On seeing and believing

In the film Argentina 1985, which was nominated for an Academy Award last year, there’s a moment I keep thinking of, replaying in my head on a loop. The film is based on the true story of the lawyers who prosecuted the leaders of Argentina’s military junta for their crimes against the Argentine people. These crimes include disappearing, torturing, and killing as many as 30,000 people (estimates vary). One of the lawyers comes from an upper class military family who view him as their black sheep for his left-ish politics and for going after their friends. The film has a melodramatic Hollywood type arc for all its attention to detail. In a mawkish scene near the end, the above mentioned lawyer’s mother calls him after listening to several days of the trial live on radio to tell him that she is on his side now. The testimonies of the victims have swayed her, she urges him to prosecute with all his power. At the end, evil is defeated and the music swells, although many of those found guilty would be released very soon after and although Henry Kissinger still presides, like a wizened Angel of Death, over world affairs, popping up to comment every so often.

The idea here, that information is at the heart of justice, is often repeated in contemporary Holocaust media also. In stories like The Book Thief or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which one critic called “contemporary post-Holocaust kitsch,” the great evils of history are reduced to sentimental tales or even allegories. German children forge bridges with Jewish prisoners, help dialogue across insurmountable gulfs of terror and genocide. Innocence, the writers suggest, is the primary route to understanding. Where adults are blinded by the fog of their cultural prejudices (unless they heroically shrug off their blinders Schindler style, another whole genre), children are untainted. The allegorical descriptions of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas are on a similar level to a particular infamous TikTok where the creator promised to explain what is happening in Palestine “for the girls” and then went on to compare it to one girl coopting another’s birthday party. The heroic adults of Holocaust media likewise have a cartoonish relationship to morality. They also seem strangely innocent, floating above the morass of hatred and repression that characterizes their fascist society. When they decide to go against the grain and resist oppression and murder, they have the blunt logic of superheroes: there is an evil that must be defeated and for some reason only they can do it.

It seems glaringly obvious that this view of history is a distorted one, dangerously distorted even. It does not offer us any insight into why or how oppression, terror, genocide come to happen, what precursors exist, what warning signs, what basic societal structures. Years ago, I wrote a professor at NYU wondering naively if I could do a graduate project about comparative genocides and about the colonial logic of the Holocaust. He wrote me back, very kindly, to tell me that unfortunately no one would ever let me study that. I keep thinking of a very long 1985 Commentary Magazine essay, trashing Primo Levi for trying to find a more universal lesson in his experience of the camps. The writer mocks his concern with xenophobia, with the camp or prison as a universal laboratory space of discipline, mocks his worldview as non Eastern European and therefore not Jewish. By contrast, Levy describes the camps “as a distorted mirror of the present-day world,” the essence of modernity.

There is nothing I can say about what is happening in Palestine, in Gaza and in the West Bank, that has not already been said. I don’t really have any words. Last week in Germany, a country where Jewish people, ethnic cleansed just a few generations before, have now been arrested and fired from their jobs for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, I scrolled on my phone between work meetings and consumed massive amounts of horror: videos and images of thousands and thousands of traumatized, mutilated, dead children and adults, buildings flattened into an apocalyptic wasteland, the constant shattering sound of explosions. In one video, a toddler, who had been pulled out from under rubble, rocked back and forth in shock while medics cleaned her injuries. Her eyes were terrified and vacant. In a follow up note, the news outlet that had posted the video noted that she had since passed away from internal bleeding. It is disorienting to look up and see the blue sky. The United States has been at war in some form for my entire life, mostly, although not exclusively in the Middle East. Although those wars have brutally destroyed countless lives and whole regions and created an abyss of never-ending violence, I have never experienced war. Like many people in this country, I live insulated from it, at the top of a mountain of carnage. Like every empire before, we have despoiled the world.

If information was really justice, surely we would live in the most just of all possible times. On the internet, it is possible to watch catastrophe unfolding in real time, to see home videos of happy children and their parents along with images or announcements of their murder. An Al-Jazeera journalist, whose family the Israeli government openly admitted to targeting, discovered while live on air that his wife and children had been killed. The images seem to be read differently, though, out in the wider world. There is something that happens in their dissemination, in how western media presents and filters things and in how we are able or willing to absorb them. Writing for n+1, in the best essay of its kind that I’ve read so far, Saree Makdisi wonders about “the people all around us who, so desperately moved by the images and narratives of Israeli suffering, have nothing to say about Palestinian suffering on a far greater scale. […] Their indifference is not personal,” he concludes, “but a manifestation of a broader culture of denial. Such people seem not to see or to recognize Palestinian suffering because they literally do not see or recognize it.”

