Visions Of Hell
In total silence
A serendipitous conversation months ago led me to a group of women united by their overwhelming need not to remain silent in the face of what will surely go down in history as the most unconscionable immorality of our lifetime.
Not only are the people of Palestine undergoing what is widely considered a genocide, but in the words of Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh it is the first “in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time.”
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish-born lawyer, is a special adviser in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
The women I met came together a month into this live-streamed genocide with a growing sense of exigency both to bear witness and to take some kind of action for Gaza, for Palestine, for Palestinians.
Joining their group, I felt a very palpable sense of relief. Here, I could speak freely about the acute pain caused by the dissonance I was carrying. I could talk openly about the mental strain of having to exist in the everyday here, in the normality of daily Western life and its undisturbed routines, while watching the acute reality of the people of Gaza struggling to hold onto the rags of existence there under abject, relentless and increasingly depraved and macabre attacks from one of the strongest militaries in the world.
As a collective, we are highly aware that anything we do or achieve could be construed as a proverbial drop in the ocean in comparison to the tsunami of wrongs meted out on Palestinians and requiring urgent attention.
In the face of Israel “‘intentionally distort[ing] rules of humanitarian law” with impunity, in the words of Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur, what possible difference can we make? We are not only living miles away from Palestine but also are far removed from those in political power and from the international legal structures created with the intention of holding states and individuals legally accountable under an agreed set of standards
I am not alone in asking myself this question on a near-daily basis. We are all struggling, individually and as a collective with the overwhelming imbalance between the weight of our understanding of Gaza and the comparatively negligible insignificance of our actions.
This was particularly clear recently when I caught the edge of a conversation between friends reuniting after some months. Among the normal niceties and “how-are-yous,” one responded that while things in the world aren’t great, she was fine. In her daily life with family, friends and work, all was well, for which she was grateful.
This gratitude in and of itself seemed to be a salve. After all, given that our relative insignificance means that nothing we can do could possibly effect the kind of change that is required in order to address the gross violations of Palestinian human rights, the solution is surely to thank whatever powers there may that one was born on this little patch of land with this color skin and not in another patch of land with a different color skin.
When it came to my turn for the “how-are-yous,” I arranged my eyes, cheeks and wrinkles into acceptable shapes and made my mouth produce acceptable sounds. Internally, my chest contracted with the now-familiar visceral pain of bearing witness to what is happening to Gaza and the discord between this and having to pretend a series of emotions I was quite simply not feeling at that moment.
I have started to feel my body thin out in these moments, as if the ends of my fingers are dissolving into the air around me. I squeeze my feet in my shoes to make my toes acknowledge the existence of something rooting me to a physical space. Sometimes, I excuse myself and beat a retreat into a private space to breathe through the sheer mental contradictions of this frankly unconscionable reality. I don’t even have to close my eyes for the macabre kaleidoscope of images to play out.
The dual narrative is constant. Every moment of the day is punctuated by parallel moments of a nonexistence in Gaza: kissing my children goodnight, I think of the father who buried his family in the rubble of his home, sleeping next to the dirt covering their dead bodies every night in order to be with them.
Or an image surfaces of a mother clasping the limp body of her child, kissing the little girl’s now-lifeless face. Or I see a boy kissing the feet of his father who was crushed to death when their house was shelled.
My daughter finds a Band-Aid for a cut on her leg, and I see a child with two amputated limbs or recall the father-surgeon amputating the leg of his niece without anesthesia.
A bowl of food stands uneaten in the kitchen, and I see images of the emaciated rib cages of children who are dying from Israeli-made forced starvation. I feel too hot or too cold at night, and I think of families sleeping ten or more in one tent; I feel the warmth of this last relatively sultry week in London and imagine the brutal 104-degree heat of a Gazan summer endured under canvas without any or adequate drinking water.
A spider crawls from a crack in the wall of my house, and even as I see flies feeding on the infected wounds of Palestinians whose health care system has been decimated by Israel, the image is superseded by flames raging through the tents of people displaced one, two or more times in the last eight months. The fire ravages people to a crisp or to cinders.
I see a mother carry the ash of her six children in two hands. She had left them in the tent to try to find bread.
As Israel’s genocide thunders on unchecked, the images from Gaza become even more disturbing and ever more appalling; the testimonials from Palestinians seized and taken to Israeli prisons become increasingly unspeakable.
The torture of Palestinians, including children, at the hands of Israeli soldiers — and in some cases, Israeli doctors — is demonstrative of sadism so inhumane that I recoil physically. I begin to write it down but the words “beatings to their genitals” and “electric probe” make my skin crawl; bile rises in my throat, and I retch.
