deaths and resorts instead to an almost surreal language that calls for “every possible precaution” to protect civilian life. UN officials, not known for intemperance, now lose their cool and use the strongest terms possible, in what seems to be a direct result of this weird insistence on not calling reality what it is. The day before the truce, Gaza authorities put the death toll at 14,532.
That’s where the sense of losing your mind comes from: the fact that it seems, for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. No, it can’t be explained and yes, it will carry on until it doesn’t at some point, which seems to be when Israeli authorities feel like it.
Part of that inability to reach for convincing narratives about why so many innocent people must die is that events escalated so quickly. There was no time to set the pace of the attacks on Gaza, prepare justifications and hope that eventually, when it was all over, time and short attention spans would cover up the toll. Gaza has been a uniquely, inconveniently, intense conflict. “Experts say that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century,” the New York Times says. A military expert commented it was like nothing he’d seen in his career. The area is so densely populated that the toll of civilians is too high, and evidence for having undermined Hamas’s capabilities, the only possible justification for the casualties, is too low.