The War Crimes in Plain Sight

How Israel, with the help of the U.S., broke not only Gaza but the foundations of humanitarian law.

- By Suzy Hansen

On April 4, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha posted a video of an obliterated urban landscape. Suddenly, there are bombs: Smoke erupts from the base of the buildings, and two large objects are ejected from the rooftops into the sky. Arms and legs seem to undulate in the air—they appear to be human bodies—before they crash down onto the pyre. “This is scary more than ever,” Abu Toha wrote on Instagram. “In the air strikes, two people flew even above the clouds of death.” In the background, the girl videotaping is crying as she holds the phone. She knows that those two people, perhaps briefly alive in the sky, have died, that Israel is bombing an already annihilated place, and that eventually those bombs may come for them all.

That there are no longer words to capture the horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip has long been said and felt, but then a video like Abu Toha’s appears, clarifying how extreme and other-worldly this catastrophe has become. In the 1980s, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod recognized that the Holocaust and Hiroshima and other crises in which huge numbers of people had died required a new language. In her 1985 book, Spirit in Ashes, she called them “death events.” These, she wrote, could be large-scale bombing campaigns, forced famines, or deportations. Most important, these manmade events were collective global experiences and involved the shared knowledge that people have made the extinction of mankind possible. In some cases, these events gave rise to something she called the “death world,” which had the “imagined conditions of death, conferring upon their inhabitants the status of the living dead.” Wyschogrod had the Nazi camps in mind; today, the death world we know is Gaza.