The baby-crying contest

Part of my job at the newspaper is trawling the picture wires. Every week I spend at least a morning scrolling through every image that came through Reuters and AP that week. I’m looking for business pictures but of course I get distracted by pictures about anything.

Like the frames of the annual baby crying contest. I did say baby crying contest. Apparently it’s harder to faze a baby than you’d expect. In the first picture, a large baby puzzles over the round stranger holding her aloft. What is he trying to communicate with his bulging eyes, mouth contortions and jumping from leg to leg? In the next frame the baby starts to frown when she clicks that this guy is having her on, he has nothing meaningful to say. Around here one of the babies starts to wail.

It’s a Japanese ceremony to bless the year’s babies. People hand their babies two at a time to pairs of good-natured samuri, who compete to get the babies howling. I think it said the louder the howl, the greater the blessing.

And I’m still totally boggled by the photo of the 23cm penis preserved in a jar. It’s purported to be Rasputin’s.

It is bogglingly huge, apparently as long as the face of the person peering in the display case in the shot. Equally mind-boggling was the accompanying information. The owner of the specimen has some 1,000 more specimens he wants to exhibit.

Try to get your mind around all this. I mean, did it ever occur to you to imagine a 23cm penis? Let alone one preserved in formaldehyde? And when you actually see such a thing, its nothing at all like you would have imagined it. One end looks like a penis, but not a real one, and the other end doesn’t at all.

My colleagues tittered nervously while I plagued them with questions. This doctor who owns the jar and its contents, why collect that many specimens? (A flasher with ambitions beyond his own equipment, har har?) Who leaves their dick to science? Is there, like, a checkbox on the organ donation form for genitalia? Did he get their consent? (I suppose not in Rasputin’s case.)

I see a lot of obscene stuff it would never have occurred to me to imagine, and lots of it is not like you would have imagined it to be, if you were sick enough to dream up such things.

Like May 2004’s relentless wallpaper of pictures tagged MIDEAST-ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-GAZA-MASSACRE.

Khaled, 7 years. MIDEAST-PALESTINIANS-YASSIN-ASSASSINATIONS. I notice his death because it’s a Hector Peterson re-enactment though the people are different and its not Soweto 1976.

Hector’s sister is played by a man with round eyes and round mouth and arched eyebrows making a dramatic gesture with his hands. His face is so full of O-shapes and upside down U-shapes he would – does – look comical.

But it’s not funny. Khaled is carried by his father instead of the tall man in dungarees. There’s a string of blood from Khaled’s nose and his body is slack.

An expression is emerging on his father’s face. It’s dawning on him that this awful unbelievable thing really is real. His mouth is open, panting. It’s a hair’s breath from a sob. The corners of his mouth and his furrowed forehead are turning down like the wailing greek mask in the drama/comedy masks.

He doesn’t know where to look for help because he is starting to see there is no help. Much later I read that the army blocked the ambulance from reaching Khaled.

After staring at the photo for a bit I notice two TV cameras in the background, and then a washing line. It’s a residential area. It turns out Khaled was inside his Gaza home, just too near the window as the army started to move in.

I open another picture slugged MIDEAST-PALESTINIANS. My eye flicks over the red t-shirt and is instantly arrested by the slightly intimate stretch of a young man’s neck.

It’s a tight shot. He’s got a handsome neck with pleasing stubble and he is lying with his face turned away to expose that clandestine place where neck and jaw meet. It’s the slightly vulnerable morning view normally reserved for siblings, parents and lovers.

Instantly Khalil pops into my mind. He is in any case never far from the surface that May. Maybe that secret stretch is in a focal point of the picture, but maybe it’s also because of Khalil that I focus on that place in the picture.

A dreamy mist starts to spread through me and coalesce in my stomach. A workmate might notice the corners of my mouth prepare for a goofy smile while my eyes go a little distant. It’s a body reflex. I’m not in control of it. My brain is still seconds away from wondering why this photo is slugged MIDEAST-PALESTINIANS-ASSASIN and my eye is already flicking to the next focus.

Vibrant, slick red. On his face. I had never before thought of that shade as blood red, maybe because I’ve never seen arterial blood before.

It matches his t-shirt. That’s when it clicks. His red t-shirt, that t-shirt was white when his mama chose it in the shop. He’s dying. His head is lolling on a stretcher, exposing his handsome neck like that. The dreamy mist condenses sharply into something else, maybe a ball of raw dough that plummets to the pit of my stomach.

