I haven’t written much about the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas because, well, it’s all just overwhelmingly awful, and I haven’t felt like my voice is one that’s going to contribute much. I’m not a conflict reporter nor someone who knows much of anything about war. Unlike scores of journalists, experts, and analysts, I have spent zero time in Israel or Palestine, and relatively little time in the Middle East; I read a lot, and that’s all that shapes any knowledge I have about the region and its history. This war has been incredibly well-covered and has merited tons of attention — unlike those also raging in Sudan and the DRC, for example — and has also been the subject of massive and widespread disinformation campaigns from many corners. Like the war in Ukraine, which I also haven’t written much about, the war in Gaza simply feels far outside of my realm of expertise. Why would anyone care what I have to say about it? And so I’ve been reading, listening, following, and sharing much, much more than I’ve been writing and speaking.
I’ve been following two lines of coverage: The “over there” in Israel and Palestine, and the “over there” in my home country, the United States, a place I don’t currently live. Watching both, I’ve pinged between disgust and despair and anger and heartbreak. The sheer scale of human tragedy is impossible to wrap one’s mind around (how does one wrap one’s mind around more than 32,000 people dead, most of whom did not invite this war, were just people like you and I going about their lives in what was already one of the most difficult places on earth, so many of whom are just little kids?). The compounding of that tragedy by what looks like pretty intentional immiseration: The blocking of food aid, the looming starvation, the fetid living conditions, the destruction of homes and cultural relics, the gleeful and sometimes sexualized humiliations at the hands of some soldiers whose understandable rage at having their own sense of safety shattered seems to have metastasized into a hideous sadism. And then such a loneliness when I look at so many of the people and movements whose politics I share (or perhaps used to share) and see, far too often, the glorification of violence, thinly-veiled or not-at-all-veiled anti-Semitism, rank misogyny, knee-jerk denialism of politically inconvenient facts, attempts to shut down any dissent or even discourse that strays slightly outside of the party line, and a kind of hyper-simplistic black-and-white thinking that desperately wants to divide the world into guys who are all good and whose cause is wholly righteous and whose acts are entirely justifiable and guys who are cartoonishly bad and irredeemable and should probably be destroyed.
I haven’t been tuning any of it out. If anything, I’ve been letting too much in. But I also really haven’t wanted to write about it. What could I possibly have to add?
One thing I do cover is politics, both electoral politics in the US and gender politics around the world. That involves some degree of reading vibes, and of assessing subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in media coverage and regular-person discussions. And it seems to me, watching this war from very far away and with the same kind of beleaguered heartache and disgust that I’m guessing many similar observers feel, that the Israeli strikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers earlier this week were a turning point. I don’t know how this ends, only that I hope it does, and soon. But I do think that when we look back at this grotesque war, the killing of these particular aid workers will be an identifiable moment when things started to shift.
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