Don't Let Them Win

Israel and the U.S. are banking on the world letting Gaza fade into the background. We can't hand them that victory.

Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images

The photo above this paragraph shows Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, mourning over the dead body of his son, Hamza, a fellow Al Jazeera journalist who was killed by an Israeli missile strike along with his freelance colleague Mustafa Thuraya. Al Jazeera reported that the journalists were deliberately targeted and called the killings an “assassination.” (Israel has killed more journalists in three months than were killed in either the 20-year-long Vietnam War or the six-year-long Second World War, not that too many people in the U.S. media seem to care.)

That photo was taken on Sunday. But it would be easy to confuse it with this photo from December 16, which shows Dahdouh mourning over the dead body of Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa, who was killed by an Israeli strike in which Dahdouh was injured.

Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images

Or this photo from October 26, which shows Dahdou mourning over the dead bodies of his wife, his seven-year-old daughter, his 15-year-old son, and his grandson, who were all killed in an Israeli missile strike.

Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images

If you look through the Getty wires like I had to do to get these images, you will see the corpses of all of these people in photo after photo, splayed out and bloody, part of a seemingly endless gallery of death. And you will see Dahdouh again and again, at the center of yet another grieving crowd, cradling the lifeless head of someone he loved.

This is the level of suffering that has befallen just one individual in Gaza. I try to imagine carrying on if those I loved most were systematically murdered from the sky month after month, and I can’t really imagine it. But Wael Dahdouh is carrying on, as are the families of the over 23,000 other people who have been killed in Gaza. This is what we are asking them to endure. This is what we are watching happen, day in and day out. If we are Americans, this is what our tax dollars are helping to fund. This is what our politicians and so-called diplomats are blithely sitting around and co-signing, their contempt for Palestinian life occasionally tempered by hollow statements that it sure would be nice if Israel stopped doing so much killing.

Perhaps this will all come to be seen as one of the greatest crimes against humanity this planet has witnessed. Perhaps someone besides the people of Palestine will be haunted by this. But then again, perhaps not. You can get used to anything eventually. Gaza has inexorably slipped down the news agenda, and as the 2024 election heats up, it will probably slip down even further. Israel’s frenzied machinery of death will continue, and the rest of the world will go about its normal routines. Perhaps the architects of this evil, both in the U.S. and in Israel, will sail along, go on TV, cash checks for speaking tours, hold forth at Davos, have a good life. It all seems pretty likely.

That is why we can’t allow what is happening in Gaza to fade into the background. The people carrying out this abomination are banking on our collective attention drifting away, on numbing us through the repetitive bloodshed of permanent war. 23,000 dead, 24,000 dead, 25,000 dead—soon it all starts to blur. Wael Dahdouh mourning in October, December, January—soon you can’t tell one picture from another. Soon it’s just another bad thing happening somewhere else. Maybe then Israel can start carrying out those ethnic cleansing plans it’s so eager to discuss.

So consider this a reminder and a plea not to let that happen—not to let our senses be dulled, not to let our anger and our sadness subside. If we do that—if we just turn Gaza on mute—it will be a victory for the Israeli and American governments who are desperate to have us scroll past the crimes they’re committing. So don’t scroll past. Don’t let them win.