It makes a sound like a snake when it falls
Every day for the past year I have spent my waking hours in an aghast sort of stupor. Thinking: no one is arriving to stop this? Surprised anew. Still no one? Not even after this? Or this? Or this? And then I resign myself to that grim fact and wake up the next day and start the process all over again.
In between those moments I go about living my normal life untouched by war or famine or disease. The life of a fucking king. Suffering no injury that I have not conspired against myself.
Every day for the past year I have seen or read something that has changed how I think about the world. About people too. Here's one that was published today by a woman named Nour Abdul Latif about living in Gaza:
The nights of genocide had begun; entire residential blocks burned before our eyes. I held my children tightly, trying to shield them from the terror, but how could I? “This is a new missile, Mama,” said Jumana, my nine-year-old daughter. “It makes a sound like a snake when it falls!”
After five nights of constant red skies from the intense bombing, we watched the residents of the Al-Karamah neighborhood evacuate, knowing that our turn would be next.
On the sixth day, I began packing my essentials in preparation for moving to a safer place. It was the hardest task I had ever faced — how could I fit my entire life into a single bag?
What if anything stood out for you there because for me it was the daughter's recognition of a novel type of munition flying over her head. Imagine being bombed so frequently that you come to know – even as a child – the different kinds of missiles sent to kill you by the sounds they make? By the size of the holes they leave behind. A sommelier's expertise in destruction. And what a bounty of varietals we have delivered to her and so many millions of others like her in our bloody history.
I know I should have known that sort of thing and maybe I already did know that and I had forgotten or tried not to think about it too much but does it sicken you too thinking about it right now? That there are so many people around the world who have been brought by our works to talk about bombs like we might different kinds of precipitation. Look at the little app on our phones and figure out what will be falling from the sky today rain or snow or sleet.
I was reminded of this Doonesbury cartoon from 1973.
She goes on in the piece:
At night, the tent became a freezing hell, exposing us to cold air that made children sick, and by the morning, we would find ourselves drenched in sweat from the sun beating down on us. And then what? Each day repeats itself like the last and the next. What’s next? We hear news of a potential deal, a distant dream, and neither fully believe nor entirely dismiss it. For me, there is no truce more important than my truce with the flies before bed, and no deal more crucial than securing fresh water for the tank in the morning.
Under the dim light of a lamp, I gaze at the faces of my sleeping children and wonder why this world still hesitates to end the genocide. What does the world want from the children of Gaza after witnessing their limbs and living flesh torn apart? After seeing how the sick among them were abandoned in hospitals to die of hunger and fear? After observing the premature babies besieged as if they were the strongest men? After knowing that fetuses were killed in their mothers’ wombs without mercy?
I am not naive to be clear. I did not just learn about how the world works today. In the past year. It's just that my stubborn belief in the goodness of the world and the goodness of people has been so hard to finally and utterly kill off. And every day it repairs itself just enough like a slowly mending heart. Just enough blood left in it to keep beating.
This piece by Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer is powerful and bracing as well:
No, the problem isn’t with language. It’s that some of us are so deliberately dehumanized that no description of the barbaric manner of our suffering or deaths could suffice to prove our humanity. In fact, the greater the barbarism, the more insistent the gleeful assertion that we deserved it. The West seeks to preserve the image of its own humanity at the complete erasure of ours. How can they be guilty of murder when those they kill are merely “terrorists” or “human animals”? In fact, not only are they not guilty of murder, they are heroes, cleansing the world.
I don’t know what language it’s possible to use with people who will never see you as human. Who will always hear an animal braying when you speak. Aware that we will be misinterpreted, we too try to translate ourselves for the West in every sense of the word in order to make our suffering intelligible. We speak to them in their languages. We say: imagine this was your city. Imagine these were your children. For we cannot simply assume that they will see our children and ascribe to them the same innocence, the same promise, the same irresistible sweetness as theirs. We translate our landscapes. We say, imagine 2,000,000 people packed into a strip of land the size of… We say, “Beirut is a cosmopolitan city with a vibrant nightlife.” Imagine, we exhort them, your children killed, your city bombed, your future gone, your sense of self erased.
Because, ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.
Every day for the past year I have seen or read something that has further depleted my already rapidly dwindling supply of respect for – or belief in the value of – the profession I have chosen. Had chosen. Not that it was very high to begin with. Like this piece in which ten journalists from the BBC and CNN reveal "the inner workings of those outlets’ newsrooms from October 7 onward, alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles."
Adam also said there was a period of time when CNN journalists “couldn’t call air strikes in Gaza air strikes unless we had confirmation from the Israelis”.