The silence around Gaza has become both louder and, to those of us committed to bearing witness, more disturbing. At a recent gathering of longstanding friends, it felt uncomfortably as if the G words (Gaza and Genocide) were taboo, as if a memo had been passed around before we congregated reminding us all that this gathering was Fun with a capital F and therefore — regardless of the conversation turning briefly to the farcical forthcoming US elections and to our Britain’s impoverished choice of potential leaders — shhh, let’s not mention Palestine.
Our collective have discussed this silence, the attitudes of those around us to the genocide, and our own choices and behaviour, trying to make sense both of why we feel so strongly the need to take action for Palestine and how other people respond to us because of this.
We are all women with differing backgrounds: one, an Indian-South African who has lived through apartheid, is able to express her activism, which has been a way of life to her, through the need to call out oppression and racism.
Two more, as Muslims (one Pakistani, one Iranian/Indian heritage), perhaps feel the responsibility of the Islamic umma. Two are white and British: one, with years of activism against Iraq, child slavery and poverty under her belt, sees this as a life of speaking out against injustice; the second feels that Gaza has awakened an understanding of oppression and racism that, by her own admittance, she was possibly not openly addressing.
I, with mixed Lebanese-British heritage, can locate my emotional response in my direct experience living and working with Palestinians in Lebanon and the West Bank.
While our metaphorical journeys to Palestine differ, we are in no doubt of the moral injustice of what is happening not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank. We are all well versed in Zionist history, the US-Israeli political alliance and the British role both in the creation of Israel and the part its two leading political parties, as well as the international media, have played in maintaining the status quo of a violent settler colonial occupation for decades.
Our collective response is an overwhelming need to bear witness: anything else would be a betrayal not only of Palestinians but also of our own moral compass.
How, then, do we reconcile this very strong sense of what we should each do with the lack of action we witness in the people with whom we interact, by choice or necessity, on a daily basis?
How does our urgent appreciation of the imperative to be activists appear to those around us?
Are we deliberately or by implication taking a moral high ground? If so, is it right that this is the case?
Or, whether right or wrong, is the apparent existence of a moral hierarchy between those who choose to act and those who choose to acknowledge the evils of the world and content themselves with the articulation of their own gratitude for their blessings, enough to tarnish us with a moral hubris that by extension distances us from the very people whose behavior we would like to affect?
These questions are not easy to answer, and the notion of some sort of moral hubris sits uncomfortably, given that our overwhelming drive is also the moral urgency to address historical and current injustices that are possibly unprecedented in terms of the political, military and economic support they are being given by the UK and the US governments, among others.
The need to bear witness, the need for each one of us to hold ourselves accountable, is not a choice, but a necessity: we cannot conceive of behaving in any other way.
Somehow, we have to find a path forward, one on which we are exhausted neither by the sheer onslaught of the violent and abject horror show being live streamed from Gaza nor by our understanding of our own inadequacy in feeling this, given that the violence we are witnessing is barely negligible in comparison to the actual reality for Palestinians for whom every second is an acute fight against the most advanced military for existence.
Nor are we put off, finally, by the silence, apathy or indifference of the people with whom we interact on a daily basis, people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have not chosen or been able to respond to this genocide with our urgency.
Struggling with the latter in particular, attempting to understand why we are acting and others are not and striving to develop ways in which to engage some of those others in a cause that we feel is ultimately not only about liberation but also, on a personal level, liberating, we arrive back where we started, asking ourselves why we chose not to stay silent.
And we arrive at the words of Pastor Munther Isaac of Bethlehem, cited by Ní Ghrálaigh at the International Court of Justice: “I want you to look in the mirror and ask: where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?”
What we are doing may not be for everyone — and indeed, it is for a reason that history records the names of those for whom action was imperative in moments of extreme crisis — but it is for each of us.
And so, waking in the morning to reach for our phones, dreading what hideous images of decapitated children, burned bodies, dismembered mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and grandparents the night will have sent to our flickering screens, we scroll through the reels sent from those on the ground.
And while our hearts burn with the pain of bearing witness, the knowledge that we are able to face our own consciences makes us turn our faces to the world, crying, with renewed determination: None of us is free until Palestine is free.
Amy Abdelnoor is an Arab-British writer and teacher who lived and worked in the West Bank and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; her work-in-progress, inspired by her experiences, was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Views expressed here are the writer’s own.
Cover Photograph: London has seen near-weekly mass demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Vuk ValcicZUMA Press Wire
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