A letter signed by ninety-nine American health care workers and addressed to the “honorable” president and vice president of the United States of America went viral in October 2024, a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza made possible by the Biden administration. In its first paragraph, the doctors, nurses, and midwives who altogether spent 254 weeks in Gaza perform the requisite throat-clearing trifecta: they condemn “the horrors committed on October 7”; they clarify that they have volunteered, in their professional capacities, elsewhere (though only “Ukraine during the brutal Russian invasion” is mentioned by name); and they reiterate their “medical and surgical expertise.” The health care workers blame ignorance—the human toll, they say, “is far higher than is understood in the United States.” Everyone in Gaza (this includes, they stress, the Israeli hostages) is sick, injured, or both. Palestinian children have watery diarrhea. Pregnant women are having spontaneous abortions. C-sections are performed without anesthesia. Surgeons have so few resources they can’t appropriately wash their hands, let alone establish a sterile field. New mothers whom “the world abandoned” cannot breastfeed (“the world” here refers to the West and its client states). Each of the letter’s signatories has treated children who “suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them.” Rather than concluding that the Israelis are doing what they’ve always done—targeting Palestine’s present and future—the doctors enumerate mangled bodies and the locations and patterns of the bullets in children’s heads and chests. The American professionals say they cannot fathom why the U.S. government continues to arm a country deliberately killing children. The limits of listening to the body, as medics are trained to do, is that the body can’t tell you that genocide suits American foreign interests.
Another letter, signed by about one hundred Israeli doctors, circulated months prior. Whereas the American medical professionals’ letter treads carefully, the Israeli physicians’ letter—urging their government to show no mercy where Palestinian hospitals, i.e., “terrorists’ nests,” are concerned—exudes the ease that comes with anticipating warm receipt. Drawing from a seemingly bottomless well of unbridled racist supremacy, the Israeli doctors’ call for the bombing of hospitals may be more honest about the fact that doctors are political actors, medicine a tool for various ends. The American health care workers stay in their lane. They put aside Israel’s past and current motivations to write from the place of the first responder at work, committed to holding open a shrinking present. Their letter ends by recognizing that they “are not politicians” and are “simply healing professionals who cannot remain silent.” And so, they speak out with the urgency of those haunted by nightmares they wish Biden could see. They censor themselves so that, despite all indications to the contrary, he might listen.
None of the information the American health care workers present is new. Palestinians in Gaza have for the last year lifted their children’s corpses in front of cameras for the world to see. What’s new is the packaging. Edward Said explains in his essay “Permission to Narrate,” written in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 destruction of Beirut, that “facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.” The American health care workers know their audience. They announce that their testimony will focus on women and children. To a bomb, a body is a body; sex and age make little difference against the weight of a collapsing home. To the West, the Arab man and male teenager are killable; the doctors’ reticence to mention them reflects an accommodation of this narrowing of the human. The right to life of Palestinian women and children is less contestable in words—though it is denied every day by deeds. In Gaza, more than one year into what the American health care workers call madness, it’s hard to ignore the human toll. Acknowledgment alone doesn’t interrogate whether Israel’s genocide still constitutes self-defense: a reflexive, albeit disproportionate, “retaliatory attack” from a frantic, cornered ethnostate driven into fight or flight.
Rather than challenge the dehumanization that allows one group to permit or deny another’s narrative, American doctors often leverage the perceived differences between us and them to emphasize their own credibility. Two doctors asserted in their eyewitness testimony that they don’t speak Arabic, aren’t Muslim, and aren’t religious. Why not understanding the language of the people one is claiming to help—or on behalf of whom one speaks—is a good thing is unclear. The health care workers explain that, as Israel has denied foreign journalists entry into Gaza, they are “among the only neutral observers” available. Setting aside whether neutrality is desirable or even possible here, because Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists—those whose coverage the health workers’ audience considers compromised—the humanitarian medic is obligated to play both journalist and healer.
