Beyond words: The unforgivable violence in Gaza

The wanton violence loosed on the people of Gaza has become so diabolic, so infernal that it is now receding beyond the communicative grasp of any words found in our lexicon. Even those of us who string words together for a living have failed to find ones that have just equivalents to the reality on the ground we are witnessing with our own eyes.

Northern Gaza. Now a desolate, Guernico-like landscape that Louise Wateridge, a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesperson posted a video of herself driving through recently, and about which she later wrote online: “There is no way of telling where destruction starts and where it ends. No matter from what direction you enter Gaza City [which, being spread across 17 square miles, is the largest city in Palestine], homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, restaurants, health clinics and apartment blocks — all are completely flattened. The entire society is now a graveyard”.

Elsewhere in Gaza. An analysis published by the United Nations human rights office last Friday of the monstrous human toll by Israeli bombardment found that among the tens of thousands of those killed in the Strip over the last 13 months 70 per cent were women and children, with children between the ages of 5 and 9 most represented among the dead.

Images of all this death and destruction are etched, like indelible ink, in our minds, images we know will continue, for the rest of our lives, to gnaw at us like raw wounds.

Racialist hatred of the other

Can you bring yourself, if you’re Palestinian, to one day forgive those who forthrightly and seemingly gratuitously waged war on children? Can you bring yourself, especially if you’re Palestinian, to one day bury the hatchet and make peace with a belligerent state whose vengeful citizen-soldiers, citizen-settlers and citizen-politicians have imbued their society with racialist hatred of the other?

In a trenchant piece titled Taming the Vindictive Passions that he wrote in January 2014 for First Things, an influential, New York-based journal focused on theology, culture and history, Danial Maloney, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University, explored the complicated philosophical question of forgiveness and its limits, by taking his readers, in his lead paragraph, to a ceremony held in Germany in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second World War and the Liberation of Auschwitz.

At the ceremony, Professor Maloney reminds us, Elie Wiesel (d. 2016), the Romanian-born American author, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, delivered the following prayer: “God of forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place. God of mercy, have no mercy on those who killed here Jewish children”.

The prayer, Professor Maloney wrote, made a lot of people uncomfortable, for it provoked thorny theoretical and moral questions about whether there are in life actions, however heinous, that can be deemed “unforgivable”. In short, was there not some point where, in this case, Germany and Germans could be — should be — forgiven?

Morals, moralism and moralists

Professor Maloney, who cited secular and theological sources, all the way from Aristotle to Acquinas, and who found room in his long paper to talk about what morals, moralism and moralists are all about, gave an emphatic yes to the question — we are all owed forgiveness by our fellow humans, irrespective of how egregious the horror we inflict on others may be.

I have my doubts about this claim. My doubts stem from the belief that just as there is violence and there violence (seeing that, for example, the violence committed by the slave to break his chains is of a different order from the violence committed by the slave master to subdue him) there is also forgiveness and there is forgiveness.

Much of the violence inflicted on Gazans today is violence they do not deserve to endure. It is violence propelled not by strategy but by pathology, the kind demonstrated, say, in the deliberate, calculated withholding of food deliveries to starving children and, in an equally deliberate, calculated manner, turning a once living, breathing society, a once dynamic habitat and a once productive land into, as Ms Wateridge put it, a “graveyard”.

The infliction of that kind of suffering is unforgivable. Its infliction on human beings is beyond the pale. Beyond rational understanding. Never before in modern times have we been witness, certainly not since the Second World War, to such genocidal passions unleashed by one people, openly, brazenly and vindictively, against another as those unleashed by Israelis against Palestinians. And never before has the world had a better read of the true face of Israel than in these times.

The images, I say, are etched like indelible ink in our collective mind.

I, for one, like Elie Wiesel who refused to forgive Nazi Germany for the atrocities it committed against his people, will refuse to forgive Zionist Israel for the atrocities it has committed against mine.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile