Suzanne Harrington: We are watching genocide unfold in real time in Gaza
Palestinian civil defence members and locals gather at the site of a building hit by Israeli bombardment in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023. Pic: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images
You’re probably quite adept at blocking out the news by now. Disengaging to preserve your sanity.
It’s not disinterest or compassion fatigue as much as basic self-care, avoiding televised news so that the images don’t lodge in your brain and haunt you at 3am.
You change radio channels when the news comes on with a lightning-quick reflex, keep newspapers at arms’ length like they’re unpinned grenades, haven’t gone near Twitter in months.
No news is not good news. There is no good news, which is why you want no news.
What initially felt like a cop-out, tiny acts of daily cowardice and disengagement now feels like the basic preservation of your mental health.
And then, in the car, your no-news armour is punctured. A report from Gaza on the radio.
A dad, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, saying how his 16-year-old daughter has been telling him that they won’t hear the bomb that kills them until it is too late; that they will already be dead.
She is saying this to console him. Imagine, he says, your teenage daughter having to think like that, having to say things like that.
Later, another snippet about people dying of dehydration. Dying of thirst? Blatant war crimes, in plain sight.
It's the feeling of helplessness, the impotence, of being unable to do anything.
The feeling that here we are, watching genocide unfold in real-time, and there’s nothing we can do. Nothing.
And if we call it genocide, we are accused of anti-Semitism. Of supporting terrorism.
It makes you want to scream because you are neither anti-Semitic nor pro-terrorist nor anything within a million miles of such vileness.
No, like most ordinary civilians, you are anti-violence, anti-murder, anti-apartheid, anti-hate, anti-colonisation, anti-inhumanity, anti-fascist, anti-monstering, anti-killing, anti-kidnapping, anti-rape, anti-bombing, anti-shooting, anti-stabbing.
And most of all, anti-dead children. Anti-dead civilians.
The dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians is happening in front of our eyes, and those who call it out – voices like Jeremy Corbyn, and Miriam Margolyes – are viewed as extremists by the mainstream, as mainstream UK politicians fall over themselves to say nothing, do nothing, maybe wring their hands a bit.
And with this dehumanisation comes decimation. We are witnessing, on our screens, the wiping out of a specific group of civilians, half of them children.
We watch as a horrific terrorist attack is avenged by state terrorism, and we are encouraged to view this mass vengeance as valid, proportionate, justified, and legal.
As though these are reasonable actions.
