Doctors Without Politics
Mary Turfah
The Baffler (# 77)
January 2025
What can medical workers do to stop genocide?
A letter signed by ninety-nine American health care workers and
addressed to the “honorable” president and vice president of the
United States of America went viral in October 2024, a year into
Israel’s genocide in Gaza made possible by the Biden
administration. In its first paragraph, the doctors, nurses, and
midwives who altogether spent 254 weeks in Gaza perform the
requisite throat-clearing trifecta: they condemn “the horrors
committed on October 7”; they clarify that they have volunteered,
in their professional capacities, elsewhere (though only “Ukraine
during the brutal Russian invasion” is mentioned by name); and
they reiterate their “medical and surgical expertise.” The health
care workers blame ignorance—the human toll, they say, “is far
higher than is understood in the United States.” Everyone in Gaza
(this includes, they stress, the Israeli hostages) is sick, injured, or
both. Palestinian children have watery diarrhea. Pregnant women
are having spontaneous abortions. C-sections are performed
without anesthesia. Surgeons have so few resources they can’t
appropriately wash their hands, let alone establish a sterile field.
New mothers whom “the world abandoned” cannot breastfeed
(“the world” here refers to the West and its client states). Each of
the letter’s signatories has treated children who “suffered violence
that must have been deliberately directed at them.” Rather than
concluding that the Israelis are doing what they’ve always
done—targeting Palestine’s present and future—the doctors
enumerate mangled bodies and the locations and patterns of the
bullets in children’s heads and chests. The American professionals
say they cannot fathom why the U.S. government continues to arm
a country deliberately killing children. The limits of listening to the
body, as medics are trained to do, is that the body can’t tell you
that genocide suits American foreign interests.
Another letter, signed by about one hundred Israeli doctors,
circulated months prior. Whereas the American medical
professionals’ letter treads carefully, the Israeli physicians’
letter—urging their government to show no mercy where
Palestinian hospitals, i.e., “terrorists’ nests,” are
concerned—exudes the ease that comes with anticipating warm
receipt. Drawing from a seemingly bottomless well of unbridled
racist supremacy, the Israeli doctors’ call for the bombing of
hospitals may be more honest about the fact that doctors are
political actors, medicine a tool for various ends. The American
health care workers stay in their lane. They put aside Israel’s past
and current motivations to write from the place of the first
responder at work, committed to holding open a shrinking present.
Their letter ends by recognizing that they “are not politicians” and
are “simply healing professionals who cannot remain silent.” And
so, they speak out with the urgency of those haunted by
nightmares they wish Biden could see. They censor themselves so
that, despite all indications to the contrary, he might listen.
None of the information the American health care workers present
is new. Palestinians in Gaza have for the last year lifted their
children’s corpses in front of cameras for the world to see. What’s
new is the packaging. Edward Said explains in his essay
“Permission to Narrate,” written in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982
destruction of Beirut, that “facts do not at all speak for themselves,
but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and
circulate them.” The American health care workers know their
audience. They announce that their testimony will focus on women
and children. To a bomb, a body is a body; sex and age make little
difference against the weight of a collapsing home. To the West, the
Arab man and male teenager are killable; the doctors’ reticence to
mention them reflects an accommodation of this narrowing of the
human. The right to life of Palestinian women and children is less
contestable in words—though it is denied every day by deeds. In
Gaza, more than one year into what the American health care
workers call madness, it’s hard to ignore the human toll.
Acknowledgment alone doesn’t interrogate whether Israel’s
genocide still constitutes self-defense: a reflexive, albeit
disproportionate, “retaliatory attack” from a frantic, cornered
ethnostate driven into fight or flight.
Rather than challenge the dehumanization that allows one group to
permit or deny another’s narrative, American doctors often
leverage the perceived differences between us and them to
emphasize their own credibility. Two doctors asserted in their
eyewitness testimony that they don’t speak Arabic, aren’t Muslim,
and aren’t religious. Why not understanding the language of the
people one is claiming to help—or on behalf of whom one
speaks—is a good thing is unclear. The health care workers explain
that, as Israel has denied foreign journalists entry into Gaza, they
are “among the only neutral observers” available. Setting aside
whether neutrality is desirable or even possible here, because
Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists—those whose
coverage the health workers’ audience considers
compromised—the humanitarian medic is obligated to play both
journalist and healer.
