the politics of grief

[sabotabby]

This is going to be under the cut because it's graphic, and if you google it you'll find something more graphic.



I can't stop thinking about Shaaban al-Dalou. He was 20 years old, a software engineering student. He was burned alive in a hospital tent in Gaza after Israel bombed the hospital. He had a 93.18% GPA. His mother burned to death with him.

He was one of the Palestinian deaths that you're not supposed to mourn at all, by the way. Somewhere between 52% and 69% of the violent deaths in Gaza at the hands of Israeli forces that have been counted are women and children, and he was neither. He was Hamas-age. He wasn't Hamas, at least not to anyone's knowledge. But he's not the kind of death you're supposed to view as an unmitigated tragedy, a horror, a war crime. Womenandchildren, yes. Young men. Well. They must have been doing something wrong, right?

He's smiling in all the photos. It's rare that we have that graphic a depiction of a person's death, and maybe that's why he stands out from all the others who have died horrible deaths.

Remember when the IDF didn't bomb hospitals? First, Hamas had to have done it. Then, there were tunnels, Hamas tunnels, with hit lists that turned out to be calendars. Now a hospital bombing barely makes the news. First denial, then justification, then celebration.

I don't know who's counting the deaths from disease and malnutrition. The death toll has largely stalled out, not because people have stopped dying, but because there's no civic infrastructure left to count the deaths. Doctors, journalists, UN peacekeepers. All Hamas, obviously. Babies. Hamas babies. They failed to condemn Hamas with their dying breath.

I am not allowed to talk about Shaaban's death to my students, who are just a few years younger than him, and I probably shouldn't be talking about him over social media. That's politics. Flesh melting from skin, searing, charring, is political. You can't be political.

At what point do you say no. This is unforgivable. This is...you don't get to do this. You don't get to burn a young man alive. Your state, your so-called safety isn't worth this. (Can't say that either, of course. Politicspoliticspolitics.)

I know people even now who defend this, burning this kid alive. All necessary for the security of Israel. Or at most, a tragedy, lower in the hierarchy of tragedies than the firing of shots at an empty private Jewish girls' school here—something that is given a lot more media prominence, something I'm told I should be terrified about, because I'm not going to be burned alive or anything like that, and the scale of fear for a person who counts as a person is different than the scale of fear for a non-person. I think of people I knew, and once respected, who continue to make excuses, to insist that they're "scared" of, I guess, 20-year-old software engineering students in a hospital tent. That Shaaban's gruesome death is necessary so that they have a back-up country, you know, if they ever start rounding us up here.

I don't ask that you watch the video; I certainly can't. I saw stills and it was bad enough, and I don't need to watch it to be outraged and horrified.

What more does it take? When is it too much?

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

I agree with what you say, and how you feel.

I am cynical enough to say that, for some people, they will never stop until they are stopped. They relish the misery - the worse the better. And, those who start the stopping of the misery enthusiasts are usually personally effected - and if the misery enthusiasts can do it, they will prevent the action through lies and destruction of all resources.

I'm also not crazy about idiots shooting up elementary schools in Canada, and I view them as paddling in the shallow end of the misery-fest.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I'm not thrilled about it either (and I want the person caught and punished and barred from owning guns). I'm just pissed that it's being used as justification for burning hospital patients alive.

[yhlee]

Here and listening.

(sorry this is brief, sick)

[sabotabby]

Appreciated nonetheless.

[minoanmiss]

weeps uselessly

[sabotabby]

I don't think weeping is useless actually. It's a great deal more humanity than any of our elected leaders show.

[frandroid]

> I don't know who's counting the deaths from disease and malnutrition. The death toll has largely stalled out, not because people have stopped dying, but because there's no civic infrastructure left to count the deaths.

I'm assuming that you've seen this, but for other people following at home, The Lancet's conservative estimate is that Israel's war has killed 186,000 people in Gaza since October 7. That's 10% of the population.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, I saw that.

[greylock]

Holy fuck.
Isn't the "Official" Hamas number 45,000?

I'm going to guess the Lancet is going to be closer.

[sabotabby]

Hamas doesn't have the ability to recover and ID bodies at this point. That's why the death count has stalled out.

There are also way more victims of disease and starvation as a result of Israel's actions that aren't being tallied.

[greylock]

I figured they'd be doing some guesstimating, but didn't expect such a disparity.

Disease? They're pausing the fighting to vaccinate kids against polio! Such charity!

[sabotabby]

The other story that hit me was the two toddlers who got vaccinated for polio after the "pause." Then returned home, to have it hit by an airstrike. One little girl lost a leg, one lost both legs, and their mother was killed.

[greylock]

I figured that would happen a lot.

[springheel_jack]

Yeah. It’s upsetting. I never know what to do or say anymore.

It’s not like the US hasn’t incinerated its share of kids, but, like, when they napalmed little girls or pulverized Bach Mai Hospital during the Christmas Bombings, it was a big deal. Every atrocity since is a little less notable. Do people even remember when the US blew up the MSF hospital in Kunduz and killed everyone in it? (That was late in Obama’s presidency though, so maybe it didn’t count.)

