As I write, it’s exactly four months since October 7, 2023, when Hamas breached the border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and, with others following, Islamic Jihad or simply enraged civilians, embarked upon what was undoubtedly a killing spree. Yet in its aftermath, it is not too farfetched to assert that we in the watching world have been witnessing a catastrophe beyond any previous imagining. I wouldn’t be the first to declare that Israel’s brutally disproportionate response to the attack and the taking of hostages constitutes, for Gaza’s civilian population, a twenty-first century holocaust.
It’s a safe bet as well that Israel’s enablers – the governments of Britain, Australia, Canada, and Germany, say – might never have predicted that in a matter of months the Middle East’s ‘only democracy’, that plucky, super-savvy high-tech state whose ‘right to defend itself’ was unquestioned, could devastate an occupied population of 2.2 million, flattening 70 percent of their built environment and basic infrastructure, displacing over a million of them while killing nearly 31,000.
Yet telling as they are, the mounting statistics of children killed, mutilated, orphaned and starved, homes and hospitals bombed can be numbing. By now, Israel’s rote recitations that civilians must die because they’re ‘human shields’, that hospitals must implode because the tunnels beneath them harbour Hamas militants, that people must be brought to the brink of starvation because an alleged 12 UNRWA employees out of a staff of 13,000 in Gaza took part in the October 7 massacre, lose all credibility.
And there comes a time when abstract numbers begin floating off into the noosphere, deprived of any flesh and meaning. It’s imperative then, I think, to focus on the visceral, to what was like for those who have died, and those who are still alive yet barely living, whatever their numbers. This is when human imagination and compassion kick in. But when numbers fail us, what else is left?
I admit that it’s the mother in me, now a grandmother, whose heart goes out to the women undergoing Caesarean deliveries without anaesthesia on hospital floors, swirling with waste water. To the children having arms and legs amputated in these horrific conditions. To the surgeons performing these operations by the light of their mobile phones, to the premature babies of undernourished mothers who perish because there isn’t the fuel to keep their incubators going.
And then there are the individual stories. Of the woman who gave birth to twins, only to see them killed days after. Of the unnecessarily fatal heart attack of the father of my Gazan friend. To the two 12-year-old girls, Nippers funded by an Australian surfing club, who died along with their families. To the child of six or seven in a car calling out for help, only to be smitten by IDF bullets. To the child who has lost everyone. To the men whom the IDF arrest, subjecting them to torture and humiliation.
Now we learn that people are indeed starving in Gaza’s largely evacuated north. In the south, in Rafah, people who’d been told they’d be safe there, are huddled in classrooms and tents, while bombs rain down and a ground invasion threatens. The stench of death is everywhere, real or impending. Better off than those in the north, in Rafah they’re nonetheless reduced to eating donkey and horse feed. Now that too has run out, so they eat the flesh of these animals instead, or cats and dogs, while animals still alive feed upon the human corpses. Filth is everywhere, rubble and cement dust clog people’s lungs. The water is polluted. Those with cars use old cooking oil to run them, fouling the air more. Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American and recent visitor, remarks on the greyness; there’s scarcely any grass left, most of eaten, or dead from the dust and lack of water. Most of the trees have been chopped down or stripped of their limbs for fire wood. ‘Gaza is hell,’ she writes. ‘It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.’
And what about the perpetrators of this horror? The Likud party’s founding document clearly states: ‘The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.’
Was anybody paying attention? These words were adopted in 1977 – long before Netanyahu was impelled to align himself with far-right ultra-Zionist parties. The platform has materialised accordingly. The settlements on the West Bank have multiplied. Oslo has been thoroughly repudiated, what with the steady expansion of illegal settlement on the West Bank and the co-option of a corrupted Palestinian Authority. And yet, the West, for all the handwringing, for all the posturing about some chimeric two-state solution, has gone along with this, and continues to do so.
What happens next? In these uncertain times that’s anybody’s guess. In the meantime, here’s what the old Jewish kabbalists wrote, centuries ago:
‘The source of all evil in the world is too much head, and not enough heart.’
Sara Dowse
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.