The Ethic of Refusal
In June of 1944, Dr. Maurice Rossel was delegated by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to inspect
Theresienstadt, a supposedly “model” concentration camp with its
own symphony orchestra. Flowers were freshly planted and
buildings painted in advance of the ICRC official’s visit. Rossel
would go on to meet with the commander of Auschwitz at the camp
itself. As a matter of “neutrality,” the ICRC refused to condemn the
ongoing Holocaust. Later, the Red Cross apologized for its
“impotence” and “mistakes.” In December 1996, the organization
declassified documents showing just how much it had concealed.
Had it spoken out, its logic went, the organization would have
jeopardized its ability to inspect facilities on both sides.
On the ground, the enemy of life is not death. The enemies of life
are the people who kill innocent people, for reasons we call
“politics.”
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), known in much of the English-
speaking world as Doctors Without Borders, was born out of this
moral stain, repeated in Biafra in the late 1960s. Founded in 1971 by
a group of journalists and physicians disturbed by the hollow
ethics of the Red Cross’s neutrality-for-neutrality’s-sake, MSF’s first
mission to an active warzone was Beirut, in 1976. The previous
year, a bus carrying Palestinians on their way to the Sabra refugee
camp had been attacked, its twenty-seven passengers massacred
by the Phalange, a group funded and armed by Zionists and
inspired by the “discipline” of Nazi Germany. The Times reported it
as an attack on “militants”; the massacre was said to be revenge
for a drive-by shooting at a Maronite church earlier that day, in
which bullets were fired from a car suspiciously marked with the
insignia of a secular Palestinian militia (who presumably knew
better than to identify themselves in a hostile neighborhood).
Different theories circulate regarding who was actually responsible
for the event that ultimately ignited Lebanon’s so-called civil war
and set the stage for Israel’s ground invasion in 1982.
Consisting of a surgeon and small assisting crew, the MSF
volunteers were stationed at a hospital in the Nab’a, Bourj
Hammoud area, an impoverished part of Beirut near the Tal al-
Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, where many Armenians had also
sought refuge from the Ottoman genocide. The area was besieged
by anti-Palestinian factions, including the Phalange. A couple of
years later, MSF redirected their attention to Zahle, an area the
organization highlighted as majority-Christian. MSF was guided not
by politics, it said, but by the need to stay close to “the most
vulnerable people, who are also the least visible.”
By treating “both sides” in Beirut, the organization established a
reputation of serving all comers, a readiness to work under fire,
and a willingness to condemn aggression wherever they saw it.
MSF, like the rest of the West, understood the Lebanese civil war as
motivated by blind sectarian hate, Lebanese Christians versus their
Muslim compatriots. Such framing, very much informed by a
politics that is invisible to those who don’t know to see it, denies
Arabs the logic of cause and effect. In MSF’s case, it allowed the
organization to rehabilitate the language of neutrality—treating
both sides—because here the violence stemmed not from
historico-political events but from identity. This frame leaves no
room for leftist Lebanese Christians, as their presence on the
Muslims’ “side” would suggest the conflict wasn’t about religion.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon—Christians and Muslims
alike—are visible only as troublemakers. Had MSF acknowledged
that the fighting was motivated by the endorsement of Israeli
occupation, distancing itself would have been less conscionable.
Instead, because the fighting was rendered politically incoherent,
MSF had no obligation to take a side. This was not neutrality-for-
neutrality’s-sake. Rather, in Beirut, the organization found that it
could be politically neutral without being ethically so (à la the Red
Cross). If anything, MSF’s lack of formal affiliation freed its ethical
compass: the organization condemned illegal actions by all warring
factions.
During MSF’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1999, the
president of its international council, Dr. James Orbinski, said, “Our
action is to help people in situations of crisis.” “Ours,” he added by
way of self-awareness, “is not a contented action.” MSF knows
what you’re thinking; they’re not happy about it either. But
humanitarianism intervenes where “the political”—an ameboid
entity to which Orbinski gestures without defining, except as what
the humanitarian is not—has failed. The humanitarian “has no
frontiers” while the political “knows borders.” The political is the
thing to engage once the bleeding stops. The failure to act
substantively, lastingly, is displaced onto actors who have the time
and space to think about the bigger picture. MSF’s logo is literally
called “the running person” (a.k.a. “running man”), their gaze
directed at what is in front of them. To MSF, this is not a matter of
shortsightedness; it is this limited scope that makes their work
sustainable.
MSF formalized this morality-beyond-politics as an “ethic of
refusal.” The term appears in the Nobel speech three times.
