The reality experienced by Palestinians, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, is intolerable and unacceptable.
Yet this ignominy, this ruthless crushing of a people, continues with the consent, or at least the passivity, of most governments around the world.
Fear, cowardice, complicity, and base compromises are all part of the mix, offering a telling picture of the mindset of all our state leaders, of what they really are.
Thus, French state authorities stooped so low as to demand the dismissal of Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, for daring to speak out about what was happening there.
Should we see Palestine and the Israeli government’s policy of extermination as a kind of testing ground for the fate that will now be reserved in the world for populations considered superfluous by these same administrators?
Everything points to this being the case. What we are witnessing in parallel with this genocidal infamy is, as explained in the following text by the Situationist Observatory, the establishment by the media of a kind of acceptance, of indifference to what, in a reasonably humane society, should provoke revolt everywhere.
The article originally published by L’Observatoire Situationniste
Gaza, off the spectacle.
Gaza is off the spectacle. The catastrophe has no beginning and no end; it continues. Life persists as ruin. The world looks away. There is nothing left to consume.
One day, we will have to look squarely at what is happening again and again in this tiny strip of land where more than two million human beings continue to live under a regime of existence that resembles neither peace nor war, but rather a prolonged suspension, as if time had been broken, becoming a violent stagnation, where destruction presents itself as a permanent state.
What has befallen Gaza since October 2023 has not been a localized battle but a gradual transformation of the territory into ruins, where the majority of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, where almost all schools have been hit, where most hospitals have ceased to function normally, where roads, water and electricity networks, and agricultural land have been disrupted, producing a situation where housing, healthcare, education, and livelihoods have been simultaneously rendered precarious, if not impossible, and where reconstruction is not a project but a hypothesis postponed to an indeterminate future, dependent on conditions that do not exist.
While the bombings ceased to occupy the center of global attention, as the media spotlight shifted to its usual scenes, the population remained amid the ruins, the cold, the diseases, the tragedies, in a landscape saturated with toxic debris, unexploded ordnance, contaminated soil, unsafe water, and air polluted by human decision.
In this territory reduced to a laboratory of modern destruction, for all intents and purposes, tens of thousands of deaths have accumulated, like a stratification of bodies and interrupted destinies, the actual number of which will never be known with certainty, but whose magnitude is sufficient to measure the scale of a human disaster that far exceeds the official figures, while tens of thousands of children have been killed or maimed, while thousands of women have disappeared under the bombs or rubble, while hundreds of journalists and thousands of caregivers have been struck down, because bearing witness and providing care had become deadly activities.
But what is at stake now goes beyond the question of immediate deaths, because material destruction has been compounded by a destruction of the future, where generations are growing up in an environment where the continuity of knowledge, care, work, and transmission has been broken, where daily life is reduced to a constant struggle with emergencies, hunger, cold, disease, and uncertainty, while public space disappears, memory fragments, and projection into the future becomes impossible.
We can look for equivalents in history, evoking sieges, bombings, and razed cities, but never such a situation where a dense population, locked in a closed territory, has been subjected for such a long period of time to the simultaneous combination of methodical material destruction, health collapse, forced food deprivation, radical ecological contamination, and the impossibility of escaping the field of destruction.
Gaza appears to be an extreme historical experiment, where an entire society is kept in a state of prolonged survival under the intermittent gaze of the world.
And what makes this situation even more atrocious than the violence itself is the way in which it has gradually become normalized, how the catastrophe has ceased to be a shock and become a backdrop, how destruction has ceased to be a scandal and become a lasting fact, how suffering has ceased to be an event and become a condition, while global attention wanes, disperses, reconfigures itself, leaving behind a population that continues to live in a form of endless catastrophe, where life is associated with its ruins, destined to represent the normal state of the world, once hatred has run its course.