Gabeba Baderoon
and Nadia Davids, Letter to the Editor, Mail & Guardian
The reality of war is bitter. A Vietnamese writer once confided that, for
her, nighttime and its peaceful silence was a time of visceral fear because
when she was a child, the silence of night was when the bombs would fall. Now,
silence took her back to the moment before the explosions and so she could not
rest. This is how the fear and destruction – the reality – of war enters our
bodies immediately and forever.
Yet it seems we weigh
realities differently.
When we read that some
children’s deaths are accidents of war, that happen without responsibility or
the need for justice, while other children’s deaths are terroristic attacks on
our common humanity, some part of us must wonder, who decides on the line that
divides those who are cherished from those who do not matter?
A powerful and
inexcusable calculus has been used to value some humans over others. This
cannot be clearer than in juxtaposing the deaths by Israeli bombing and
invasion of over 250 Gazans – the overwhelming majority of them civilian and
many of them children – with two Israeli deaths.
Those of us who read
about the war at a distance play a crucial role in this suffering by colluding
or not with the dehumanising of Palestinians. This is because the different
valuing of lives has happened through an insidious and effective project of
dehumanising Gazans, rendering them distant and their suffering meaningless and
almost inevitable. Any intervention is
deemed hopeless. They are turned into the intractable and stubborn problem of
the Middle East, a narrative that easily becomes repetitive, a story stuck on
repeat.
How has this happened?
The most powerful weapon
of dehumanisation is language, particularly, the indiscriminate use of the word
“terrorist” to cover all Palestinians.
The word “terrorist” creates a stark vulnerability, which is then used
to justify brutal violence in response. The use of Israeli vulnerability to
justify disproportionate violence toward Palestinians is a cycle we witness
again and again. In the last ten years, since a war was declared on “terror”,
abuses in the name of stopping terror have become normalised. Public language
has calcified, allowing terms like “collateral damage” to go unremarked. As
writers, as South Africans, we have witnessed and felt the effects of co-opted
language and we issue a call to resist such militarised discourse.
Often, the question ‘Why
Israel?’ is mobilised as an argument against meaningful engagement with, and
critique of, the country’s war crimes. Why not take issue with China, Syria,
Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or any number of other places where
human rights violations are frighteningly commonplace? It is an important
question, not least because it condemns Israeli militarism from the mouths of
those seeking to support it: to ask the comparative question is to admit
Israel’s place among the guilty. We do not seek to single out Israel for
condemnation: if we condemn its government for killing children, it is
axiomatic that we condemn other governments too. To be enraged by Netanyahu is
not to forgive Assad, to demand that Palestinian children not be killed while
playing on the beach, is not to grant Joseph Kony the right to recruit
child-soldiers. It is possible, it must be possible, to be concerned about many
places at once. It is also possible to feel empathy and sadness for Israeli
citizens, who live in a volatile and violent region.
When the three Israeli
teenagers were kidnapped and later killed, we grieved for their lives that were
just beginning and for their families’ pain. Hamas has still not claimed
responsibility for their deaths but to date, in ‘response’, 46 Palestinian
children have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force.
Forty-six.
Heartbreakingly, it is
likely that by the time this letter is published, that number will have increased. Some of these children were as young as 18
months. They were babies. Gazan children’s lives, their games on the beach,
have been cut short by the precise aim of one of the world’s most powerful,
most well-equipped militaries. The photographs of their lifeless little bodies,
their T-shirts smeared with blood, their limbs blown off, their funeral
processions are unbearable to look at. But look we must.
We must not turn away.
And in that looking, let
us think again about the meaning of the mounting death toll of the war on Gaza
and how dangerously this illustrates the erasure of the category of the
civilian in Palestine.
Let us think again of
people whose faces we only see screaming in pain in the media, whose homes and
infrastructure are being destroyed, whose children must stay indoors under the
threat of death, who are battered daily by repeated injustice even when they
are not in the headlines. Before the war, their lives were made untenable by
salaries unpaid, dignity refused, taxes not transmitted by Israel, haphazard
detention, arbitrary arrests, subject to endless raids of homes, cafes and
mosques. Lives reduced to waiting at checkpoint, always at the mercy of an
impervious authority – these routine forms of suffering erased under
manipulative discourses of security.
A refusal to tolerate the
excesses of Israeli militarism is not a denial of the country’s right to exist,
nor is it a strand of the ugly evil of anti-Semitism. Instead, it is a demand
that the Israeli government is held accountable for the for the civilians it
kills and that that accountability is not side-stepped by declaring that it is
Hamas’ “fault” and that they “had” to kill children.
This demand is to refuse
the logic that Palestinians do not matter, that their daily suffering does not
matter, their repeated losses do not matter.
Let us recall, we also
know what it means not to matter. We did
not matter either.
Because South Africa has
been used as a metaphor – “apartheid” offers itself as an analogy for others’
suffering – let us remember how ardently the apartheid government sought to
dehumanise black South Africans and render our suffering meaningless too.
But we, like Gazans, are
not meaningless. Our lives matter. So do theirs.
Let us feel our common
humanity, let Gazan lives be our own, let us insist that we will not collude
with the erasure of their suffering.
By the simple acts of
remembering, listening and refusing the language of division, let us offer our
empathy and protection to those who are least powerful and most ignored. Let us
refuse to be complicit with war and its infinite suffering.