Orbinski explains that MSF was designed to counter the
assumption that political neutrality requires silence. While the
material impact of words varies, he is certain that “silence kills.”
Unlike the Red Cross, in the face of injustice, MSF’s doctors
condemn. They discern morally and ethically. They do not,
however, offer anything specific in place of the structures they
refuse, as this would require a political vision. As doctors, they are
on the side of life, against death. On the ground, though, the enemy
of life is not death. The enemies of life are the people who kill
innocent people, for reasons we call “politics.”
Empire of Trauma
The humanitarian doctor’s interventions are of limited impact
against forces committed to killing civilians. The work becomes an
exercise in futility: you stabilize a patient and bandage their
wounds, only for them to leave the hospital an easier target. To
compensate, MSF volunteers commit to “bearing witness,” what
the organization calls temoignage, from the French temoigner, “to
testify.” Implied is that the witness serves as evidence—here,
against ongoing suffering—not for the sake of achieving a
particular political end but to mobilize political actors who will and
to supply them with the raw data so that they can.
The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed
without question by Western media for over a year in order to
present genocide as an understandable human reaction.
The Empire of Trauma by French anthropologists Didier Fassin and
Richard Rechtman traces the rise of humanitarian psychiatry and
the narrativization of harm through the lens of trauma. The two
describe how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), introduced to
the American psychiatric lexicon in the 1980s through the third
edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, took some time to gain traction internationally,
especially in the world of humanitarian medicine. It wasn’t until
MSF’s work in Gaza in 1988, providing physiotherapy to the injured
during the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that the
organization began prioritizing trauma as such. In 1994, after the
Oslo Accords ended the uprising, MSF set up its first mental health
program in Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank. In Jenin, MSF
worked with youth who had witnessed people they loved arrested,
tortured, and killed, and who still lived under an occupation that
insisted their lives had no worth. A couple of years later, the mental
health program in Jenin closed, and others started up in its place,
addressing the needs of various subpopulations (including former
prisoners) on a more or less individual basis, until 2000.
That year, as part of his prime ministerial campaign, Likud leader
Ariel Sharon, flanked by more than one thousand Israeli colonial
police and soldiers, stormed the al-Aqsa mosque compound, an
obvious provocation that triggered the second intifada. MSF sent
surgeons and support staff to Palestine, only to realize, as MSF’s
Middle East programs director remarked, that “in the Palestinian
territories they’ve got a well-equipped hospital system with skilled
staff. You can’t bring any added value.” MSF pivoted. It identified a
gap in mental health care and announced, in a statement that
doesn’t use the word Israel, the opening of a new mobile clinic in
Gaza to provide support, both medical and psychological, with a
focus on children younger than twelve. Here, there was no PTSD to
treat—the “traumatic stress” wasn’t exactly “post”—but the
diagnosis did provide tools, especially in the realm of testimony, to
rally international attention against the occupation.
Part of the concept of temoignage is for the doctor to find words for
what the mind on some level already knows and to help others see
it too. Trauma filled a preexisting gap, engaging the interiority of a
people suffering beyond the periphery of skin. For an organization
operating in times of crisis, trauma and PTSD were less diagnostic
tools than a means of summoning empathy. The Palestinian had
been presented for decades in Western media as terrorism
incarnate: think anonymized face, wrapped in a black-and-white
keffiyeh. Trauma provided a humanizing alternative. The
Palestinian—disarmed, emotionally vulnerable, in need—could be
fashioned, with the right sound bites, for a hesitant audience (say,
your average New York Times reader) into a human being.
The phrase humanitarian crisis freezes political inventory and
clarifies that those suffering are people. If you know this already,
the term grates. A former president of MSF, after stepping down,
remarked in 1996 that “if Auschwitz were operating today, it would
probably be described as a humanitarian emergency.” In a recent
interview with CNN, an MSF-affiliated pediatrician who has worked
in Gaza and was speaking in her own personal capacity clarified
the news anchor’s phrasing, “This is not a humanitarian crisis . . .
and I’m going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is
genocide.” Crisis, like trauma, emphasizes suffering to elicit pity.
But introduce into the frame a gun, or a rock, and things get muddy
again, the human being replaced by the threat. The formerly pity-
stricken Times readers see themselves in the tank. Trauma does
nothing to challenge this frame; at best, it asks us to ignore it for
the sake of the human story.