After that I register the orange/yellow/reflective medics vests and the face of a young onlooker beside the orange roll-up stretcher.

The paramedics seem entirely focussed on the business of speeding him to hospital but if they’re letting themselves think about it they probably already know they’re going to sleep badly tonight, they’re losing him.

I remember now I have seen arterial blood before, but not its colour. It was after midnight, new year. A young idiot, drunk and heartbroken, punched a plate glass window. He cut an artery in his forearm. Seconds later his heart was pumping the blood high and free into the air. I remember how quickly he went into shock after that.

That tricky association with the intimate stretch of neck is still there: of course I wonder, ‘what if that was Khalil on the stretcher?’ They’re about the same age.

I remind myself Khalil lives in a different part of the country, nowhere near the Wall or Gaza, in a part where the violence is usually subtler.

But imagine the same warm body you held close leaking frighteningly fast into the sand, draining with it everything else of the human you met. By the time I saw that picture, there were a bunch of humans facing that bleak fact about Diya.

At least, I think it was Diya. The onlooker, I can’t remember, is it his little brother, is his face crumpling into a wail? Or was that a different picture, a different death?

When I first studied that picture I thought the details would be etched forever in that lump of dough. But I’m going to see a lot of young men wearing t-shirts from the same dye-lot in the weeks ahead. The scenes become a monotony of horror, the peripheral details mashed together.

Just reading the papers won’t have given you a proper sense of this. You may have seen some of these pictures and they may have wrenched your heart. But there’s only space to publish one or two international pictures a day, Palestine is not the only place in the world, and no-one publishes a picture because it’s similar to yesterday’s or last week’s – quite the opposite. So the relentless repetition of bloody deaths and funerals is blunted in print.

Later, until I have the captions in front of me, I can not be absolutely sure if I’m recalling a picture of Mohammed, 17, shot while trying to climb on a tank when the IDF invaded Gaza, or Diya, 24, shot for throwing stones against bulldozers and soldiers preparing to build the apartheid wall around his home village, Biddu, in the West Bank. (So much for an anti-terrorist offensive.) Though I remembered it wasn’t of the much younger boy, 14 or 15 year old, shot while watching some older boys throw stones in the same village.

The same thing starts to happen with the pictures of distraught relatives and funerals.

I almost miss an extremely powerful photo because it’s a picture totally drained of drama, not a shred of excitement. But that is what finally fixes it in my memory amongst the frantic medics and distraught relatives.

It’s before the funeral of Mohammed, I think. Four men, his father and brothers or uncles, have sat through the night with his 17 year old body.

You sense it’s a shiver past four in the morning, they’ve sat all night on the floor around the cold, yellowed corpse that used to be a son/brother/nephew.

He’s neatly wrapped in a Palestinian flag and there is cotton wool in his nostrils. His skin is yellow because his blood drained out yesterday.

The youngest man, a bookish-looking older brother in the white cable jumper, is no longer looking at the body or the Q’oran resting on his stomach. His gaze is fixed blankly on his hands jammed between his outstretched legs. He can’t think anymore, he’s just exhausted now, but maybe he can’t stop thinking either.

One of the older men touches the back of his hand to the cold face. It’s a tender and hopeless gesture.

Another, a sturdy man getting towards middle age, is crouched leaning against the wall. His built suggests a labourer. He is looking at the body and the other man’s gesture. His lips are pressed and twisted into a sneer. But it’s not Mohammed or the other man he’s disgusted by. His face is the face of a witness to the needless waste of a life. Despair and weary anger take over every sleep-deprived line. It seems to me this man is thinking: for throwing a stone, for this he’s handed an arbitrary death sentence, for this trifle this life, barely begun, has been pissed away.

What I’m seeing is not a war against terror but a terror against, primarily, civilians: kids in their homes and teenagers who pick up stones against tanks.

There is one harsh point of light in this bleak chain of pictures. I’m amazed to see, as tanks start rolling into Gaza, that people stand up to them. I’m well aware of the handful of gunmen amongst the scattered crowd. But most face the tanks without arms. With rocks. Rubble from the blocks of flats reduced to piles both by collateral missile strikes or by controlled explosion in a collective punishment.

My mind boggles again trying to put myself in those shoes: unarmed in a dusty street, dwarfed by this clanking machine, and imagining it possible me and my mates can stop it.

