In the last 18 months, not a day has gone by without the world being witness to atrocities so terrible that, in a just world, we wouldn’t even have a word for them. Yet here we are, with words and little else. What can words do to describe what is happening in Gaza? Try these words out for size. “Strikes on civilian populations”. Too clinical? What about “Forced displacements”? No? The thought of being ripped away from your life, your home, and everything you ever loved and ever wished for doesn’t tug on your heartstrings, does it?
Try this: “Bombing hospitals”. Not just “a hospital, mind you”, but 464 health care facilities, 727 health care workers, and 113 ambulances. Maybe remember that not every single one of those attacks is a war crime. Look at footage of life-saving equipment riddled with bullet holes, shot seemingly out of pure spite and contempt for the humans they were meant to treat.
Try: “Bombing universities and schools”. “Bombing fucking kindergartens”. Sit with the fact that of the 11 universities Gaza had in 2023, every single one has been bombed or outright demolished.
Have you felt anything? Or are all those words still just dark blotches of pixels on your iPhone’s screen? Did you feel the bone-shattering shockwave, pulverising your insides, the cascading concrete crushing your limbs, your lungs filling with ash and dust? Do you feel the skin-melting heat of the blast? Your tent’s plastic sheathing falling like molten lava on your blistering skin?
“Bomb” --- what a puny, chubby-cheeked, ineffectual word. Curse whoever came up with it. What good are words if all they can do with even the rawest, most vital, most urgent, most crushingly real realities is to neuter them, to denature them, relegate them to the same status as a weather forecast, as a grocery list, as a fortune-telling you get out of a cookie? I’m not quite sure. Still, they’re all I have. Fuck.