I’ve been wanting to write about the events that have been unfolding in Palestine, truthfully, since 1948, but have escalated this past October, for a while now. I haven’t been able to narrow down the plethora of feelings and thoughts that have plagued my mind for weeks into a comprehensible message until now, because it felt too intimidating. I have so much to say, so much I’ve been pondering that has without a doubt been said better by someone more qualified. But something finally clicked for me, and I guess I’m now able to articulate a couple of the thoughts I’ve been thinking.
Jordan Peele’s 2022 horror film NOPE introduced me to our society’s insidious addiction to the spectacle. Ever since I watched that film, all I could think about was how perfectly he got it, the way people in our world react to horror and tragedy and pain as if it is only worth how entertaining it is. As if the truth of it all is worth less than how much of a spectacle it can be. And NOPE is not the first movie, or book, or song, or form of media to discuss this concept. We’ve all seen The Hunger Games. We’ve all seen the desensitization humans can bear towards brutality and violence and depravity, watching nightmares from the safety of their screens and their homes, enjoying themselves at the cost of another’s life. This is not a new concept to any of us.
But in the wake of Israel’s latest aggression on Palestine, which began on October 7th and has only gotten worse up until the day I’m writing this on November 11th, I felt like I had no words to describe the abhorrent indifference and apathy that I’ve seen people display in the wake of indescribable horror. But now, I understand. There is nothing more salivating to the most morally bankrupt of us all than a horror or tragedy so intense it feels almost unreal. So extreme that it allows them to take a step back, detach themselves from the roots tying so many of us to the ground of the crisis, and become spectators. Watch on as people are bombed to pieces, expelled from their homes, orphaned, decapitated, starved—among countless other atrocities—and feel nothing. Some of them cheer and dance at their rallies, protesting the possibility of a ceasefire, of an end to the indiscriminate massacring of a civilian population. Some of them sit in their mansions, set their phones up on their tables, and bring forth their crocodile tears, pretending to feel even a fraction of the fear and terror that run through Palestinian blood. The rest of us watch, speechless at the moral apathy. But it’s clear; to them, this is not real life. Palestinians are not human. To them, this is an absolute spectacle, one that poses no real threat or harm to their perfectly fabricated lives, though it’s already in the midst of crushing an entire peoples’ lives. The way the media and the press is covering this genocide is dystopian, to say the least; there is a sense of callousness dripping between the lines of every obscured headline and every biased report. Their morals can be bought, their words can be twisted, because the massacre of Palestinians is something so wildly distant from their lives they cannot bring themselves to care enough to stand on anything.
I did a project on the ethics of the consumption of true crime recently and came across the concept of “wound culture,” coined by Mark Seltzer in the late 1990s. Though Seltzer discusses the concept in regards to serial killers and the American obsession with the torn and open body, in wound culture, the public broadcast of violence and trauma allows for the public fascination and addiction to violence and trauma. Such publicized horror intertwines with private fantasy to become a spectacle, where people convene around scenes of violence, utterly hypnotized. One in which we cannot avert our eyes, but only stand, spellbound at another’s pain. And I think that for one to create a spectacle of something so incredibly horrific, they must feel a sense of comfort and safety from where they stand. Like the citizens of Panem, they watch the horror unfold on a screen, so far away it can never be anything but a source of entertainment. Like the characters in NOPE, they stare hypnotized at the UFO, feeling such a deluded sense of safety and distance, even as it sucks them into its underbelly. No, it could never even begin to infringe on their lives, not like it infringes on the lives of Palestinians, on the ground and abroad. No, that could never happen to them. Because they are different. Aren’t they? What makes them different?
