The Gaza extermination camp

At this point, Gaza feels like a movie, a horror movie, but a movie nonetheless in which we see new ways of killing every day.

How do you describe the events of the last 18 months? What words, data, pictures, videos, or statistics can really conjure the horrors that the Israelis have visited upon the Palestinians? Do you capture it by repeating that they have dropped bombs with over six times the tonnage of the bombing of Hiroshima? That they have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in some of the most violent ways ever invented by mankind? That they have butchered tens of thousands of babies who never stepped out of their 25-mile by six-mile concentration camp before being incinerated in it? That hundreds of babies never saw life outside of genocide before being consumed by it? That they have beheaded dozens of children? That they have bombed hundreds of schools dozens of times each? That they have blocked the entry of food and water to a besieged population for nearly two months while subjecting them to relentless bombardment?

Can you imagine being perpetually hungry and thirsty, and then being told to gather your ever-dwindling belongings one more time to get to another “safe zone”? Then you get bombed on the way to the “safe zone” before being bombed inside the “safe zone” where you suddenly see your loved ones covered in soot as they struggle to recover from the shock of a 2,000-pound bomb shipped all the way from Missouri that just dropped in their vicinity and rendered many bodies lifeless, without limbs; where you hear your compatriots’ primordial screams as they are consumed by heat that reaches up to 2,500 degrees Celsius before being reduced to unrecognizable charred remains; where you hear the screams of children too shaken, too weak, and too injured to move; and where you see just the top half of what would have been a girl of no more than 3 or 4 whom rescuers can’t even reach to gather what remains of her tiny body, let alone search for the other half because they don’t know if they will be picked off by a sniper or a “double tap strike” that is likely on the way — and make the rescuers martyrs too.

It’s one thing if this happened a few times or for over a period of a few weeks before things went back to normalcy, whatever that word means in a concentration camp, but for this to continue every single day, multiple times in a day, for 18 months straight, and yet without any sign of it ever coming to an end is macabre beyond belief, sickening beyond all imagination. I doubt anyone ever thought that days such as these would be possible; that we would be witnessing just such sickening, ghastly reality in all its gory detail while most of us go about our days like it’s all normal.

Commentators have spoken and written about running out of words to describe what they are witnessing. Those who measure hunger on a scale have described the lack of food in Gaza variously as causing mild, moderate, and severe malnutrition. They talk about the development of children being set back by years, about them growing stunted, about their food insecurity, about their increased susceptibility to life-threatening illnesses, about their wasting away. Those who work in war zones have variously described the situation in Gaza as an emergency, a disaster, a calamity, a catastrophe, a cataclysm, a campaign of extinction. Somehow even these scales and words seem inadequate.

Yet, nothing has changed the situation of the people in Gaza as their barbaric occupiers continue to find newer ways to kill and practice their depravities on a population that has no way out. How does one deal with such evil? What would you do to stop a psychopath who you know abducts and tortures children in his little dungeon at the back of his house? Would you call the authorities on him? Or would you say, “it’s complicated,” or “I am too powerless,” put your head down and just pass by that little dungeon of his on your way to work? Would you take matters into your own hands and confront him in his little dungeon if the authorities don’t seem interested in stopping the brute? Won’t you just do everything within your means to stop him from hurting any more children? What if that monster gets to have an entire state of his own with monstrous compatriots giving him full authority to carry out their own depraved fantasies on the bodies and minds of over two million children and adults? In this grotesque world we now inhabit those monsters chide the rest of us for not supporting their monstrosities enough, and get lauded for it. While the rest of us just throw our hands in resignation, mutter an abuse or two at the sheer audacity of the monsters who rule over us, and then watch the next horrific video from the Gaza extermination camp that has been streaming live non-stop for over 560 days.

Perhaps our material reality has made us too hopeless, too despairing, lost in a state where the old norms that once guided our actions no longer make sense — what Durkheim referred to as anomie. In our despair, our hopelessness, and our inaction, Gaza burns. Its children are cut in half and parts of their bodies are blown off into the distance. At this point, Gaza feels like a movie, a horror movie, but a movie nonetheless in which we see new ways of killing every day. We also see excruciating helplessness, where soot-covered, visibly distressed, badly injured children cry out for help, raising their tiny hand (thank God the hand is fine?) — but anyone reaching out to them could possibly suffer a death blow. That death will be another killing captured for posterity on our screens. Then we will scroll to the next killing. For how many more days?

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