The planes fly low over Ballona Creek. I’m driving on a road that stretches out to the Pacific Ocean and we’re on two paths, two geographical planes. I’m at a stoplight and a man holds a sign with blankets draped over his shoulders. I meet his eyes, smile grimly and feel pathetic, sitting in my car. Red brake lights flooding over me, yellow headlights spilling over him.
In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), the father and mother chaperone their child’s birthday party in their yard. We did it. This is the dream. Splashing in the pool, sweet lemonade, children shrieking, a lush garden heavy with bliss (what is bliss again?). On the other side of the garden wall is Auschwitz. The father designed it, even picked the width of the gas chambers. A stream of smoke curls out of the chimney behind the wall. Children shrieking.
You’re baking banana bread. Tilt it towards the window, take 36 photos, and in one of them, maybe the light will look soft enough. You accidentally click on her story and it’s Al Jazeera. Your thumb grazes left across the screen, the same one that you lick buttercream off later.
Someone I loved told me once told me that she dissociates. I told her I know. We’d talk about things that plague us and if we did it for too long, I’d watch her glaze over and wilt. I always wondered how to pull her out or if I was supposed to just let her float.
On Super Bowl Sunday, as Israel invaded Rafah, I ate chips and salsa on a small paper plate, a wall away from the distraction of an American football game. Hunched over my laptop in a bedroom that wasn’t mine, I wrote about six-year-old Hind Rajab, who’d been fleeing the war in northern Gaza in late January with her uncle, his wife and four children when they came under Israeli fire. In the audio posted to social media by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, you can hear gunfire, Hind’s cousin calling for help, and then silence. Then later, Hind’s frail voice over the phone. “Come take me. Will you come and take me? I’m so scared, please come!” The Red Crescent had to coordinate with Israeli authorities to even allow paramedics to the scene. Hind was found dead 12 days later, in a bombed ambulance.
I think a lot about language in my job, and the way that the news media encourages dissociation, and in turn, absolves accountability. Elena Dudum writes about this passivity in American news media for TIME: “‘A group of Palestinian men waving a white flag are shot at,’ and I can’t help but hear the voices of my past English teachers ask, ‘But who ‘shot’ these men?’” Elena goes on to describe auditing an undergraduate class on Israel, one of 2 Palestinians in a class of 25. The professor describes the Nakba, the 750,000 Palestinians who “were displaced.” But his report has no mention of who did the displacing.
I think of derealization, the fleeting sensation of lifting outside of yourself, maybe an overbearing awareness of your consciousness. But the bird’s eye view, even for a second, seems more conducive to humanizing others. Dissociation - the dis association - is the one that scares me, the ability to remove yourself from what is happening here and now.
I know that they’ll rewrite the wisps of smoke after Aaron Bushnell perished outside the Israeli Embassy. They’ll say never again and do it again. They called it chaos instead of massacre when Israeli forces killed more than 100 starved Palestinians who waited for food. Ballona Creek used to be lush and green, lined with sycamores and willows, until they came and paved the banks over with cement and said, Look. This is how it’s always been.
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The stellar reporting on the war in Gaza from The Intercept, Al Jazeera, & Democracy Now.