At some point during one of the pandemic’s lockdowns, I reminisced about places I had travelled, and thought about where, once the opportunity was available again, I’d like to visit. This was a completely privileged activity, of course. And then I thought about what I do when I travel.
Gradually, a pattern emerged. For my entire adult life, I appear to have gravitated towards sites of trauma. I thought about the places I had visited: Auschwitz (twice); Birkenau; Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam; the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana; the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Dr Martin Luther King jnr was assassinated; the Kigali Genocide Memorial and museum in Rwanda; the fragments of the Warsaw Ghetto wall; the American, British and German graves and the D-Day beaches in Normandy; the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City; Robben Island Prison off Cape Town; the International Civil Rights Centre in Greensboro, North Carolina; and at home, the dozen or so visits I’ve paid to Kilmainham Gaol and the National Famine Museum in Strokestown.
I’ve spent a significant part of my life over the past decade in Berlin. In this city, the history of anti-Semitism in Europe is impossible to avoid, and rightly so. You literally trip over it, the dull glimmering of Stolpersteine (small “stumbling stone” plaques) set in the ground as cobbled reminders. I read the names on every one I pass, and think of the horror of innocent people being pulled from their homes and sent to die. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood among the grey abstract tombstone-maze structures at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and in the cold, hostile “voids” of the Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. I have repeatedly walked the ground that concreted over Hitler’s bunker, gazed into the Empty Library that memorialises the book-burning on Bebelplatz, watched the video that plays in the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism at Tiergarten over and over, and returned four or five times to the Stasimuseum in Lichtenberg.
I’ve never approached travel with the giddy edginess of “dark tourism”. I have no bucket list of sites of terror. But I seem to be drawn to places of mass human suffering. Perhaps it is a confrontation with human misery. Maybe I am trying to figure out a puzzle: why do we do such horrendous things to each other?
The bombing of Gaza is not merely a reaction to Hamas’s abhorrent, disgusting, unforgivable violence, but a continuum of the dehumanisation of Palestinians
In the aftermath of the slaughter committed by Hamas in Israel, one wonders what memorials will come from this carnage, if any. One of the grim but informative aspects of the Kigali Genocide Memorial is that it contextualises how genocidal rhetoric and propaganda was seeded and the violence strategically planned for. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, the dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the Israeli government was pronounced. This is not new. “Human animals,” the Israeli defence minister said. Human animals.
Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil; what we are witnessing now is the fever of orchestrated revenge. This revenge can only be carried out at the pitch we are witnessing when the context of subjugation, oppression, and dehumanisation already exists. The bombing of Gaza is not merely a reaction to Hamas’s abhorrent, disgusting, unforgivable violence, but a continuum of the dehumanisation of Palestinians. After Hamas’s attack, people asked “how” this could happen, given Israel’s level of surveillance. No one needed to ask “why”. Everyone knows the context.
[ Justine McCarthy: Two wrongs do not make a right, they make a vortex of horrorOpens in new window ]
How can the European Union stand for the flagrant breaches of international law by Israel, and frame the dehumanising rhetoric and its inevitable outcome as Israel’s “right to defend” itself? And where will this lead Israel? What is the end goal? To flatten Gaza? To kill all Palestinians? This nihilism won’t just destroy Palestinian lands and people, it will also ultimately destroy Israel’s place in the world – it is bulldozing whatever fantasy of a moral high ground it had. Preceding this horror, many Israelis themselves were protesting their government’s dark jolt to the right, and how it was impacting them, as positions of political power were cluttered with far-right brutes.
The framing of Hamas’s massacring of Israelis as ‘a 9/11′ is utterly insidious. We know what happened after that, the phoney justifications and lies that instigated the mass-killing of innocent people
If the first casualty of war is truth, then this is a moment when people need to hold fast to reality in the midst of propaganda, lies, rage and ignorance. Anyone judging the necessary criticism of and opposition to the violent actions of the state of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic is either foolish, lying, or totally indoctrinated. This fake, performative moralising justifying retaliatory murder needs to stop. The framing of Hamas’s massacring of Israelis as “a 9/11″ is utterly insidious. We know what happened after that, the phoney justifications and lies that instigated the mass-killing of innocent people based on where they happened to be geographically located.
The smoke from Gaza, and most likely the West Bank, will not clear for some time. As innocent people feel the wrath of revenge rain down on them, what we know at the time of writing is that both the US and the European Union have given a free pass to the state of Israel to lay siege to Gaza. Collective punishment is a war crime. Any person of conscience has to stand up against this. The call to learn from history is repeatedly sounded by Israel. If only their own government would heed it too.