Pearls and Irritations

It’s been a month since I relocated to a new town. It’s been traumatic. The emotions have run wild and the somatic reactions strong. At the epicentre of this emotional firestorm is a deep, wounding sense of dislocation, of severed connections with people and place.

As I began to reflect on all this, I found myself thinking about my father whose ‘kulak’ (wealthy land-owning) family in Poland was, in 1941, dragged from home, forced onto cattle trains and sent on a harrowing journey to the northernmost reaches of Siberia where, apart from my dad who was released to fight with the allied forces, languished for several long, arduous years. Everything was gone in one night: safety, security, home, attachments to place, friends, acquaintances, the everyday, the familiar. It’s impossible to comprehend, unless you’ve been there. It would be absurd to compare my relocation experience to such trauma, but still, trauma comes in many shapes and sizes.

Let’s take this to another place of unfathomable mass trauma – Gaza. What’s happening there – genocide live – is utterly horrific. And it’s happening right before our eyes. One of the most traumatised populations on earth – the Palestinians – are in the midst of a state-sponsored military onslaught that has killed, maimed and starved tens of thousands of women, children and men. An entire way of life forged in the context of cruel and inhumane occupation in ‘the world’s biggest concentration camp’ has been reduced to physical and psychological rubble. Ecocide, sociocide are apt descriptors here. ‘Safe zones’ have been turned into killing fields, refugee camps the same, all in a vain attempt to eradicate ‘terror’ that reseeds with every bullet and bomb.

The media images are hauntingly familiar. Empathy fatigue has set in. The latest round of bloodletting no longer figures in headlines, or people switch off because they can’t stand to watch or listen, or they don’t want to know. Those who do, feel powerless and overwhelmed by a sense of anger and injustice that mass slaughter has occurred on the watch of supposedly decent, human-rights adoring nations. Many of these same countries continue to supply weapons to the Israeli killing machine.

Meanwhile, the suffering of the Palestinians intensifies. Just yesterday, I watched footage of a man returning to piles of debris where his home once stood. There was no food, and no family to share it with. His hollowed eyed spoke of the abandonment by the world’s decent nations. The daily images of tightly bound corpses laid out in neat rows to the accompaniment of cries and exhortations to the heavens resonates to the core. Each day there’s another bombed out hospital, school or residential area. To witness this level of cruelty, day-in, day-out, should shame even the most compromised nations. But it doesn’t – the Australian government included. Its moral vacillations are sickening, as is the obscene dissection of whether ‘red lines’ have been crossed.

Instead, as if in some sort of ghoulish theatre, the speaker of the US congress and many of his congressional peers invite the lawless Israeli prime minister to talk in open session about justice and democracy. How on earth can this be acceptable? This kind of reality-defying gesture is one of the more egregious displays of a political system patently unable to act on moral principle. Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ trumps all, apparently. Exposure of the violence inflicted upon the Palestinian unpeople offends those who are perpetrating it. Predictably, the Israeli cabinet has banned Al Jazeera coverage in the country. It’s too revelatory, too close to the bone, running against the grain of Israeli propaganda.

On the same day that former president Donald Trump was convicted of concealing payments to a porn star, dozens of Palestinians were killed. There was barely a mention of this in the media, which was obsessed with the implications of Trump’s legal woes. Right-wing talk shows were apoplectic, an expression of rage completely absent when it comes to the murder of Palestinian innocents. A few days later, four Israeli hostages are ‘rescued’, and there’s clapping and cheering aplenty. Palestinians meanwhile mourn the 300 Gazans killed in the course of this military triumph.

This horrific ratio is emblematic of what has long been the case when it comes to the Israel’s exceptionalism; the lives of Palestinians don’t matter. They are history’s unpeople, dehumanised and unnoticed.

My house move? It really doesn’t matter a jot compared to such terrible, enduring cruelty. I can’t even begin to comprehend the depths of intergenerational and ongoing trauma of a people denied the most basic forms of justice and care. Biden announces a ceasefire proposal. It took the deaths of around 40,000 Palestinians to get to this point. Says it all, really.

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