To avoid talking about killings: A deliberate action of war

Talking about war is the war itself: My passive attempt to understand this war is a war in myself, forcing me to observe and negotiate with my conscience every minute of watching it.

Wounded Palestinians receive treatment at al-Shifa Hospital after Israeli air attacks on Gaza City on October 26, 2023 [Abed Khaled/AP Photo]

I have been staring at my screens for days since the war between Israel and Hamas started. This numbness partially comes from my pure ignorance about the war in a region I have never set foot in, the holy land of devastation, and maybe, all this short life of mine, I would never wake up to see the place at peace.

When I was little, a 14” inch TV in my family living room showed a still image of a historic meeting between Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat. The two men shook hands with Clinton’s hands behind them. The picture has so many nuances that I couldn’t keep my eyes off Clinton’s hands. The hidden arms, the orchestrating hands, the hands on the back, the burden of power set on the back of both groups of people, longing for their lost lands and longing for their forming nation.

That history will never reach my face, and I have all the rights to stay out of it. Many people I knew chose Israel to support. Many statements and comments I read, “bomb them out!”, “stop the war, stop them,” and “they deserve the punishment.” That shook my hands when I opened the Middle East Eyes, AFP, and Aljazeera to see the faces of young people sitting unstirred on the rubble. Daze faces of children, still images of fathers’ arms holding their kids’ weight in white bags, young brothers having little ones tucking each other by the side of a fragile concrete wall. Their houses, their olive trees, their terraces, their neighbor’s grocery store, thousands of different kinds of things, and houses of their cities now have a common name: rubble.

While groups of people out there are forcing everyone else to choose a side. Are you pro-Hamas? Are you with the terrorists who killed 200 people in a rave? Do you side with the bombing? Are you with the US government supporting Israel? Is the UK nodding its head for the strikes to go ahead? Are you with the missile striking the hospital? Do you agree with hands that beheaded 40 children? - One colleague told us, “Talking about war is the war itself.” Her statement means that my very passive attempt to understand this war is a war in myself, forcing me to observe and negotiate with my conscience every minute of watching it.

I went from being horrified by the statement that 40 children were beheaded by Hamas statements by many leaders of the world. My conscience is being challenged. It does not allow me to take sides. While beheading 40 children is a horrible act, there has been no evidence to back it up, and the president of the world leaders had walked back his statement from “see confirmed pictures” to no picture was there in the first place.

When you show what side you choose, it is not about the war, the Palestinian, or the Israeli; it is about you. This is the heavy problem with commenting about the war. We are so far from the actual conflicts, and we have much more to say about dying people than the dying people themselves.

Trying to understand how the Gaza people live under siege, I searched pictures of them queuing for water, doing funerals, and taking care of dead bodies. The results come from Al Jazeera English show heavily traumatized children bursting out crying. On Middle East Eyes, I saw pictures of a group of dead bodies, half covered by mattresses. Their feet and toes are rotten with flies. Those are the reality of war. The struck hospital was in total chaos; they didn’t have anything left to take care of living patients, not even mention dead bodies.

I saw much “lighter” search results on the New York Times and BBC; the women crying on the BBC look decent and cleaner. The children in the Washington Post look tired and clean. The dead bodies on NYTimes are covered in neat black bags. Even the body bags on NYTimes look cleaner than the piles of bag bodies in the Middle East Eyes.

Looking tired and clean doesn’t manifest the 9,000 people killed in day and night raids. Mundane pictures distance us from the war. Our hands are clean. Our politicians are doing a good job. Our spokepeople speak sweet words. We are protecting the world by sponsoring an army to graze the land of living people.

Who are those “living people”? - I wondered and couldn’t find their faces and fates on the major news channels that I have trusted to read for decades.

Consuming news has become an unconscious and unempathetic action in this war. I am becoming increasingly ignorant when I want to grasp the extent of human suffering from that side of the world.

Recently, in my writing group, my Pakistani friend broke into tears. She has nothing to do with the Gaza War, she said; she only knew what had happened to her family that caused her to be exiled to the US. She cried for the people running like her mother and sisters in the old times. The only difference is that the people in this war have nowhere to run; they are confined behind a wall of a giant prison destined for them since they were born. We were silent. We didn’t know what to say.

Only those who have experienced war understand what war means.

This morning, I used all my braveness to deliver a short presentation about how we are perceiving this war on dominating English-language news channels.

Surprisingly, walking back the stories that have been happening for half a month, I saw that the victims are weaponized and used in this war. The 40 beheaded children were broadcasted by the US president, turning out to be an unconfirmable story with no facts to back up. The airstrike on the hospitals is suffering blame from both sides (how unluckily, both sides didn’t do it, but there is a devastated hospital).

I was challenged twice this month if I support the killers who beheaded 40 children. I do not support the killers who beheaded 40 children. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that I support the US to bomb Gaza. As a matter of fact, we have never been shown evidence that actually happened. I don’t side with those who tell lies to back up their choice of supporting a war.

One colleague in the workshop said that she saw young Palestinians speaking English on TikTok and Instagram, insisting the world see the war happening at their place and airstrikes raining on their homes. They demand the world to see their screams on the rubble called home.

Last week, I watched a lecture on YouTube by my favorite author, Viet Thanh Nguyen; he mentioned the notion of “voicing the voiceless.” For the writer, there is no such thing as the voiceless. There are only voices deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard, or voices refused to be heard from.

That may be what I have been doing this time; I listen to the voices that were talked over by the celebration and statements of politicians, voices that were being silenced by the noise of bombs and airstrikes and network disruption.

I try to understand the war that is unrelated to me.