We are so strongly encouraged, in other words, to identify with people who we understand to look like us and be like us, and our media is so strongly slanted towards these associations, that it becomes nearly impossible to perceive the suffering of others. This is the dehumanizing work of imperialism and white supremacy. Dylan Saba writes in The Baffler that “the Palestinian subject position necessarily requires explicating in one breath this whole historical lineage, while the Zionist subjectivity has an assumed universalism.” Trying to cut through this requires attention, care, contextualization. It denies space to grievance, to dispossession, even to mourning.

Mainstream news outlets have uncritically repeated briefs from the Israeli government, who in recent times have referred to the people they are bombing variously as “human animals” and as “children of darkness” on live TV or on their overactive social media accounts. In a particularly startling tweet, the official account for Israel posted a Harry Potter themed meme about defeating Voldemort that made me rethink my stance on the “Hitler was a Disney adult” thing. Although this kind of propaganda seems ridiculous and embarrassing in addition to being shameful apologia, Erik Baker suggests in The Drift that it is designed precisely to sow confusion and uncertainty, to weigh us down in endless and circular debates.

Since our values so palpably don’t matter, we take refuge in imagining war as a kind of deadly board game, governed by objective rules that obviate the need for political debate. There are certain unquestionable premises: Israel has a “right to defend itself,” limited only by a canon of “laws of war” that distinguish acceptable from unacceptable killing. Compliance with these laws is a purely factual question, in a sense value-neutral: anyone, whatever their other commitments, ought to be able to agree that certain acts are “war crimes” and therefore intolerable, while other massacres are lawful and therefore beyond reproach. This fantasy restores to us some of the power stripped by the depoliticization of war: if we can penetrate the fog of war and prove objectively that something happened that was against the rules, we might still be able to make a difference, to arrest the progress of the catastrophe that provokes in us such impotent moral outrage. 

And that is all I have to offer: impotent moral outrage. No other action I have taken or can take seems to make a difference. Biden, beholden to his wealthy weapon manufacturer cronies, whose stocks have skyrocketed since October 7th, doesn’t seem to care what the American public, drowning in record poverty, gun violence, food insecurity, and homelessness, want or think. Israel has just made it legal to kill protestors on the spot. An American Senate resolution quoted random student groups from around the country at length before denouncing them as “antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible.” This atmosphere has created some absurdity, which would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque. New York congressman Ritchie Torres tweeted a series of shrill messages calling Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) antisemitic hate groups (Torres is not Jewish) and accusing anti-Israel Jewish activists of inciting “blood libels” against him. He has continued to post through it, claiming to be the staunchest ally of the Jewish people and suggesting that no one police his self-identification. In his head, perhaps, Torres is Jewish, in a similar way to George Santos.

In this sharp backslide towards utter repression, where not only is genocidal violence being enacted in our names, but it is illegal for us to even gesture to it, it is easy to feel despair. I do not think we have a right to despair or more critically, time for it. Even if action feels futile, all we can do is take action. The Palestinian Youth Movement is running a series of dispatches in The New Inquiry with calls to action and guidelines. And a group of writers and culture workers have created a solidarity working group to build a cultural organizing movement, modeled after American Writers Against the War in Vietnam. You can see their pledge here.

Eyal Weizman has written for The London Review of Books about the history of Israeli settlements, offering context and background. Weizman is one of the founders of Forensic Architecture, whose video on the Triple Chaser tear gas canister manufactured by the corporation Safariland, shifted my worldview when I first saw it.

Arielle Angel wrote a very moving essay weeks ago for Jewish Currents about her experience of grief and anger and trying to hold multiple truths. Gabriel Winant wrote a very moving essay for Dissent about how the Israeli state steals the Jewish ability to mourn by converting mourning into retributive violence. Refaat Alareer, a brilliant Palestinian writer and editor, described the bombing of his home. A 2018 piece by award winning writer Adania Shibli, on getting a false warning call about a bombing, was reprinted in Lit Hub.

The only other thing I’ll share are two poems. One, “Awaiting a Poem,” I heard read by Laila Lalami the other night and was written by Libyan poet Hawa Gamodi about the Arab Spring. “I stand with my heart agape” writes Gamodi, “To observe this desolate world / As it falls into ruin.”

The other was written by Hiba Kamal Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet who was killed on October 20th in an airstrike. She won a Sharjah Award in 2017 for her poetry and there is a video of her reading this one live, which says so much more than all the other words anyone seems to have. “None of Darwish’s poems,” she writes, “can return to the bereaved / what they have lost.” May she rest in peace.