And a lot of this has so much to do with a profound desensitization to brutality and violence, even more so when the targets of brutality and violence have been dehumanized in the mass media that shapes public opinion. I keep thinking to myself, how inhumane must one be to watch the same videos I’m watching, to hear the same things I’m hearing, and feel not even an inkling of despair? How can they watch a man lose his leg to a bomb made of blades and open their mouths to defend the ones that built that bomb and the ones that sent it into the yard of a hospital? They must be so desensitized to such extreme violence that watching this to them is like watching some kind of fictional reality. There’s an alternate explanation, one even more harrowing, albeit true: they must not view the ones experiencing the violence as human. They must not view Palestinians as worthy of not being blown up to pieces or having their homes reduced to rubble or losing an entire bloodline in a few hours. I mean, we all saw Netanyahu call Palestinians the children of darkness subscribing to the laws of the jungle, didn’t we? We all saw that for the dogwhistle it was meant to be, right? Except it wasn’t quite a dogwhistle, because surely anyone with a moral compass or at least more than two brain cells functioning in their skull saw it for what it was. Surely.
The media runs with the narrative they were given by the perpetrators of violence and genocide, of course, but this again all feels so insidious. How do you, as a journalist, look at the scene before you, and throw it all away in the name of power? In the name of money? How can your morals be bought? How can you allow yourself to become a pawn in their game, unaware or ignorant of the way in which they won’t hesitate to toss you aside when you no longer align with their agenda? You’ve seen the people they’ve already sacked from their jobs just for sharing posts to spread awareness or for saying Free Palestine. Choosing to stay silent or posting a flimsy infographic preaching a “neutrality” that does not exist when you have the platform to actually make a difference is just as spineless. Who cares about the brand deals you’ll lose out on? Do the innocent Palestinians being massacred in the hundreds of thousands not mean more to you than a check?
In a world fascinated by the spectacle, no matter how twisted, you’ll find moral apathy riddled so deeply within its people you won’t be able to find a cure for the disease because it’s already begun to rot its hosts. We’ve seen the pictures of Israeli settlers setting up chairs to watch the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza in 2014 like it was a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. I saw a Tiktok video of an American settler standing on her balcony and basking in the sound of missiles being sent out towards Gaza, feeling absolutely exuberant at the prospect of the IOF killing civilians. This is nothing more than a spectacle to them. And it’s nothing more than a spectacle to the droves of people around the world who watch video after video of the horrors unfolding in Palestine and feel nothing but an insatiable fascination with the violence. They cannot look away, not even to feel outraged. Not even to do something, anything, even find a new coffee spot other than Starbucks. It is an absolutely unhinged and deranged society. One that I feel terrified to live among.
This piece does not even begin to say all the things there is to say about the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine that has been going on since the Nakba in 1948. I cannot even begin to cover everything I have to say and everything I’ve been thinking about. Thankfully, other people, who are more educated and more qualified, have said more about Palestine and in better words than I could ever achieve. So, in that vein, I think the appropriate way to close this piece is by establishing the fact that we all have more to learn and more to understand about the situation in Palestine. I want to suggest we all read books and watch documentaries about Palestine, in the hopes that we all continue learning, continue lending our attention and our ears to the voices of Palestinians, as well as our solidarity and support. In a time where they are being censored so heavily and so publicly, nothing is more important than lending our voices and our platforms and our protection.
An invaluable resource I implore you all to check out: Decolonize Palestine. It is funded and run by two Palestinians living in Ramallah who have labored extensively to bring us a rich well of information and perspective that will benefit our understanding tremendously. They have a reading list on their site with books about Palestine separated into specific categories like Media and Censorship, History, and Myth busting among others, so I’d like to point you all towards that. I also want to suggest the Palestine Film Institute, a body that serves to fund, promote, and preserve Palestinian cinema. Again, invaluable resource.
Do not allow yourselves to become desensitized to the violence, pain, and trauma that real people are experiencing. Ground yourselves in reality. Becoming desensitized and detached only serves the oppressor. They want us to become apathetic. They want us to grow indifferent. This is not a spectacle. This is reality. Wake up.
—from the film Children of Shatila (1998) directed by Mai Masri.
thoughtful and well written as always!!! understanding apathy (or worse) to Palestine through the lens of spectacle + media is so interesting and def made me see it through a new perspective