Sometimes I just want to lay in a dark room with sleep music emanating from my iPhone speakers. Indulge in a facsimile of peace. A facsimile because there is no peace. Bombs don’t get fatigued. Quadcopters don’t need to rest and recharge. Warmongers are relentless in their march toward destruction. A starving child in a flooded tent in Rafah can’t turn off her increasingly aggressive hunger pangs. Her mother, electric with stress, attempts to tame her daughter’s ravenous urges with bread made of animal feed and a generous sprinkle of coarse salt. There is no peace.

I am so exhausted. Shall we all just lay down and die? Ok, on my order… 3, 2 annnd 1. 

I had a stray thought this morning. What if the genocide continues for another 100 days? What if? Do I keep writing? Posting? Sharing? When will we look away from the struggle? The obvious answer is that we must continue to bear witness. Our minds have become conditioned to process 60-second clips of information. And so, in the midst of this genocide of the Palestinians, hundreds of men and women traverse the muddy, devastated ruins of Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah to broadcast 60 seconds of bodies helter-skelter across blood stained hospital floors, or corpses partially trapped under the rubble. 

They upload reels of toddlers covered in ash and bleeding from the head. They post TikToks of bodies recovered from rubble and wrapped in those ubiquitous fuzzy blankets everyone seems to own. These are the milder images. The ones that give you a sense of keeping up with current events. Enough to confirm that war is hell and to satisfy the image that you’re a paragon of liberal middle-class respectability. Just enough consumption to trigger mild horror, but not too much that it kills your desire to sip a glass of cab over today’s Wordle. 

The content that really triggers the bone weary fatigue—images and live video that the New York Times and MSNBC preemptively sanitize and lock away in private archives—are images of the father carrying his son’s body parts through the streets in dirty, plastic grocery store bags, the dead premature infants rotting in incubators of the raided and then abandoned Al-Nasr hospital. Instead, Western audiences are cossetted with Israeli propaganda and soft-focus images of hostages taken from a Kibbutz. Interviews with aggrieved Israeli families lead the nightly news segment. In Palestine, everyone is suspect. Collective punishment is rained down to obliterate collective remembrance. 

There is power in the remembering. The retelling. The word must be passed and seeded into Palestinian soil. We must struggle mightily against the urge to capitulate to exhaustion. For those that survive the bombings, the massacres and the sniper attempts, a space must be created to pass the word. To name the thing (Genocide) and to drag the perpetrators (IOF) into the disinfecting sunlight. 32,000* Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis.

What do we owe each other as humans? In the absence of political power, do we mitigate our moral debt by paying attention? Each time I open Instagram lately I’m confronted by an image of a starving child. Jaundice and peeling lips and sharp rib cages are a grim stand-in for some mother’s beloved. The overwhelm is insidious in it’s seduction. How easy to simply look away. Close the app and watch an episode of Real Housewives of Wherever. Let the scripted, petty conflagrations weave a gauzy shroud of escape over my memory. Who does fatigue, and it’s cousin, forgetting, serve? Does it pave the way for the Israeli body politic to draft new frontiers, new myths, and new cultural narratives unchallenged?

One of the greatest accelerants of fatigue is hunger. Sustained hunger gnaws at focused resistance and replaces it with delirium. Israel has weaponized food access in it’s ongoing assault on anyone that would dare dream of a free Palestine. Those Palestinians that still draw breath move through Gaza’s destroyed coastal strip in a state of utter famine. Air drops packed with expired, non-Halal food have killed desperate Gazans. Those that don’t drown or get crushed to death seeking aid serve as Israeli machine gun fodder as they desperately swarm the trickle of aid trucks allowed in. The lucky ones escape with blood-soaked bags of flour. 

There have been at least 3 flour massacres in Gaza. The first in North Gaza at Al-Rashid Street (112 killed), the second occurred as starving Gazans waited for humanitarian aid in Kuwait Square (20 killed). The third was an IOF attack on an UNWRA food distribution warehouse (1 staffer killed and 22 wounded). In each scenario Palestinians shook off the fog of despair, if only momentarily, and rallied their will to live another day. They gathered at preauthorized distribution sites, only to be rounded like cattle and slaughtered by guns and hellfire missiles.

On April 1st, the West learned that even the umbrella of celebrity philanthropy can’t shield good samaritans from liquidation. 7 aid workers with the World Central Kitchen (WCK), traveling in a 3 vehicle caravan on a route approved by the IOF were struck and killed by precision guided Israeli missiles. Their vehicles were clearly marked, their movements coordinated and their bodies swathed in WCK badges and logos. No matter. They were agents of Palestinian survival. As such their lives were forfeit. The Instagram reels of their bloodied bodies laid in the dirt with a first responder shoving their passports into the camera lenses played on a loop until my eyes got dry.  My exhaustion was only narrowly defeated by horror and disgust that day. 

And yet, I remain a slave to conditioning. I click, swipe, scroll, falling deeper into a macabre highlight reel. It’s a form of self-flagellation. Each post shared is like a whip to my consciousness. A sharp intake of pain to jolt me out of the stupor of defeat. I cannot halt the funding of Israeli weapons. I haven’t stormed the halls of Congress to confront the Zionist sympathizers in Ralph Lauren suits. But I can keep watch. I can sit and let the horror of what’s happening in Palestine constrict me. I can write and contribute to the record.