I’ve truly lost the capacity to contain within me even a fraction of the news from Gaza, let alone Sudan, but there is one thing I realised today.
The reason I feel additionally tired when I see ‘bad takes’ from people who I feel should know better isn’t because I think people can’t learn, but rather that such people rarely do learn and end up taking so much oxygen from the space I need to grieve.
Its absence is a reminder that, ultimately, the positions I hold make me alone. I do know this feeling is shared – and so, evidently, I’m not alone – but grieving without the collective makes grieving more difficult. It isolates me from myself because no one is an island.
With Gaza I see myself struggling to grieve as part of a collective, and grieving alone is just too taxing. The result is paralysing, and that paralysis is the greatest gift to the genocidal powers that seek to impose a new reality faster than our collective abilities to respond, let alone our individual ones.
And while seeking a space to grieve I must also, it seems, anticipate where these forces of destruction will hit next. By that I don’t mean wondering whether their genocidal violence will ‘spillover’ elsewhere (it already is), but rather whether the international system that is seemingly being rendered useless will withstand this onslaught.
If there is anything that the Syrian experience has taught me it’s that it is not the case that the world ‘simply moves on.’ Far from it. The world has already been changed by the open destruction of hospitals and schools by the Assad regime in Syria.
Now, this world is undergoing the transformation needed for it to accept the most documented genocide in history (so far), the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.
They are killing thousands of our children and they are doing so live for everyone to see on any smartphone, any computer, any TV.
An entire network of human relations is being eradicated in front of our eyes at dizzying speed and most of the people who can do anything about it – big media outlets, politicians, the ultratrich – are either ignoring it, downplaying it, or encouraging it.
A bunch of Neros fiddling while our Romes burn.
UN agencies say over 1 million in Gaza could experience highest level of starvation by mid-July 2024.