I remember as a young child of seven seeing clips of victims of the Rwandan genocide on the evening news and then, sat in the bathtub afterwards, with intrusive images from what I had seen flashing through my mind’s eye, believing that by thinking about the genocide I was causing more deaths.
A few years later a child counsellor helpfully informed me that this was just the OCD octopus in my brain flailing its greasy tentacles madly in my mind’s eye. I then largely worried about not putting sufficient effort into my homework to deserve my full house of ‘A’ grades for effort until I went to university, at which point I went off the rails for a bit.
These days, however, I’m more like that seven-year-old child again. Every morning when I wake up I immediately think of the Palestinian writers I follow here on Substack – gracious, smarter writers than me like Mohammed Mohisen and Mona Ramadan – and check that they’re still alive. I then check the news for what is happening in Gaza; the newest atrocities; the promises of a ceasefire that the Israeli government has zero intention of keeping.
Then, periodically throughout the day, as I am working, I twitchily check Substack, occasionally donating or venturing out of my flat to join a protest; sign a few petitions. These are guilty acts of disavowal. Unlike my desperate attempts at repression as a child – squeezing my eyes shut and desperately praying for painful thoughts to go away – I now recognise my moral obligations and full-heartedly meet them half-heartedly through epic acts of compensatory transference. I mean, I’m donating one of my kidneys to a British child partly because of my awareness that there are thousands more Palestinian children I am failing to help.*
Mostly, on the subject of the genocide of Gaza, which my government both supports and funds, I see a lot more repression than disavowal. When I’m protesting in Ipswich for people to change their bank accounts from Barclays or for Suffolk County Council to divest from companies profiting from the genocide, just over half of the people in the street say they’re not interested or don’t have time or don’t care or, more often, just walk the other way and avert their eyes. To a degree – I get it. Just living and working is tiring. From the perspective of those suffering monstrous privations, they’re luxuries, but for most people: walking to the shops, looking after the kids, cooking dinner, checking your bank account, tying your shoelaces, washing your hands after going to the toilet, setting the alarm on your clock, checking your social media feeds etc. etc. etc. are slogs, tiresome diversions from the chemical pleasures afforded by eating, masturbating and consuming entertainment. I remember the half-a-year I worked for AXA in my early 20s and how in the evenings I felt so numbed I would plonk down on the sofa next to my sister and watch Britain’s Got Talent. I did not want to feel and did not feel like I had the capacity to think.
From one perspective, naked repression looks more innocent than disavowal. After all, companies and governments are more likely to engage in disvowal once repression no longer cuts it with the populace. Barclays have stated that: “We recognise the profound human suffering caused by this conflict. This is an exceptionally complex and long-running conflict, and we urge governments and the international community to work together to find a lasting, peaceful solution.” Keir Starmer informs us: “The appalling scenes in Gaza are unrelenting. The continued captivity of hostages, the starvation and denial of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, the increasing violence from extremist settler groups, and Israel’s disproportionate military escalation in Gaza are all indefensible.”
We all wind our weasel ways into our burrows hoping to sleep a little easier at night.
Today I attended Unitarian Service on the topic of science and faith and whether they can be reconciled. During the pause in the service for announcements and notifications I thought I’d better stand up and say something about the recent aid drops. I told the congregation that they are a distraction, that we should all remember how last year a lot of Palestinian civilians were murdered by IDF snipers as they went to retrieve desperately needed provisions. Some of the aid ended up being dropped in the sea. It is a way to delay opening the border and prolonging starvation.
There were nods of agreement. Good. The minister taking the service (who gives genuinely good sermons! I like her!) took up the collection and I gave my £5. Later, when she stopped the congregation for prayer and reflection, she asked that we all prayed for the people of Gaza…
…
… and the Israelis who are protesting and those Israelis who have suffered.
And. I don’t know. I didn’t know. Was this just another form of disavowal?
Because I bear the hostages no ill will. I’m glad to see a small, small contigent of Israeli citizens finally take a stand. I’m thankful I’m not a hostage. I believe in protest.