I can’t decide if we just don’t care anymore or if everyone has taken in the lesson that protest is both dangerous and completely ineffective now.

Even campus protest has been totally suppressed. Vanderbilt, for example, expelled all the kids who who encamped and didn’t disperse when ordered. They did that in the 60s to James Lawson and people thought it was unjust. Now, nothing.

[sabotabby]

I remember that—I think it was when I started donating to MSF. But it's faded into the patchwork of horrific atrocities because there are so many.

I don't actually think protest is useless. I did for ages, but it's doing a lot to swing the public narrative. We're just up against tremendous odds and a machine that keeps rolling on inertia.

[dissectionist]

I have to believe that we’ll collectively reach the point of too much. I think of where pro-Palestinean support was ten years ago, and it was damn near nonexistent in popular culture. Over the past couple years I’ve seen a lot more people speaking out in favor of Palestine. (Including some folks that are only doing it to be antisemetic, but they’ll get run out of the movement eventually. Most people seem to be sincere and have motivations stemming from compassion for Palestineans.) It’s been a dramatic change.

Of course they’re up against a strong and organized pro-Israel front, and many of the pro-Palestinean have been silenced. But historically, silencing people doesn’t usually work out long-term, and I don’t think it will here either.

But I know that while I do believe long-term changes for the better are coming, that doesn’t help now. In the now, people are dying or already dead, and I can’t stop that from continuing. So I try to hold my hope for the future alongside my grief for the what-is, because both are true. But a lot of times feeling the grief overwhelms feeling the hope.

[sabotabby]

I don't have a lot of hope. I'm not a particularly hopeful person in general, and watching people's brains be so warped that they can justify this atrocity just fills me with despair. Also rage, which for me is more motivating than hope, so there's that.

[greylock]

I read about him earlier.
Didn't hear a thing on the radio. I do know more about One Direction than I did yesterday.

Remember when the IDF didn't bomb hospitals?

Honestly, I do not remember that.

A friend has been going to rallies weekly, she's feel this conflict really, really hard.
They have doctors speaking who've come back from stints trying to save lives and, honestly, her stories are probably more visceral than this.

I don't know who's counting the deaths from disease and malnutrition.

There is no disease and malnutrition, don't you know?
I forget exactly what I heard this morning, but it was someone saying Israel isn't using starvation as a weapons. They're just limiting aid to Hamas. Which... well...

But don't worry, the US might limit military aid in a month. That the US has troops on the ground shocked me.

What more does it take? When is it too much?

When someone builds beachfront hotels in Gaza. Real quality places for the nu riche,

I am not allowed to talk about Shaaban's death to my students, who are just a few years younger than him

Weird. My 16-year-old self learnt about necklacing in English class. And in Social Studies we discussed Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall as they were happening.

I probably shouldn't be talking about him over social media. That's politics.

Is that official policy? Or just a fear of painting a target on yourself?

[sabotabby]

The degree to which this has to do with real estate prices is another extra layer of horror.

We learned about all sorts of politics because I went to a proper school where nothing was off-limits in terms of discussion.

Is that official policy? Or just a fear of painting a target on yourself?

Yes.

[greylock]

The degree to which this has to do with real estate prices is another extra layer of horror.

But it's about ethnics in games journalism!

We learned about all sorts of politics because I went to a proper school where nothing was off-limits in terms of discussion.

I assumed it was a general educational policy to not trigger the snowflakes* or such.

(Ignoring the fact I daresay there's a horrifyingly high number of students who have seen the Shaaban video, or photos, willingly or unwillingly, and probably don't realise they need to discuss it).

* Are the snowflakes the next generation, or angry lawyered-up parents? Who can say!

[sabotabby]

I think more the lawyered-up parents. Millennials are parents now.

[frandroid]

> Didn't hear a thing on the radio.

The mainstream media has been completely silent about this. It's not kosher to show ANY Palestinians dying, forget in horrifying ways.

> A friend has been going to rallies weekly, she's feel this conflict really, really hard.

You should go with her.

> Weird. My 16-year-old self learnt about necklacing in English class. And in Social Studies we discussed Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall as they were happening.

You learned about these things because it was official government policy to support change in the Eastern Bloc, and the tide was turning against South Africa. Come on man. You can't compare the two. People are losing jobs for sharing social media posts supportive of Palestine on their personal accounts, in their spare time. People whose jobs are not even concerned with the conflict. A Jewish professor has lost her tenure at some college in the U.S. over her support of Palestine. Meanwhile Prof. Shai Davidai is repetitively harassing Palestine-supporting students at Columbia and has only been suspended from physically attending campus.

[sabotabby]

I think a vital movement for workers' rights has to be "your social media account is personal and shouldn't affect your ability to keep your job." Yes, that means we won't be able to get Nazis fired anymore, but way fewer Nazis get fired over their politics than leftists.