The Ethic of Refusal
In June of 1944, Dr. Maurice Rossel was delegated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to inspect Theresienstadt, a supposedly “model” concentration camp with its own symphony orchestra. Flowers were freshly planted and buildings painted in advance of the ICRC official’s visit. Rossel would go on to meet with the commander of Auschwitz at the camp itself. As a matter of “neutrality,” the ICRC refused to condemn the ongoing Holocaust. Later, the Red Cross apologized for its “impotence” and “mistakes.” In December 1996, the organization declassified documents showing just how much it had concealed. Had it spoken out, its logic went, the organization would have jeopardized its ability to inspect facilities on both sides.
On the ground, the enemy of life is not death. The enemies of life are the people who kill innocent people, for reasons we
call “politics.”
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), known in much of the English-speaking world as Doctors Without Borders, was born out of this moral stain, repeated in Biafra in the late 1960s. Founded in 1971 by a group of journalists and physicians disturbed by the hollow ethics of the Red Cross’s neutrality-for-neutrality’s-sake, MSF’s first mission to an active warzone was Beirut, in 1976. The previous year, a bus carrying Palestinians on their way to the Sabra refugee camp had been attacked, its twenty-seven passengers massacred by the Phalange, a group funded and armed by Zionists and inspired by the “discipline” of Nazi Germany. The Times reported it as an attack on “militants”; the massacre was said to be revenge for a drive-by shooting at a Maronite church earlier that day, in which bullets were fired from a car suspiciously marked with the insignia of a secular Palestinian militia (who presumably knew better than to identify themselves in a hostile neighborhood). Different theories circulate regarding who was actually responsible for the event that ultimately ignited Lebanon’s so-called civil war and set the stage for Israel’s ground invasion in 1982.
Consisting of a surgeon and small assisting crew, the MSF volunteers were stationed at a hospital in the Nab’a, Bourj Hammoud area, an impoverished part of Beirut near the Tal al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, where many Armenians had also sought refuge from the Ottoman genocide. The area was besieged by anti-Palestinian factions, including the Phalange. A couple of years later, MSF redirected their attention to Zahle, an area the organization highlighted as majority-Christian. MSF was guided not by politics, it said, but by the need to stay close to “the most vulnerable people, who are also the least visible.”
By treating “both sides” in Beirut, the organization established a reputation of serving all comers, a readiness to work under fire, and a willingness to condemn aggression wherever they saw it. MSF, like the rest of the West, understood the Lebanese civil war as motivated by blind sectarian hate, Lebanese Christians versus their Muslim compatriots. Such framing, very much informed by a politics that is invisible to those who don’t know to see it, denies Arabs the logic of cause and effect. In MSF’s case, it allowed the organization to rehabilitate the language of neutrality—treating both sides—because here the violence stemmed not from historico-political events but from identity. This frame leaves no room for leftist Lebanese Christians, as their presence on the Muslims’ “side” would suggest the conflict wasn’t about religion. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon—Christians and Muslims alike—are visible only as troublemakers. Had MSF acknowledged that the fighting was motivated by the endorsement of Israeli occupation, distancing itself would have been less conscionable. Instead, because the fighting was rendered politically incoherent, MSF had no obligation to take a side. This was not neutrality-for-neutrality’s-sake. Rather, in Beirut, the organization found that it could be politically neutral without being ethically so (à la the Red Cross). If anything, MSF’s lack of formal affiliation freed its ethical compass: the organization condemned illegal actions by all warring factions.
During MSF’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1999, the president of its international council, Dr. James Orbinski, said, “Our action is to help people in situations of crisis.” “Ours,” he added by way of self-awareness, “is not a contented action.” MSF knows what you’re thinking; they’re not happy about it either. But humanitarianism intervenes where “the political”—an ameboid entity to which Orbinski gestures without defining, except as what the humanitarian is not—has failed. The humanitarian “has no frontiers” while the political “knows borders.” The political is the thing to engage once the bleeding stops. The failure to act substantively, lastingly, is displaced onto actors who have the time and space to think about the bigger picture. MSF’s logo is literally called “the running person” (a.k.a. “running man”), their gaze directed at what is in front of them. To MSF, this is not a matter of shortsightedness; it is this limited scope that makes their work sustainable.