But that desire to also hold the other side (our side) in our prayers… even if it is the best, the most innocent of our side…
I think it comes from a foreclosure of the truth, from a difficulty for many of us in the West to look straightforwardly at the situation and say without ifs and buts, “We are the villains here”. We so want to be good. I want to be good. But we’ve been hoodwinked into thinking the situation is more complex than it is because that allows us all a little bit of collective wiggle room. And God how we love and need and pray for our wiggle room.
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BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis has only written once on Palestine and Israel and it is a strange, partial blog post. I think it also makes clear that the journey from Point A [Henry McMahon’s agreement with the Emir of Mecca and the Balfour Declaration two years later – typically, Curtis starts with the British] to Point B [the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli government] has been enormously complicated. But I am not convinced that a process being complicated means that events themselves always are. From a zoomed-out perspective we might only be able to hear noise; but tune-in to what human beings are doing and experiencing in the now and you can see with horrifying clarity. The reasons as to why an individual is kidnapping, torturing and murdering children might be enormously complex – a web of traumatic childhood experiences intersecting with genetic predispositions and that time they bumped their head as a child which years later led to chemical misfirings in their brain meaning that certain probabilities and tendencies were more or less likely etc. etc. etc. But when you are faced with a child being tortured to death you are faced with a child being tortured to death. In that moment, solutions matter. Find the signal in the noise.
So, however I feel about that Curtis blog post above, I do think his two short video essays on what he names ‘Oh Dearism’ for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe are useful viewing.
Curtis’ essential argument in ‘Oh Dearism I’ is that Live Aid probably helped to kill as many people in Ethiopia during the famine of 1983–1985 than it helped to save, and that in the wake of NGOs attempting to provide aid for the Tutsi victims of the Rwandan genocide, Hutu murderers were inadvertently housed in camps in the Congo, which were then invaded by Tutsis who “instead of behaving like good victims […] carried out terrible massacres”. The horrific civil war that followed complicated the comfortable Western binaries of good and evil.
“When there weren’t any good or innocent people to support any longer, the kind of news reporting invented in the 90s made no sense. Because the news had given up reporting them as political struggles […] there was now no way to understand why these terrible events were happening. And, instead, political conflicts around the world from Darfur to Gaza were now portrayed to us as simple illustrations of the mindless creulty of the human race about which nothing could be done [and] to which the only response is ''Oh dear''.”
Curtis’ follow-up argument in ‘Oh Dearism II’ is that the method of intentionally sowing confusion amongst the public pioneered by Russian spin doctor and Putin’s personal advisor Vladislav Surkov has been adopted by politicians and the media in the West in order to disempower the public.
Israeli Hasbara has been very effective over the past two years (and for many years before that) at inducing much of the public across the West (certainly here in Britain) to feel that the genocide is “too complicated” for them to understand; instead, they/we resort to both sideism, throwing up our hands and saying “Oh dear!”
However, not every individual in Gaza needs to be a perfect victim [although, newly born babies are as close to perfect innocents as humanly possible and Israeli forces have shown little compuction about murdering them] for genocide to be treated as a singularly monstrous crime that requires zero hedging, zero mealy-mouthed apologetics. Fuck Starmer for beginning his list of victims with “The continued captivity of hostages”. Fuck Barclays for their murderous white-washing. And fuck any remaining impulse to be polite and considered about a soul-destroying crime our governments (who supposedly represent us) are aiding and abetting.
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The title of this blog post comes from the Pink Floyd track ‘On the Turning Away’, which is a self-flagatting piece of liberal "soul searching" about the tendency of the privileged to turn away in the face of horror and privation. Ironically (and predictably) its writer, David Gilmour – an excellent guitar player and a very bad lyricist – has actively resisted calls to boycott Israel over the years and defames his former bandmate Roger Waters, who speaks out with clear-sighted anger in defence of Palestianian lives and freedom and has done for years, as “Antisemitic to his rotten core”.
By contrast, Waters – a mediocre guitar player but an excellent lyricist – faces calls to be prosecuted for his support of Palestine Action and has his concert film screenings cancelled. So, to finish, here are some lyrics from Waters’ ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ from my favourite Pink Floyd album The Final Cut:
A place to stay
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more
No-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue
Kicking in your door
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore
No-one kills the children anymore.
*Of course, I also straightforwardly want to help her. Human motivations are complex and multifaceted.