Have you seen it yet? The image of a Palestinian kid cut in half following the IDF’s bombing of Rafah? If you’re on social media you probably have. Or maybe you saw the video of a severely injured Palestinian child seemingly taking his last breath. It went viral last week. There it was vying for our attention alongside all the other viral stuff, trending with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Perhaps you’ve heard the audio clip of
the six-year-old Gazan girl, Hind Rajab, phoning for help after the car she and her family were travelling in came under fire. Tragically, Hind was later found dead. Her final words have been posted everywhere. Everyone must listen to this ‘harrowing’ and ‘haunting’ call, the activist class insists.
There’s an unseemly feel to all this feverish sharing of images of Palestinian suffering. ‘Roll up, roll up, hear a child’s dying breath’ – that’s what I hear when I see post after post inviting us to behold the lives and bodies that have been broken by ‘evil’, ‘Nazi’ Israel. The clicktivists who share these grim images no doubt think of it as ‘Palestine solidarity’. We’re raising awareness of the suffering of the Palestinians, they’ll say. In truth, they’re dehumanising the Palestinians. They are commodifying their trauma, making a spectacle of their agony. And the aim, it seems to me, is less to assist people in Gaza than to provide a moral rush to activists in the West, to furnish them with the comforting sensation of collective repulsion. It is an entirely narcissistic project, as far from ‘solidarity’ as you can get.
Western activists have turned the war in Gaza into a moral snuff movie. It is obscene.
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