Trauma shows you a person folding inward, shearing their tether to
the world. Trauma cannot get one to struggle, in the sense of
committing to something bigger than their person—a
cause—because it only recognizes a world mediated by individual
human bodies. And, because trauma faces the past, the
traumatized native is only able to recognize themselves through
what their colonizer has done to them. They are stuck playing catch
up, evening the score, serving that ouroboros called revenge.
Palestine is motivated by a horizon beyond occupation, one
inaccessible through the narrowing language of trauma.
MSF initially leveraged personal narratives of trauma as one facet
of the harms of Israel’s occupation, alongside records of human
rights violations—taking doctors hostage, targeting ambulances,
imprisoning children—that were demonstratively systematic. In the
2000s, amid rising fear about international sympathy for the
Palestinian cause, donors threatened to withdraw funding from
humanitarian organizations operating in Palestine if they didn’t fix
their “anti-Israel bias.” Trauma narratives absent political valences
offered the possibility of parity: occupiers suffer too. Personal
testimonies are raw material, malleable and manipulated by
political actors to serve various ends. A 2024 essay in Politico titled
“We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was
Unspeakable” enumerates horror upon horror committed against
civilians by the Israelis but ultimately packages these as the
unfortunate consequence of the ugly “Israel-Hamas” war, rather
than as a core tenet of Zionism’s eliminatory logic. On X, below a
photo of a small child crying in a red tank top, her bilateral lower
limb amputations exposed, a former CNN producer commented, “I
am horrified and sorry, but what did you think it’s [sic] going to
happen after you attacked Israel on October 7, 2023?”
The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed
without question by Western media for over a year in order to
present genocide as an understandable human reaction, while
Palestinians have the last one hundred years. The juxtaposition,
though satisfying, is flawed: what matters in the case of Palestine,
as in all struggles for liberation, is not that one side’s quantified
suffering eclipses the other’s, nor that half of its martyrs are
children. What matters is not that the other side has cowardly
soldiers encased by tanks and no issue running over children. It’s
not Palestinians’ suffering that makes their cause worthwhile
because suffering is not a moral good, power not a moral harm.
What matters is that Israel is a settler colony, built on stolen
Palestinian land and sustained by Palestinian blood. Otherwise, we
might find ourselves in a world, as the power gap between
oppressor and oppressed narrows, where Israel is the victim.
Better Than Nothing
As part of its ethic of refusal, MSF has a long history of terminating
projects where it finds itself instrumentalized by belligerents. In
Afghanistan in 2004, the U.S. military had blurred the line between
the work of humanitarian organizations like MSF and U.S. forces,
including by dropping leaflets threatening to condition
humanitarian aid on civilians’ willingness to provide information on
fighters’ whereabouts. Five MSF workers were killed in an ambush
by the Taliban, who accused MSF of collaborating with the United
States. MSF withdrew its operations. In response, Western media
condemned MSF’s naivete for insisting on an ethics without
politics—politics which, for the United States propaganda arm,
meant medical doctors serving the interests of an occupying
military. In Libya in 2012, MSF found itself treating patients who
were subject to torture by the government imposed on the country
by NATO forces, a situation Reuters termed “awkward,” as if the
intentional destabilization of a country was subject to the same
etiquette as a dinner party. MSF insisted that their role should be to
provide medical care with the goal of improving prognosis, not the
Sisyphean task of “repeatedly treat[ing] the same patients between
torture sessions.” Again, MSF withdrew.
In Gaza, especially since the tightening of Israel’s siege, an
animating question for MSF is whether something is better than
nothing. Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014 prompted an
MSF member to write a short reflection on Crash, the blog of the
organization’s think tank, about the necessary limits of any MSF
intervention. He opens by telling his reader a little bit about Gaza:
An entire population is trapped in what is essentially an open-air
prison. They can’t leave and only the most limited
supplies—essential for basic survival—are allowed to enter. The
population of the prison have elected representatives and
organised social services. Some of the prisoners have organised
into armed groups and resist their indefinite detention by firing
rockets over the prison wall. However, the prison guards are the
ones who have the capacity to launch large scale and highly
destructive attacks on the open-air prison.
In the blog post, one heading consists of a single word, inflected as
a question: “Complicit?” At what point does MSF simply refuse the
conditions it is sustaining, as it did in Libya or Afghanistan? A
decade later and under an exponentially escalated targeting of
Gaza’s health care system, these concerns persist. Today, both its
modes of intervention—medical care and witness—are
compromised, especially as the latter is only as effective as the
media coverage it receives. MSF’s “voice of outrage” against
Israel’s destruction of medical infrastructure has been drowned out
by the propaganda war that moves in lockstep with Israel’s needs.