MSF formalized this morality-beyond-politics as an “ethic of refusal.” The term appears in the Nobel speech three times. Orbinski explains that MSF was designed to counter the assumption that political neutrality requires silence. While the material impact of words varies, he is certain that “silence kills.” Unlike the Red Cross, in the face of injustice, MSF’s doctors condemn. They discern morally and ethically. They do not, however, offer anything specific in place of the structures they refuse, as this would require a political vision. As doctors, they are on the side of life, against death. On the ground, though, the enemy of life is not death. The enemies of life are the people who kill innocent people, for reasons we call “politics.”
Empire of Trauma
The humanitarian doctor’s interventions are of limited impact against forces committed to killing civilians. The work becomes an exercise in futility: you stabilize a patient and bandage their wounds, only for them to leave the hospital an easier target. To compensate, MSF volunteers commit to “bearing witness,” what the organization calls temoignage, from the French temoigner, “to testify.” Implied is that the witness serves as evidence—here, against ongoing suffering—not for the sake of achieving a particular political end but to mobilize political actors who will and to supply them with the raw data so that they can.
The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed without question by Western media for over a year in order to present genocide as an understandable human reaction.
The Empire of Trauma by French anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman traces the rise of humanitarian psychiatry and the narrativization of harm through the lens of trauma. The two describe how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), introduced to the American psychiatric lexicon in the 1980s through the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, took some time to gain traction internationally, especially in the world of humanitarian medicine. It wasn’t until MSF’s work in Gaza in 1988, providing physiotherapy to the injured during the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that the organization began prioritizing trauma as such. In 1994, after the Oslo Accords ended the uprising, MSF set up its first mental health program in Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank. In Jenin, MSF worked with youth who had witnessed people they loved arrested, tortured, and killed, and who still lived under an occupation that insisted their lives had no worth. A couple of years later, the mental health program in Jenin closed, and others started up in its place, addressing the needs of various subpopulations (including former prisoners) on a more or less individual basis, until 2000.
That year, as part of his prime ministerial campaign, Likud leader Ariel Sharon, flanked by more than one thousand Israeli colonial police and soldiers, stormed the al-Aqsa mosque compound, an obvious provocation that triggered the second intifada. MSF sent surgeons and support staff to Palestine, only to realize, as MSF’s Middle East programs director remarked, that “in the Palestinian territories they’ve got a well-equipped hospital system with skilled staff. You can’t bring any added value.” MSF pivoted. It identified a gap in mental health care and announced, in a statement that doesn’t use the word Israel, the opening of a new mobile clinic in Gaza to provide support, both medical and psychological, with a focus on children younger than twelve. Here, there was no PTSD to treat—the “traumatic stress” wasn’t exactly “post”—but the diagnosis did provide tools, especially in the realm of testimony, to rally international attention against the occupation.
Part of the concept of temoignage is for the doctor to find words for what the mind on some level already knows and to help others see it too. Trauma filled a preexisting gap, engaging the interiority of a people suffering beyond the periphery of skin. For an organization operating in times of crisis, trauma and PTSD were less diagnostic tools than a means of summoning empathy. The Palestinian had been presented for decades in Western media as terrorism incarnate: think anonymized face, wrapped in a black-and-white keffiyeh. Trauma provided a humanizing alternative. The Palestinian—disarmed, emotionally vulnerable, in need—could be fashioned, with the right sound bites, for a hesitant audience (say, your average New York Times reader) into a human being.
The phrase humanitarian crisis freezes political inventory and clarifies that those suffering are people. If you know this already, the term grates. A former president of MSF, after stepping down, remarked in 1996 that “if Auschwitz were operating today, it would probably be described as a humanitarian emergency.” In a recent interview with CNN, an MSF-affiliated pediatrician who has worked in Gaza and was speaking in her own personal capacity clarified the news anchor’s phrasing, “This is not a humanitarian crisis . . . and I’m going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is genocide.” Crisis, like trauma, emphasizes suffering to elicit pity. But introduce into the frame a gun, or a rock, and things get muddy again, the human being replaced by the threat. The formerly pity-stricken Times readers see themselves in the tank. Trauma does nothing to challenge this frame; at best, it asks us to ignore it for the sake of the human story.
