I love words. Professionally, they are my primary tool. Yet sometimes – more often than I would like – I question what they are good for. Sometimes, they feel like empty noises or squiggles on a screen.
Take Gaza. Words seem to be failing us. The phrases we used to hear a lot – international order, international community, civilisation – seem to have been rendered meaningless.
Most European countries, ourselves being one of the few exceptions, have opted for throwaway pieties. They favour realpolitik over morality, (let’s not poke the Trumpbeast), while the constant coverage has started to have a gradual numbing effect. If there is a triumph in the razing of Gaza, in the targeted starvation, the mass killing, in the fervent cruelty of it all, it is a triumph over language: as the atrocities pile on top of one another, it becomes increasing difficult to find words to reflect their horror.
It’s not that people, in Ireland and elsewhere, have ceased to care: it’s more a slightly despairing sense that words – to move, to prompt thought or compassion, to call others to action – seem to have lost their efficacy. Despite the vast majority of countries on this planet calling for a ceasefire, despite international arrest warrants, plausible claims of genocide and war crimes, the situation has grown worse, not better. Israeli politicians and generals seem to be caught in the addictive grip of thinking up ever new ways, not just to kill and maim Gazans, but to mentally torture them too. Evacuate. Bomb. Evacuate. Bomb: every time with the almost sniggering justification that it is for civilian safety.
I am seldom lost for words, but the atrocities in Gaza leave me speechless
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The pen isn’t beating the sword. And when language is defeated, so too is diplomacy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and co may be aware of the millions of words being said on this subject. Or they may not hear them. They certainly don’t seem to care. They don’t have to. The majority of Israelis may not wish to see Netanyahu in power, but they still support Operation Gideon’s Chariots: a name calibrated to continue the depiction of Israel as the outgunned underdog. (In the biblical account, Gideon led a battle against the Midianites using trumpets and jars containing torches. The Israelites won, despite a vast numerical disadvantage.)
[ Air strikes kill dozens in Gaza as international criticism of Israel growsOpens in new window ]
Words don’t work that well either when speaking to the traumatised; and for the last 19 months, Israel has been a traumatised country. Apart from the naked horror and death of the October 7th attack, it was a pogrom on Israeli territory: an incident cynically designed to reignite the darkest fears of Jewish racial memory. The sense of shock will continue not just until all the hostages are returned, but for years afterwards. Right now, it’s all Israeli society seems able to think about. It’s all the Israeli media can report on.
It’s understandable, and correct, that the fate of the hostages is always in the foreground of the Israeli media’s coverage. But the disparity between the domestic and international reporting on Gaza is vast. Due to an ethos of supporting the “war effort”, Israelis aren’t shown pictures of the doomscape that is now the Gaza Strip. They seem unaware, or not willing to believe, that within a two-hour drive from any point in Israel, 50,000 corpses have piled up.
Sooner or later, this will all come to an end. Yet the psychological toll will be incalculable. It’s impossible to predict what effect this will have had upon Palestinians: whether we’re witnessing the end of a nation or just another bloody turn in the ongoing churn of violence.
In the future, perhaps years from now, Israel may reach a point where it can look back at what happened and start to consider if, while caught up in its own anguish and distress, it allowed fanatics to transform their genocidal fantasies into reality. But it will be far too late then. It already is. And words will never explain it.