The doctors she sent to serve Palestinians should understand that
they were serving Palestine. Otherwise, they could choose a
different medical mission.
Even MSF’s condemnations are careful not to overstep Israel’s red
lines. During the first months of the genocide, volunteers were
instructed not to use the word genocide except if they clarified they
were speaking in their personal capacity. (Orbinski, in his Nobel
speech, had condemned humanitarians’ unwillingness to use the
word.) Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times offered in 2023, by
way of advice, that “the best chance of preventing a humanitarian
catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.” Over the years,
humanitarian organizations have learned that, if they wish to
provide aid to Gaza, they must accept that Israel will remind them
who is in charge, often by killing some of their members. The
deliberate targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be
understood as the Israelis saying that no one, no matter how
famous or non-Arab, should perceive themselves as beyond
Israel’s reach. Israel has killed Americans, such as Rachel Corrie,
for getting in their way—in Corrie’s case literally, by offering her
body as a barrier between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian
home in 2003.
MSF has insisted on the net positive of the organization’s ability to
use its voice to testify to the “indiscriminate and massive killings of
civilians.” The term indiscriminate is misleading; civilians are the
target. The other thing MSF can do with its voice, a response to the
Crash reflection offers, is to remind “the warring parties” of their
responsibilities “in theconduct of hostilities.” MSF speaks from a
place of musts and must nots, without any means of enforcing
these modal verbs. After Israel kills another doctor or bombs
another hospital, MSF responds by issuing statements that urge
Israel not to do what it does, sprinkling its social media posts with
hashtags like #notatarget. In a short tribute to one of their
murdered colleagues, a physiotherapist named Fadi killed on June
25, 2024, MSF elaborates the circumstances of his death: Fadi was
cycling to work and was killed along with four others, three of them
children. Surely he was not engaged in terror activities against
snipers spawned from a culture that relishes in neutralizing
children. MSF, wagging its finger, “has reached out to Israeli
authorities asking for clarifications about the circumstances of
Fadi’s killing. Only an independent investigation can establish the
facts.” The facts that matter, of course, are obvious; this insistence
on so-called independent investigations into a genocide, sustained
by the countries that launch so-called humanitarian interventions,
gets old.
Ilana Feldman wrote for The Journal of Palestine Studies in 2009
that “humanitarianism is sometimes deployed as a strategy for
frustrating Palestinian aspirations,” even when these interventions
are well-intentioned. After the successful destruction of much of
Gaza’s medical infrastructure this last year, Israel gave MSF
permission to set up a field hospital. Members of the organization
protested this move internally, recognizing it as filling a gap Israel
had created in order to leave Palestinians dependent on foreign aid.
But a hospital is a hospital. Within a humanitarian frame, it doesn’t
matter who is treating or how, so long as people receive care.
Some of the backlash to the field hospital was prompted by the
actions of Israeli soldiers, who set up a photo op and took pictures
of themselves delivering boxes of supplies there, making MSF look
like the organization is collaborating with those committing
genocide against the people MSF is treating. In response to this
accusation, what can MSF meaningfully say?
Witness inaugurates a beginning. Over the past many months,
various writers have offered the Arabic root of the word shaheed,
martyr: it is sha-ha-da, “to bear witness.” For the religiously
inclined, a shaheed does a number of things. The martyr’s act
refuses, as it resists, an ongoing injustice. On Judgment Day, the
martyr will testify before God to the harms committed against their
people. Until then, the martyr-as-witness does not die—one verse
in the Quran reads, “Do not say of those killed in the cause of God
‘dead;’ verily they are alive, although you do not sense them.”
Instead, in the sharpened wake of aftermath, the martyr obliges
those of us who have not yet borne witness with the whole of
ourselves to resist the world that let this happen, so that one day
the will for a dignified life won’t require a person to forfeit theirs.
Doctors born in Gaza, working in the few hospitals still partially
functional, have shown us another way to bear witness: to
surrender yourself for a people’s sake, with the intention of
remaining within our sensory world.
The deliberate targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be
understood as the Israelis saying that no one, no matter how
famous, how non-Arab, should perceive themselves as beyond
Israel’s reach.
As of this writing, Israel has killed over one thousand health care
workers in Gaza. It has broadened the practice of targeting health
care infrastructure to Lebanon, bombing medical clinics and
hospitals and ambulances and paramedics, including those
stationed in the annex of a church. Israel has taken over three
hundred health care workers in Gaza hostage. In April 2024, Dr.
Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the orthopedic surgery department at
Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, was likely raped to death after four
months of detention in what the Associated Press called “shadowy
hospitals.” Before they killed him, al-Bursh had refused to give the
Israelis false testimony to be used against his people. In July, Dr.
Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the head of al-Shifa Hospital, was
released from Israeli dungeons seven months after he was
abducted while treating patients. Immediately, he spoke to
reporters of the abuse he faced. He testified to the torture enacted
by Israeli doctors against Palestinians. And then, he returned to
work. If his role is to doctor, his project is to liberate.
Part of my aversion to MSF’s brand of testimony is that it shrinks
the potential of witness. As Fassin and Rechtman point out, the
more medicalized the language, the closer to the individual human
body, the more the role of “war loses potency.” The conversation
slips into what the doctors are treating instead of what the
people—doctors among them—are fighting for. In response to a
careful compilation of testimonies published in the New York Times
from American doctors who volunteered in Gaza, debates raged
about whether the X-rays showing intact bullets in children’s skulls
were real or fake. These discussions propagated entirely in parallel
to, and as a distraction from, the actual issue, which is that tens of
thousands of children have been killed by the Zionist state to fuel
Zionism. Credentials were questioned and reaffirmed, including by
the Times, which has played a frontline role in manufacturing
consent for this genocide. Enumerating Palestinian suffering
without saying what for, these testimonies do not have liberation as
their aim. At best, they get us another short-lived ceasefire.
Some of the foreign doctors who enter Palestine perform the role of
old-school humanitarians, without allegiances except to an
abstracted thing called life. Quickly these doctors realize they have
nothing, as doctors, to stop the bombs. And their witness, when
facing those poised with a professionalism that accommodates
genocide, emphasizes bodies over people. It is incomplete.
Realizing this, there are doctors who reach for something more.
The Palestinian pharmacist, resistance fighter, and martyr Bassel
al-Araj spoke of being Palestinian in the “broad sense, meaning
everyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless
of their secondary identities.” The orthopedic surgeon Swee Chai
Ang first traveled to Beirut in 1982, where she witnessed the Sabra
and Shatila massacre. Soon after, she founded Medical Aid for
Palestinians (MAP). During MAP’s early years, she required her
volunteers to read Rosemary Sayegh’s From Peasants to
Revolutionaries. The doctors she sent to serve Palestinians should
understand that they were serving Palestine. Otherwise, they could
choose a different medical mission.
Daily Routines
As Israel bombed the area around Beirut’s airport in 2024, I
revisited Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness.” Darwish
is trying to get to his kitchen to make coffee one morning in Beirut.
The month is August, the year 1982, and Israeli warplanes break the
sound barrier, disfigure the earth, target buildings and history.
Americans of an earlier generation say a place looks “like Beirut”
to mean “ravaged.” I took a screenshot of this excerpt:
The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly
wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of
creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not
going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb
all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the
radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: “Merit
cigarettes—more aroma, less nicotine!” “Citizen watches—for the
correct time!” “Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure is!”
“Health mineral water—health from a high mountain!”
In my square of text, the word health hangs, as though Darwish
balks at a world that could raise such a consideration now. There
are elements of the absurd in his stubborn commitment to
preserving routine as the bombs rain down around him. The poet’s
descriptions drip in hyperbole, but they’re not enough—no words
are—to capture what’s not a matter of language in isolation but of
witness, something that requires all the senses to know it. The end
of a world, without punctuation.
Darwish’s attention is not on the human body but everything
around it: the sky, the sea, consumerism’s escapist beckoning. He
is alone, his annoyance at the disruption of his morning
solitude—the static that buzzing war machines impose in place of
his thoughts—a feeling any writer will recognize. His body is intact,
out of frame; it could just as easily be my body or yours, the
subject rather than the object of this story.
Speaking with a reporter about his time in Gaza, the Palestinian
plastic and reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah admitted
that the gore hadn’t bothered him. Among his patients was a nine-
year-old with “half of her face missing, who had no one left.” Only
after he had washed away the blood and mud caked onto her body
did he begin “to see the child before the injury.” Hair ties decorated
with plastic flowers, nail polish painted onto tiny toes amputated by
the blast—these jolted him out of his clinical stupor. Before him
was a little girl. Abu-Sittah found himself sobbing: someone had
loved her enough to take the time, in the middle of a genocide, to
braid her hair.
END