[frandroid]

Even then I think you're being overly generous, because on the left people get fired for advocating "people shouldn't get killed" while on the right a few people get fired for saying "these people should get killed". I feel like there's a pretty stark difference in value judgment there, and in a truly liberal world only one should be punished!

[sabotabby]

To be fair, non-zero numbers of people on the left also say "these people should get killed." But I ultimately don't trust institutions and bosses to make decisions like this, as their sympathies tend to fall along class lines more than divisions of human rights/vs. white supremacy.

[frandroid]

Yeah. I mean these decisions are always retaliation for holding the wrong opinion and often nothing to do with the workspace, so one could think that even in this liberal world we could get legislation to separate your personal opinions from your job.

[sabotabby]

Controversially, I also think it's okay for teachers to post pictures of themselves to Facebook in bikinis holding a martini, as long as it's not on work time.

[frandroid]

I saw stills but I didn't know there was video. Horrifying.

There has never been any reckoning with what Clinton and Dubya did to Iraq. We never managed to stop anything. That Harris is welcoming Cheney support now is utterly sickening. We have to fight but goddamn I am not hopeful. I think European countries will make Israel respublica non grata over time, but more like afterwards. But who knows.

Meanwhile one of the truly good things that the US helped with in the Middle East (even if done for imperialist purposes!), the vanquishing of ISIS, is scoffed at by the Left, and many of my otherwise sane friends still pine for the couple hundred US soldiers to leave Syria, Because Imperialism, even though that would mean the almost certain ethnic cleansing of over a million Kurds and other minorities by Turkey in Syria.

[sabotabby]

Tankies gonna tank. Same with the One Good Thing NATO is doing. Why is it such a huge stretch to be consistent about these things?

[frandroid]

I just hate when the tankies are friends of you and me. :P

[sabotabby]

I want them to be better. They're like, 75% of the way there. Same with liberal Zionists–like, you've realized A Thing but you don't have the ability to carry the thought through.

Which is why I still engage sometimes; I swear it's not because I'm a masochist.

[selki]

Your state, your so-called safety isn't worth this.

Whole-hearted agreement. Nothing is worth this horror.

[sabotabby]

Like if someone told me, "you will live to a ripe old age and be rich, but four children need to die for that to happen," I wouldn't take the bargain. I just wouldn't. And I know to some degree that's the bargain all of us strike in the First World, and it's not four children but millions, but. You know. It's not worth it.

[dewline]

The "bargain" we all get dragged into, whether we know it or not.

Some people are determined to keep dragging us into such "deals", right?

[gingeriana]

I just came to say thank you for writing this out loud.
I need more people like you around me cause my moral compass is trying to explode every fucking day here.

[sabotabby]

I feel crazy basically all the time but i think I'm not the crazy one.

[lastofhisname]

I keep waiting for a stronger international response, but one never comes.

I feel so fucking useless.

I'm gonna go donate to the PCRF. It's the very fucking least I can do.

[sabotabby]

That's a useful thing to do.

[frandroid]

Individual European countries are starting to ramp up sanctions. Ireland, Norway. First they're starting with the arms embargo which are easy because most of them didn't sell many weapons to Israel, but then they'll escalate to sanctions against illegal settlements and settlers. And I think these sanctions will last a long time. There's no going back from this genocide. They won't stop the genocide at all (only the USA can do that) but they will eventually ensure that Israel has no international legitimacy.

[dewline]

Not until Netanyahu is locked up. Which is why he let Hamas kick this mess off: to avoid jail time for himself.

[smhwpf]

There are just no words. I dunno if you saw how Sky News read out the names of four Israeli soldiers killed in a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base, and in a headline described them as "teen victims". Obviously no names read out of Palestinians. Shabaan al-Dalou is a rare name that has made even the mainstream media.

I used to think that, at some point, even western leaders would say "Israel has gone too far, this has to stop now." (In the past, they've done so privately, effectively forcing Israel into agreeing a ceasefire. Even Biden did it in May 2021). But it is increasingly clear to me that, if there ever was such a point, there no longer is.

I hold out some tiny hope that, if and when Harris becomes President, she will take the opportunity for a change of course, decide that this is not in the US's interest. But there is no indication she will, and I think it is a very small possibility. Apart from anything else, the US may be in a hot war with Iran by then.

What can we do, but continue to protest, and hope that in some as yet unforseeable way, it makes a difference?

Counting the number who have died as a result of disease and starvation is always difficult, even in circumstances far less dire than this. Excess mortality surveys require time and not being in the middle of an active genocide when everyone is being forced to move on a regular basis and there are genocidaires shooting at people attempting to do the survey. But the 99 US healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza and wrote an open letter to Biden and Harris setting out what they saw and the evidence they had gathered, included in an appendix evidence that the number killed as a result of the war was at least 118,908. It will be considerably higher now.

[sabotabby]

I guess I've just never believed the US capable of being a force for good. It can't even manage supporting Ukraine, let alone Gazans.