[ We must keep watching. It is only in this pain that we will
charge our resolve and our power – and force America and Israel to
end this bloody war]
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WE ALL SEE THE HORRIFIC VIDEOS OF SUFFERING IN GAZA. WE MUST NOT LOOK
AWAY  
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V (formerly Eve Ensler)
January 3, 2024
The Guardian
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_ We must keep watching. It is only in this pain that we will charge
our resolve and our power – and force America and Israel to end this
bloody war _

Palestinians mourning their relatives killed in an Israeli strike on
Dec. 21, at a hospital in Rafah., Fatima Shbair/Associated Press

 

Over these last horrific months, Instagram has exploded with
catastrophic images and videos of the genocide taking place in Gaza
[[link removed]]. We have seen formerly
incubated babies found abandoned on hospital beds, huge craters where
apartment buildings and neighborhoods once stood, bones emerging from
rubble. One particular video haunts me. I watch it on my phone. I
watch it again. A dust covered, anguished father crawls towards his
limp, gray, dead 10 month old baby. He covers him with his body. He
holds the baby rocking and rocking him as if to say, “gone, gone,
gone.” He slaps the floor with his hand. He cries out over and over.
Then the energy changes, suddenly terrifying, suddenly shocking. I
have never seen a man’s body go mad from the inside. I have never
seen legs scream – their movements convulsive, spasmodic, as if
taken, charged by electrocuting grief.

And I realize there must be a person filming this and I wonder if the
father is aware or if he is so far gone into the horror that he is no
longer in that room or in this realm at all. And I ask myself what
does it mean to be recording the mad vulnerability of grief in real
time? And I worry that watching this is somehow invasive, entering an
intimacy I have not earned. This father, a stranger and this probably
the most catastrophic moment of his life. But the video is on
Instagram. I assume that the father must have agreed to be filmed,
agreed for the video to be posted here. And this reminds me of the
mothers of the Say Her Name campaign, the extraordinary mothers of the
daughters, sisters, granddaughters who were murdered by the police. I
remember a particular event a few years ago where they were being
honored after a play. I was on stage with several of them who were
sharing their stories. One of the mothers began to cry as she spoke,
which grew into a loud wail. I could tell she was losing control. So I
gently took her arm and asked if she might want to walk off stage for
a minute. She froze, looked at me with total clarity and said, “No,
no, let them see us. Let them know our pain.”

I have been trying to come up with a word or a way to accurately
describe what we are doing as we press the “sensitive material”
buttons on our IG Reels to release the most painful atrocities and
images. What is this ritual? I know I cannot ever feel or know what
that father is feeling. I pace my bedroom. I feel nauseous. I feel
grotesque and privileged and disgusted to live in America, an empire
that spends billions supporting this violent and violating enterprise.
I feel a sickening disappointment in myself, a sinking awareness of a
malignant lack of courage. I have been to Israel
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times. I have seen with my own eyes the hundreds of checkpoints and
walls. I have heard and experienced firsthand the cruelty of Israeli
soldiers towards Palestinians, the degradation, the sadism, the
apartheid structure. And yes, for almost 20 years since the first
visit, I have gone to demonstrations, signed letters and petitions to
end the occupation, the siege on Gaza, the stolen settlements. I have
joined Israeli and Palestinian women peace activists on the ground in
Israel and here in US, supported the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, hosted
educational speakers and events.

But, here now, watching this father I realize, I have not given myself
fully. Not really. There has always been a reservation in me, a fear,
a real fear of being excommunicated from a tribe that I deeply admire
and know, a tribe who’s suffering I have studied and visited and
memorized and learned in my body since I first inhaled The Diary of
Anne Frank at nine, and although I know I can never comprehend the
magnitude of such suffering, I have tried to get as close to it as
possible as a way of honoring, remembering and cherishing those that
suffered and those that were born out of that suffering. And that
journey of loving the Jewish people and attempting to touch our agony,
changed and determined my existence. That holocaust brought me to the
world, brought me to war zones and the far reaches of human suffering,
catalyzed with the mantra and directive “never again”. And I took
that imperative very seriously. I took it to mean that never again for
the Jewish people meant never again for anyone, the Congolese people
or the Bosnians or the Sudanese or the Palestinians. I took this vow
as a political and spiritual mandate to expand the boundaries of my
own concerns and connect to the greater tribe of humanity.

In the video the father clutches his dead child. I feel the agonizing
failure of language to meet this moment. I feel the smoldering shame
and rage of living in a world that for 80 days has allowed the
full-scale destruction of a people and their place, (over 21,000
dead,
[[link removed]] over 56,000
injured
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90% of Gaza destroyed) in broad daylight, where babies’ brains are
exploded and people are being starved and bombed in their dreams and
hunted with rifles and gunned down in wheelchairs and where, with each
passing hour the precious poets, journalists, doctors and nurses are
being erased into eternity. Where hospitals, schools, mosques, art
centers, everything that makes a life and holds a culture is turned to
dust. I watch the video again. Some might call this a form of
self-harm. Some might call it obsession. But that is not it at all. I
am watching as a way of seeing, as a way of paying attention, as a way
of knowing and in that knowing allowing the pain of that father into
my body, my heart and my memory as a way of not letting him go, as a
way of saying you are not alone, you are not forgotten.

We are watching now, millions of us and we must keep watching. They
know how powerful our watching is and that is why they are doing
everything they can to censor what we are watching. They want us to
turn away. They are betting that they will outlast us and exhaust our
attention with their atrocities. We must keep watching because it is
only in this pain and through this pain that we will charge our
resolve and our power and force America and Israel to end this bloody
war. We can and we must.

*
_V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder
of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls_

* Israel-Gaza War
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* war crimes
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* Protest
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* Ceasefire
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