“Write my name on my leg, Mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skulls and bones
our legs will tell our story, how
there was nowhere for us to run”
Zeina Azzam
Once more we `discover’ that `indiscriminate bombing’, just like so-called stampedes and so-called natural disasters, is never indiscriminate. The bombs and missiles seek out children and women. This is the case in Gaza. On November 3, the World Health Organization reported, “As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2326 women and 3760 children have been killed in the Gaza strip, representing 67% of all casualties, while thousands more have been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old.” And this week, under the headline “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace”, The New York Times reports, “People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.” The article goes on to explain, “It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.” Israel has chosen to use specific armaments that would cause the most damage and death. And who are the overwhelming majority of those killed and injured? Women and children. More women and children have been killed in the shortest period of time ever recorded.
As Neta C. Crawford, a University of Oxford professor and co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, noted, “This is a scale of immiseration over such a short period of time that it’s really difficult to comprehend.” According to Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, to comprehend the devastation of, and the death toll among, women and children, one would ““have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.” We have gone back to Vietnam or the Second World War.
What else is there to say? Who will remember the ultimately uncounted, uncountable women and children? When the world `returns to normal’ in the great promised `after the war ends’? When the discussions turn to public policy and `reconstruction’ and `national security’, who will lift the stones and whisper or shriek or simply speak the names, the lives, the …
Instead of conclusion, a poem, once more, from and by Paul Celan …
Whichever stone you lift –
you lay bare
those who need the protection of stones:
naked,
now they renew their entwinement.
Whichever tree you fell –
you frame
the bedstead where
souls are stayed once again,
as if this aeon too
did not
tremble.
Whichever word you speak –
you owe to
destruction
(By Dan Moshenberg)
(Image Credit: Ad Reinhardt / Tate)