The recent pictures of Palestinians children and infants buried under the rubble and smeared in blood –-some censured by the empathetic Facebook algorithm as too disturbing—had me thinking: has humanity hit rock bottom and become completely blinded by the narrative of the strongest, the one in control of all resources including the media? Have we ever witnessed an instance where the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor has become so blurry?
The practically genocidal situation taking place in Gaza Strip –-under siege for long years—is a painful reminder of the times humanity has failed some of its members and turned its back on them. What comes to memory is the still vivid example of the Rwandan civil war where the Hutu and Tutsi turned against each other despite the shared skin color. It would seem that ethnicity trumped Africanness and the Hutu majority was given a free pass to ruthlessly butcher the Tutsi minority. History has it that the victors even established checkpoints to inspect IDs and systematically eliminate members from the opponent tribe. Does it ring a bell? What raises serious concerns here is that the world let this happen and the lives of around 800,000 Tutsis were lost as a consequence.
And, since ethnic cleansing and apartheid go sometimes hand in hand, we cannot dodge the grey and heavy-as-lead history of South Africa. Wait a second, were all policies stemming from the human’s animalistic instincts and survival of the fittest mindset born in “primitive” Africa? Well, not exactly, you see the I am-better-than-you attitude that laid the foundation of apartheid and the unfair, almost imbecile social stratification was invented by the white colonizer settling in South Africa. The legacy is grim, all the more so because the then newly-established United Nations deemed it a “domestic matter” and let white men indulge in massacre after massacre until it was no longer possible for the organization to bury its head in the sand. But then humanity, or let’s say superpowers, decided to intervene against a blatantly ugly reality and started an offensive of divestment and arms sales ban, pressuring the country into giving up its racial separation laws.
Similar morbid accounts are embedded in the American history, along with another massive stain on humanity: slavery. And just when you think you had enough, you find out that what is happening in Palestine is far much worse.
The horrendous war –though the term implies two equally strong parties not a regular army versus a movement of locals—taking place in Gaza is almost unprecedented in terms of length, casualties and total tonnage of bombs dropped on the city. Many Western media outlets would have us believe that this was the direct consequence of October 7 attacks by the Hamas movement on neighboring occupied territories, but in doing so they are just offering a truncated history for generation Z, may be.
The crux of the matter is that October 7 violence, which nobody of sound mind can condone, was a reaction not an action itself. The story did not start on that day, it just took an unexpected turn. Gaza has been under siege for sixteen years and earned the title of the biggest open prison known to man. The strategy of laying siege to an untamed city or an impenetrable fortress is a smart move that have been used by military tacticians for centuries to drain and weaken a foe (though it might have the opposite effect as the human being can be creative and resourceful when pushed to the limit). Many have watched medieval movies where soldiers fail to breach a castle and decide to besiege it for months and years until the enemy surrenders; but Gaza’s story is real and it is happening in the 21st century, in an age humanity is supposed to have reached an elevated moral status that would make it frown upon the atrocities and wars that tarnished its past self, in the past century.
Yet here we are, almost desensitized or depressed by the daily load of victims’ pictures inundating social media, regardless of who they are.