Identification, differentiation, distanciation. Stated baldly, most of us will never live in Gaza, but we know it could have been us boarding that plane in Amsterdam. Which is why there is a morbid fascination with tales of the passenger who changed flights at the last minute, thereby cheating death, or with the crew member who made the opposite move, hastily switching to MH17 at the final moment, taking a decision that would have seemed so trivial at the time but which cost him his life. When we read about the debris – the holiday guidebooks strewn over the Ukrainian countryside, the man found next to an iPhone, the boy with his seatbelt still on – our imaginations put us on that flight. Of course we have sympathy for the victims and their families. But our fear is for ourselves. The reports from Gaza stir a different feeling. When we read the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont describe the sights he saw driving around the strip on Friday morning – three Palestinian siblings killed by an Israeli artillery shell that crashed into their bedroom, a father putting the remains of his two-year-old son into a plastic shopping bag – we are shaken by a different kind of horror. It is compassion for another human being, someone in a situation utterly different to ours. We don’t worry that this might happen to us, as we now might when we contemplate an international flight over a war zone. Our reaction is directed not inward, but outward. Not that that makes one situation easier to contemplate than the other. They are both unbearable. And so we devise coping strategies. (...) Of course, there is another way to cope. It’s the one that most of us deploy most often. It is to look away. That’s what we have done with Syria, where the killing goes on, day in and day out. On Thursday 115 people were killed, 25 of them civilians, in a single clash in Homs province. But none of us was watching. Looking away is certainly comfortable. The trouble is, that option is not always available, as MH17 has proved. We might have wanted to avert our gaze from the civil war in Ukraine. But now we can’t. As one analyst so rightly says: “The war has come to us.”
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 10:59:18 +0000
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