I remember, as the confused and bloody news reports began to flood online last October 7th, the dull weight of certainty I felt that, for every person Hamas had murdered in their terrorist attack, Israel would slaughter many more. My naivete, however, prevented me from grasping the true scale of what was to come. I was blinded by a fantasy that a small few of us, by virtue of the places we were born in and of the color of our skin, are permitted to enjoy: that the world is governed by rules, and that there are red lines that must never be crossed. Even in Palestine, where international law has been less than an empty platitude for so long, I still felt there would be a limit to the horror Israel would unleash. That some vague threshold, once crossed, would trigger a mechanism of restraint, that levers would be pulled by those powerful enough to stop the violence Israel would exercise, and that things, somehow, would return to a grim status quo.
I was wrong.
Numbers, once they reach a certain stature, become somewhat devoid of meaning, especially when they’re used to measure human death. I read today that more than 42,500 Palestinians are confirmed dead because of this war, but also that the actual figure is probably closer to 119,000. I read that Gaza is about 60% destroyed, and that 90% of its people have been displaced. I read reports from April suggesting 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza, while reports from yesterday asserted that those bombs had created 42 million tons of debris there. I read stories from January stating that maybe ten children had their legs blown off every day during the war’s opening months, but, whether or not those morbid figures have continued to today, I have no idea.
Numbers are cold, and their power lies not in their ability to express human suffering. The human face of this genocide, though, can be found online, even as censorship attempts to silence Palestinian voices from presenting the truth of what they endure. Scarcely a day has gone by this past year where I haven’t seen some unthinkable photo or video almost immediately upon logging online: a dead Palestinian child, little body twisted and torn; a mourning mother, keening for the son or daughter she’ll never again hold; an Israeli soldier, giddy, as he plays with the underwear of a Gazan woman who is surely dead. Sifting through this endless reel of atrocity has become almost routine by now, and perhaps it won’t be long before it feels as sterile to me as do the statistics.
There are days where I don’t think about the genocide at all. It may be that I make a conscious decision to block it out, or it may be entirely natural. I have a life, and I seek to enjoy it. I spend time with the person I love; I drink beer, go for walks, and, on really good days, I pet a dog I’ve never met before. I have the freedom to leave my phone aside and to forget, for a little while, that any of this is happening. It sometimes makes me feel guilty, because, for the increasing number of people living through Israel’s savagery, the horror is ceaseless and they do not have the ability to momentarily forget about it.
More than 2,000 Lebanese people are dead already, as Israel expands its war, and many of them, of course, were children. The same indiscriminate bombing tactics Israel uses against Gaza are now being deployed against Lebanon, while new forms of terror, like simultaneously blowing up people’s pagers around the country, are being rolled out with glee and hubris. Iran has joined the bloody turmoil, and where this escalating situation will spiral to is not yet clear.
How many more people are going to die? Could the U.S. become directly involved in a war with Iran? Might nuclear weapons be used? I sometimes catch myself thinking about such things, fearing that, perhaps, I’m catastrophizing. But, after watching a livestream of genocide for a whole year, it’s difficult to suggest the worst isn’t possible. Rules, in so much as there are any, are made to be broken, so just how far might this thing go?
Joe Biden is not the only foreign leader to be complicit in the genocide and the growing regional war, but he, for the time being, remains the most important. Were it not for his total, unconditional support for Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in turn, treats him with utter contempt, and were it not for the billions of dollars in aid and weapons the United States has provided, Israel would never have been able to sustain this industrial-scale murder, as they have demonstrated with past American presidents more willing to rein Israel in. But money and weapons continue to flow, American veto power is repeatedly deployed at the United Nations to render any feeble attempts to act there redundant, and the president and an obsequious, shameless media class continue, to this day, to invoke Israel’s right to defend itself all while the list of its war crimes grows ever longer.
Whenever I learned of genocides in the past, I always struggled to wrap my head around something: how could a society become so detached from norms, from the very essence of human nature itself, that it permits such devastating barbarity to occur? How could anyone, not only look away from the annihilation, but go so far as to cheer for it? The premise of my question, I realize now, was flawed, because it was asked in a spirit of reason. It failed to reckon with the intoxication of violence, and the madness it breeds.
The genocide of Gaza is a year old now, but the war in the Middle East seems only to be beginning. Joe Biden will soon retire as a genocidaire, while Netanyahu appears to be slaughtering his way back into the good graces of his electorate, perhaps destined to cling onto power for longer than ever seemed possible this time last year. His war, then, will continue, and it will likely grow larger at the expense of people whose lives are deemed by so many to be worthless. Madness, truly, has set in, and the true depths to which it will drag us are as yet unknown.