Blur the faces of the dead

Gaza Fragments, I

I forget when Al Jazeera started blurring the faces of Gaza’s dead. Of course, everyone else did from the start. You would turn on CNN or the BBC and see something like this: a dozen grave faces at the edge of the screen, a man or woman weeping in the foreground, and, at the centre of the frame: a body with a grey square like a tinted window where the head should be, underneath which you are to imagine the face of a dead child.

But Al Jazeera would not do this — and being the only major news organisation with journalists on the ground in Gaza, they had nearly always shot the footage in the first place. So you could simply switch the channel to Al Jazeera and see the same crowd, the same parent lost in unfathomable darkness, and the same child. And you could see unblurred, over and over and over, the inscrutable sleeping faces of dead toddlers.

I never really found the censored images any more palatable than these. There is something obscene in a world that facilitates the mass slaughter of civilians with gusto yet flinches from the sight of their corpses. Why only blur the face? A dead child’s face can look like it is merely asleep, but there is a primal terror in a baby’s arm hanging perfectly limp, jolting with every shudder of their parent’s ministrations. Why not blur everything? Hide the whole body and let the imagination take hold. And then, because the anguish of the other Gazans — the ones still living — is almost as brutal an interruption of your peace of mind, pixelate the whole screen. We can then depict Gaza as its destroyers intended: a non-place, flat and featureless as slate.

Maybe showing the faces of the dead disturbs you at a moral level. Everyone can decry the garish imperatives involved in filming poor dead people killed in wars. Moral posturing like this is easy. It assuages the liberal conscience to defend the privacy of corpses, even though when those people were alive they were not actual human beings. We will do nothing to stop the killings, but we find the dying obscene.

Journalism cannot aim to be palatable, only honest. But the real question here is whether some things are so horrible that we must approach the truth only obliquely. This does not mean capitulating to propriety, or allowing Western sympathisers to assuage their guilt by pretending that the Gazan holocaust is not really happening. We have to look away at some point, or else we will become numb. How many times can you contemplate the experience of a child whose limb is amputated with a bonesaw without anaesthesia? Once? Twice? At one point the Israeli army was creating ten child amputees per day.

So it was not out of some sense of decency that Al Jazeera started blurring over the dead. I think their editors simply discovered what much of the world has been cursed to know: there are only so many dead babies one can witness, in person or in pixels, before something in you snaps. Industrial child murder does not violate the meaning of some particularly cherished feature of civilised life: it destroys the possibility of meaning entirely.

Even Gazans learned that there is only so much reality the world can stomach. “At the beginning, people were honest,” recalled a Palestinian journalist: “Show the world what’s going on. Let them see.” Parents held their martyred children up to the cameras, naïvely believing that the slaughter was tolerated due to wider ignorance of its effects. In fact, Western leaders knew that Israel was primarily killing women and children and vociferously supported Israel’s right to continue. After the first few thousand children were bombed, burned, and snipered from this life, Gazans were disabused of any belief in the human conscience. “Now,” says the cameraman, “essentially we lost the faith.”

Let them see, said the cameraman. The people of Gaza invite you to walk right up to the edge of the hole. Nudge your feet to the edge. Lean over, stare in. How far down can you see? How long can you keep staring before reason melts, forms of the material world blend together, the capacity for language dulls and sloughs away, and you are left numb and silent? I don’t know what horrors Cormac McCarthy had in mind when he imagined a scale of human suffering so vast that if it

were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash.¹

But that is what I think of Gaza.

We owe it to the dead, and to the living even more, to confront the reality of the genocide of the Palestinians. This means not attempting to make the act of killing more palatable by shielding the public from the bloody faces of the dead. At the same time, the history of war attests to the benumbing effect of too much killing. Many murders are, as Stalin knew, mere statistics.

There is too much horror in Gaza for a single person to comprehend without losing their mind. There is also too much horror to stop looking — that is moral cowardice. There is only one way to square the paradox. Choose a single death and mourn it endlessly. Remove one child, one man, one mother, from the pile of statistics. Contemplate the life cut short, contemplate the second before the bullet. Find their body, find the blast that killed them. Ask yourself how fragile is the line between a person and a corpse. There is enough witness testimony to hear what a hundred families think of their son, their sister, their cousin’s murder. Mourn Shaban al-Dalu, burned alive in a hospital compound. He was 19. Mourn Khaled Nabhan, a man whose love and gentleness endured to the grave. Mourn the Abu Hayya family. Their three-month-old baby Reem, who survived the blast that killed her parents and five siblings, cannot yet mourn them herself.

1. In his play The Sunset Limited he puts these words in the mouth of a contemplative atheist who condemns Christianity as a “fellowship of pain.” This is not really an explanation as to where the visceral felt force of the remarks comes from.