Trauma shows you a person folding inward, shearing their tether to the world. Trauma cannot get one to struggle, in the sense of committing to something bigger than their person—a cause—because it only recognizes a world mediated by individual human bodies. And, because trauma faces the past, the traumatized native is only able to recognize themselves through what their colonizer has done to them. They are stuck playing catch up, evening the score, serving that ouroboros called revenge. Palestine is motivated by a horizon beyond occupation, one inaccessible through the narrowing language of trauma.
MSF initially leveraged personal narratives of trauma as one facet of the harms of Israel’s occupation, alongside records of human rights violations—taking doctors hostage, targeting ambulances, imprisoning children—that were demonstratively systematic. In the 2000s, amid rising fear about international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, donors threatened to withdraw funding from humanitarian organizations operating in Palestine if they didn’t fix their “anti-Israel bias.” Trauma narratives absent political valences offered the possibility of parity: occupiers suffer too. Personal testimonies are raw material, malleable and manipulated by political actors to serve various ends. A 2024 essay in Politico titled “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable” enumerates horror upon horror committed against civilians by the Israelis but ultimately packages these as the unfortunate consequence of the ugly “Israel-Hamas” war, rather than as a core tenet of Zionism’s eliminatory logic. On X, below a photo of a small child crying in a red tank top, her bilateral lower limb amputations exposed, a former CNN producer commented, “I am horrified and sorry, but what did you think it’s [sic] going to happen after you attacked Israel on October 7, 2023?”
The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed without question by Western media for over a year in order to present genocide as an understandable human reaction, while Palestinians have the last one hundred years. The juxtaposition, though satisfying, is flawed: what matters in the case of Palestine, as in all struggles for liberation, is not that one side’s quantified suffering eclipses the other’s, nor that half of its martyrs are children. What matters is not that the other side has cowardly soldiers encased by tanks and no issue running over children. It’s not Palestinians’ suffering that makes their cause worthwhile because suffering is not a moral good, power not a moral harm. What matters is that Israel is a settler colony, built on stolen Palestinian land and sustained by Palestinian blood. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in a world, as the power gap between oppressor and oppressed narrows, where Israel is the victim.
Better Than Nothing
As part of its ethic of refusal, MSF has a long history of terminating projects where it finds itself instrumentalized by belligerents. In Afghanistan in 2004, the U.S. military had blurred the line between the work of humanitarian organizations like MSF and U.S. forces, including by dropping leaflets threatening to condition humanitarian aid on civilians’ willingness to provide information on fighters’ whereabouts. Five MSF workers were killed in an ambush by the Taliban, who accused MSF of collaborating with the United States. MSF withdrew its operations. In response, Western media condemned MSF’s naivete for insisting on an ethics without politics—politics which, for the United States propaganda arm, meant medical doctors serving the interests of an occupying military. In Libya in 2012, MSF found itself treating patients who were subject to torture by the government imposed on the country by NATO forces, a situation Reuters termed “awkward,” as if the intentional destabilization of a country was subject to the same etiquette as a dinner party. MSF insisted that their role should be to provide medical care with the goal of improving prognosis, not the Sisyphean task of “repeatedly treat[ing] the same patients between torture sessions.” Again, MSF withdrew.
In Gaza, especially since the tightening of Israel’s siege, an animating question for MSF is whether something is better than nothing. Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014 prompted an MSF member to write a short reflection on Crash, the blog of the organization’s think tank, about the necessary limits of any MSF intervention. He opens by telling his reader a little bit about Gaza:
An entire population is trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison. They can’t leave and only the most limited supplies—essential for basic survival—are allowed to enter. The population of the prison have elected representatives and organised social services. Some of the prisoners have organised into armed groups and resist their indefinite detention by firing rockets over the prison wall. However, the prison guards are the ones who have the capacity to launch large scale and highly destructive attacks on the open-air prison.
In the blog post, one heading consists of a single word, inflected as a question: “Complicit?” At what point does MSF simply refuse the conditions it is sustaining, as it did in Libya or Afghanistan? A decade later and under an exponentially escalated targeting of Gaza’s health care system, these concerns persist. Today, both its modes of intervention—medical care and witness—are compromised, especially as the latter is only as effective as the media coverage it receives. MSF’s “voice of outrage” against Israel’s destruction of medical infrastructure has been drowned out by the propaganda war that moves in lockstep with Israel’s needs.
The doctors she sent to serve Palestinians should understand that they were serving Palestine. Otherwise, they could choose a different medical mission.
Even MSF’s condemnations are careful not to overstep Israel’s red lines. During the first months of the genocide, volunteers were instructed not to use the word genocide except if they clarified they were speaking in their personal capacity. (Orbinski, in his Nobel speech, had condemned humanitarians’ unwillingness to use the word.) Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times offered in 2023, by way of advice, that “the best chance of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.” Over the years, humanitarian organizations have learned that, if they wish to provide aid to Gaza, they must accept that Israel will remind them who is in charge, often by killing some of their members. The deliberate targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be understood as the Israelis saying that no one, no matter how famous or non-Arab, should perceive themselves as beyond Israel’s reach. Israel has killed Americans, such as Rachel Corrie, for getting in their way—in Corrie’s case literally, by offering her body as a barrier between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian home in 2003.
MSF has insisted on the net positive of the organization’s ability to use its voice to testify to the “indiscriminate and massive killings of civilians.” The term indiscriminate is misleading; civilians are the target. The other thing MSF can do with its voice, a response to the Crash reflection offers, is to remind “the warring parties” of their responsibilities “in theconduct of hostilities.” MSF speaks from a place of musts and must nots, without any means of enforcing these modal verbs. After Israel kills another doctor or bombs another hospital, MSF responds by issuing statements that urge Israel not to do what it does, sprinkling its social media posts with hashtags like #notatarget. In a short tribute to one of their murdered colleagues, a physiotherapist named Fadi killed on June 25, 2024, MSF elaborates the circumstances of his death: Fadi was cycling to work and was killed along with four others, three of them children. Surely he was not engaged in terror activities against snipers spawned from a culture that relishes in neutralizing children. MSF, wagging its finger, “has reached out to Israeli authorities asking for clarifications about the circumstances of Fadi’s killing. Only an independent investigation can establish the facts.” The facts that matter, of course, are obvious; this insistence on so-called independent investigations into a genocide, sustained by the countries that launch so-called humanitarian interventions, gets old.
Ilana Feldman wrote for The Journal of Palestine Studies in 2009 that “humanitarianism is sometimes deployed as a strategy for frustrating Palestinian aspirations,” even when these interventions are well-intentioned. After the successful destruction of much of Gaza’s medical infrastructure this last year, Israel gave MSF permission to set up a field hospital. Members of the organization protested this move internally, recognizing it as filling a gap Israel had created in order to leave Palestinians dependent on foreign aid. But a hospital is a hospital. Within a humanitarian frame, it doesn’t matter who is treating or how, so long as people receive care. Some of the backlash to the field hospital was prompted by the actions of Israeli soldiers, who set up a photo op and took pictures of themselves delivering boxes of supplies there, making MSF look like the organization is collaborating with those committing genocide against the people MSF is treating. In response to this accusation, what can MSF meaningfully say?
شهادة
Witness inaugurates a beginning. Over the past many months, various writers have offered the Arabic root of the word shaheed, martyr: it is sha-ha-da, “to bear witness.” For the religiously inclined, a shaheed does a number of things. The martyr’s act refuses, as it resists, an ongoing injustice. On Judgment Day, the martyr will testify before God to the harms committed against their people. Until then, the martyr-as-witness does not die—one verse in the Quran reads, “Do not say of those killed in the cause of God ‘dead;’ verily they are alive, although you do not sense them.” Instead, in the sharpened wake of aftermath, the martyr obliges those of us who have not yet borne witness with the whole of ourselves to resist the world that let this happen, so that one day the will for a dignified life won’t require a person to forfeit theirs. Doctors born in Gaza, working in the few hospitals still partially functional, have shown us another way to bear witness: to surrender yourself for a people’s sake, with the intention of remaining within our sensory world.
The deliberate targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be understood as the Israelis saying that no one, no matter how famous, how non-Arab, should perceive themselves as beyond Israel’s reach.