“We would not be doing this in any other place. We would not tolerate the need to ask, say, the Russians whether they bombed a hospital in Kyiv.”
Recently, when health officials in Gaza announced that Israeli attacks had killed more than 40,000 people, CNN Managing Editor Mike McCarthy ordered his team to “contextualise and hold Hamas accountable”, Adam said.
“That was reflected in the framing from the shows,” he added.
Informing viewers of the grim milestone in August, CNN presenter Becky Anderson said in a news show, “The Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel that triggered the war,” and cautioned that CNN could not verify the toll. Leading experts have said the figure is likely an undercount.
Every day for the past year I have seen or read some of the most astounding anti-Arab and Muslim racism I have ever seen. Even accounting for the post-9/11 "war on terror" atmosphere. This piece below for example is one of the most shameful and revolting articles I've read in a year full of them. It was printed as usual in an ostensibly liberal media outlet. (Anecdotally it's funny to me because just yesterday I was thinking before I read this piece that maybe I should start writing for The Guardian again. But why would I want to share space with ideas like this? People like this. Why would anybody?)
I wanted to include a screenshot here because it's important to see the art they used. A fake dead baby. An appropriate choice for the argument the piece is trying to make. To the extent that there is any point to the piece besides genocide denial coupled with justification for the genocide it is denying. A very common way of thinking I've seen over the past year. This is not happening like they say it is but if it is they have it coming.
If you're wondering if the text itself is as bad as the headline makes it sounds it's somehow worse.
For the record "more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades," a recent Oxfam analysis found.
Not that that Palestinian children were particularly safe before the past year's increase in slaughter. Note the date of this report.
Every day for the past year I have had to listen to our president and perhaps our next president feign helplessness about their ability to do anything about all of this killing. All while shedding the occasional crocodile tears that "too many lives have been lost" or some such bullshit. Knowing that they are in fact the ones responsible for it.
Read this piece in The New Republic today.
It’s unclear yet whether the consequences of Israel’s post–October 7 war will be as bad as the Iraq War. They very well might, but one thing already clear is that both catastrophes were enabled in part by a U.S. president with strong ideological biases, a confidence in his own judgment as unshakeable as it was unjustified, advisers unwilling or unable to push back effectively, and an elite media establishment with an overtly militarist bent and a shockingly callous disregard for Arab lives, far more interested in editorializing about college student chants than about sitting U.S. senators—that is, people with actual power—urging Israel to “flatten” Gaza. (It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the bigotry still underlying our foreign policy discourse that, amid the flood of anti-Palestinian invective issuing from members of Congress, the only censure the U.S. House managed to pass was of its one Palestinian American member.)
It was obvious from early on in this war that Biden administration officials either did not understand, or just refused to acknowledge, what they were dealing with. As the public statements from Israeli leaders (collected as evidence in South Africa’s brief charging Israel with the crime of genocide), combined with the staggering amount of destruction being poured onto the 2.3 million people trapped within an area about twice the size of Washington, D.C., show, Israel’s concept of “self-defense” includes the intentional infliction of civilian suffering.
A memo from a defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv from November made this clear barely a month into the war. Israel’s strategy, the attaché wrote, is “deliberately causing massive destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” in Gaza, targeting houses, bridges, and roads, and causing massive civilian casualties. Israel’s approach, he concluded, clearly violated “international treaties and laws of war.” Israeli military conduct over the past year has repeatedly and consistently proven that analysis correct.
And the people in this administration know it. Early this year a senior official described to me the administration’s efforts to convince the Israeli government to loosen its onerous aid restrictions into Gaza. The Israeli public was still in a vengeful mood and felt that all Gazans should be made to suffer, he said, and the Israeli government, deeply embarrassed by its failure to prevent the worst attack in Israel’s history and frantic to direct the public’s anger elsewhere, was still very happy to oblige.
“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said.
Here is Biden even still today repeating debunked propaganda about October 7 and as an afterthought absolving Israel of agency in the tens of thousands they have massacred since that day. In fact providing cover for them by accusing Hamas of hiding among civilians. Yes it's sad but what else could one expect Israel do?
My statement marking one year since the unspeakable brutality of the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel: pic.twitter.com/KremdJODAd
— President Biden (@POTUS) October 7, 2024
And every day for the past year I have been trying to make sense of all of this. To write something that might make the slightest difference.
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Of course it did not change anything. I'm not fucking stupid. But one has to try. To maintain what's left of their humanity. To believe in something. And I do believe that there is a better world than this waiting for us. One in which Palestine will be free.