As the battle cry of ‘all eyes on Rafah’ gains momentum, Capsule takes yet another look at why bearing witness to the atrocities occurring in Gaza is so important
This is an opinion piece
Every once in a while, in one of those ‘Millennials are the worst’ think pieces, you’ll get a comment along the lines of ‘Yeah, but remember we watched 9/11 happen while we were at school.’
And yes, we did. The television was wheeled into the Social Studies classroom, as me and my fellow 15-year-olds sat through hours of replayed footage of people either dying in a plane crash, a fire or jumping out of windows. Even now, I can still remember certain things from the thousands of documentaries that followed – the thuds of the bodies hitting the ground, the term ‘exploded like a watermelon’ used to describe a pregnant woman who was found in plane wreckage. All of it, we watched, for weeks and years on end.
This isn’t unique, of course. The previous generation had TVs wheeled into their classrooms to wave at the nice teacher joining the astronauts on the Challenger shuttle, only to watch them explode live on air as well.
How many of the younger generation accidentally saw the Mosque livestream footage? How many people only learned to turn off the ‘autoplay’ feature on their Twitter feed the hard way, after spending too long wondering what they were seeing on March 15? The internet has given us all new ways to pay morbid attention to the horrors of the day at the same time as they unfold, and there is currently what seems to be the annihilation of the entire population playing out before us now.
Pre the horrific attack of October 7, and the ‘can we finally call it genocidal?’ onslaught that has followed it, most of us had already reached a stage where we would routinely see something that triggered a ‘Okay, that’s enough internet for the day’ stress response.
We’ve only just experienced a global pandemic – the photos of mass graves, the wrapped up piles of bodies; the simple horror of those iPads on stands in hospitals and what they represented. The pandemic was only hitting its stride when we had a new Western war to witness – the invasion of the Ukraine, the shock of how quickly a city goes from normal life to beleaguered battleground. The latest footage from the area last week showed them building underground classrooms so that kids could return to school while the war rages on. How quickly they have had to accept a new normal, because the world did so first.
But then came Gaza, a horror show both in terms of speed and scale and in terms of how much we are seeing. The influx of dead babies that fill our screens creates a whiplash that stabs you in the heart. Flicking through Instagram stories – the usual celebrations, jokes, dead baby, good outfits, nice places, dead baby, new hair!!, dead baby, newborn baby, dead baby. Is this another new normal?
All Eyes On Rafah
I let myself back onto Twitter for Superbowl Monday (mainly to catch the Beyoncé excitement) and watched the highest peaks of Western pop culture juxtaposed against the lowest troughs of Western-funded war as the Rafah attack took place. A new set of tiny white burial shrouds, wrapped around tiny babies. A new set of images to haunt us forever.
That is the whole point, isn’t it? The action call of ‘All Eyes On Rafah’ this week stands because it matters that we see this. We are asked to bear witness to what is happening because somebody has to. The scarring footage of big news events only really stops becoming about shock value and starts becoming personal in the weeks and months that follow, where follow-up footage, investigations and documentaries walk us through an in-depth look at the lives of the people missing, and then their deaths. Otherwise, it’s easy to have it feel like an overwhelming set of numbers.
But there’s a high chance we’re not going to get that from Gaza, because who will be left to tell those stories? Entire family trees, entire generations, are disappearing before our eyes. Well, ‘disappearing’ is the wrong word – it’s too peaceful. They’re disintegrating. The bodies of the children wrapped in white are the ones who are whole enough to be buried, or who have someone left to bury them. How are we supposed to understand any of this?
There’s a Mary Oliver quote being used in social media this week following the Rafah bombings – and honestly, there’s an entire other story to be written on the meme culture of war – and it’s about having your heart broken: “I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.”
Mary Oliver was a poet who survived a bad childhood, of abuse and neglect, and created a body of work around finding joy in a broken world. Another one of her lesser-known poems was three lines, called ‘Instructions for living a life’:
“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
The letters to our politicians matter, the protests matter, the sharing matters. We may not be able to stop the next genocide – it seems unlikely we can stop this one – but we can show both those in power and those who aren’t that this is a world that can pay attention, that does not run out of capacity to still be shocked by what we can do to each other, and that talks, and talks, and talks about it.