As of this writing, Israel has killed over one thousand health care workers in Gaza. It has broadened the practice of targeting health care infrastructure to Lebanon, bombing medical clinics and hospitals and ambulances and paramedics, including those stationed in the annex of a church. Israel has taken over three hundred health care workers in Gaza hostage. In April 2024, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the orthopedic surgery department at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, was likely raped to death after four months of detention in what the Associated Press called “shadowy hospitals.” Before they killed him, al-Bursh had refused to give the Israelis false testimony to be used against his people. In July, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the head of al-Shifa Hospital, was released from Israeli dungeons seven months after he was abducted while treating patients. Immediately, he spoke to reporters of the abuse he faced. He testified to the torture enacted by Israeli doctors against Palestinians. And then, he returned to work. If his role is to doctor, his project is to liberate.
Part of my aversion to MSF’s brand of testimony is that it shrinks the potential of witness. As Fassin and Rechtman point out, the more medicalized the language, the closer to the individual human body, the more the role of “war loses potency.” The conversation slips into what the doctors are treating instead of what the people—doctors among them—are fighting for. In response to a careful compilation of testimonies published in the New York Times from American doctors who volunteered in Gaza, debates raged about whether the X-rays showing intact bullets in children’s skulls were real or fake. These discussions propagated entirely in parallel to, and as a distraction from, the actual issue, which is that tens of thousands of children have been killed by the Zionist state to fuel Zionism. Credentials were questioned and reaffirmed, including by the Times, which has played a frontline role in manufacturing consent for this genocide. Enumerating Palestinian suffering without saying what for, these testimonies do not have liberation as their aim. At best, they get us another short-lived ceasefire.
Some of the foreign doctors who enter Palestine perform the role of old-school humanitarians, without allegiances except to an abstracted thing called life. Quickly these doctors realize they have nothing, as doctors, to stop the bombs. And their witness, when facing those poised with a professionalism that accommodates genocide, emphasizes bodies over people. It is incomplete. Realizing this, there are doctors who reach for something more. The Palestinian pharmacist, resistance fighter, and martyr Bassel al-Araj spoke of being Palestinian in the “broad sense, meaning everyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities.” The orthopedic surgeon Swee Chai Ang first traveled to Beirut in 1982, where she witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Soon after, she founded Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). During MAP’s early years, she required her volunteers to read Rosemary Sayegh’s From Peasants to Revolutionaries. The doctors she sent to serve Palestinians should understand that they were serving Palestine. Otherwise, they could choose a different medical mission.
Daily Routines
As Israel bombed the area around Beirut’s airport in 2024, I revisited Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness.” Darwish is trying to get to his kitchen to make coffee one morning in Beirut. The month is August, the year 1982, and Israeli warplanes break the sound barrier, disfigure the earth, target buildings and history. Americans of an earlier generation say a place looks “like Beirut” to mean “ravaged.” I took a screenshot of this excerpt:
The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: “Merit cigarettes—more aroma, less nicotine!” “Citizen watches—for the correct time!” “Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure is!” “Health mineral water—health from a high mountain!”
In my square of text, the word health hangs, as though Darwish balks at a world that could raise such a consideration now. There are elements of the absurd in his stubborn commitment to preserving routine as the bombs rain down around him. The poet’s descriptions drip in hyperbole, but they’re not enough—no words are—to capture what’s not a matter of language in isolation but of witness, something that requires all the senses to know it. The end of a world, without punctuation.
Darwish’s attention is not on the human body but everything around it: the sky, the sea, consumerism’s escapist beckoning. He is alone, his annoyance at the disruption of his morning solitude—the static that buzzing war machines impose in place of his thoughts—a feeling any writer will recognize. His body is intact, out of frame; it could just as easily be my body or yours, the subject rather than the object of this story.
Speaking with a reporter about his time in Gaza, the Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah admitted that the gore hadn’t bothered him. Among his patients was a nine-year-old with “half of her face missing, who had no one left.” Only after he had washed away the blood and mud caked onto her body did he begin “to see the child before the injury.” Hair ties decorated with plastic flowers, nail polish painted onto tiny toes amputated by the blast—these jolted him out of his clinical stupor. Before him was a little girl. Abu-Sittah found himself sobbing: someone had loved her enough to take the time, in the middle of a genocide, to braid her hair.
Mary Turfah is a writer and resident physician.
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