As the month wears on I see how its possible, and I start to understand why a person might lie awake at night detailing imagined tank traps the way I used to detail imagined alterations to my first house through sleepless nights.

Here’s one way to make it imaginable. You climb on a roof, about seven of you, some pre-teen, and push large rubble onto it as it passes. You need to plan your exit well and be prepared for disappointment. Your chances of damaging the tank are much much smaller than your chances of getting punctured by a bullet.

I suppose you can try that, or you can go home and still feel scared there.

Those pictures made me feel brave and fearful for them, and angry that kids - or anyone - gets to choose between taking those risks and a collateral death through the window of your family home.

As the week’s pictures come through its hard to see the equality between the tanks and the sprinkling of small arms and home-made mines facing them

Soon there is a dreadful variation in the dreadful monotony of young men’s funerals.

A Madonna and child pic: her mother leans over as if amazed that her wrapped-up baby has fallen asleep despite the crowds of obviously noisy people in the room. Asma’a. 4 years old. Dead from teargas inhalation.

A nine year old girl who I first see on an operating table: her eyes and mouth are half open but she sees nothing, she’s partly obscured by tubes and turquoise-gowned medics labouring over her.

I realise something from the pictures from her funeral the next day.

Three little girls, here they are in the street at the funeral of their 9 year-old schoolmate. She caught a bullet when the army invaded a residential area. Their faces are framed by their headscarfs and the girl in the middle is howling, open-mouthed and helplessly. You can see her chest heave.

She’s crying for her friend and she’s crying also for herself. And of course it’s terrifying, a little girl just like her is dead, a little girl she maybe knew and played with, she has lost a friend and she has reason to fear for her own life. I read somewhere that children in the occupied territories suffer post-trauma stress at a rate of 6 out of ten. The expected rate for a war zone is between 2 and 5 out of ten.

Not only babies, a group of adult men standing outside Mohammed’s home as his body is taken out for burial into the bright sun. Three are weeping behind their hands, the face of another is crumpling as the shutter closes. If you thought men don’t cry you should look under MIDEAST-PALESTINIANS.

It’s not the death alone that overcomes the men and it’s not only the litany of wasted lives. That’s plenty already, but on top of that is loaded days without proper sleep while the army pounds your neighbourhood, days spent on edge knowing you’re a random target, days wondering if you or someone you know will be next. Now it has finally happened, but unlike finally letting go of the window ledge, that doesn’t mean it’s ended. The anxiety remains relentless, someone else you know or even yourself can still be next, maybe even today, perhaps at the funeral.

These are pictures of a deeply traumatised, deeply terrorised society, of a place where it becomes unexpectedly frightening to go about an ordinary life. Not one of these scenes is unique in the end. They are repeated in different places, with different faces, but the same scenes. And, for weeks and weeks, they are repeated only amongst Palestinians.

It’s against this backdrop that a settler and her five children, all girls, are ambushed and killed by two or three gunmen. It’s horrible but there’s a difference to the horror.

There’s pictures of drawings the girls made for their dad, to say thanks dad for working to save our home. Dad had been driving up and down in the preceding weeks campaigning for Likud to oppose the Gaza pullout.

I’m thinking, what the hell is wrong with Dad? What kind of a home was he saving for them? A home built on graves with walls of hate?

I’m thinking, he had a choice, why didn’t he find a real home for his 5 lively girls, while they were still lively? A home that wasn’t built over the foundations of someone’s else’s home while the someone else is barricaded into a dusty destitute camp across the way then bombarded and brutalised. Someone like the little Palestinian girl described in a post-trauma stress case study (about the same age as Dad’s second daughter) who draws the pretty sort of house children that age love to draw and describes it, “This is a little house of peace. It is definitely not my house.”

These deaths come nowhere near equalling the score, if anyone is keeping score, and the Israeli state cries ‘self defence’ and escalates operations in Gaza.

Self defence: I notice only three changes in the now-familiar scenes of Palestinian funerals.

One, more civilian victims of missile strikes rather than bullets: the army is bringing out the heavy ordnance. So much for a pullout.

Two and three, the age range of deaths broadens on either side of the teenagers.

One side, younger and younger victims, more and more Hector tableaus. The inevitable result of waging a war in a residential area.

The other side, more masked men, mid to late 20s, appear in ambulances or carried awkwardly by three or four people to the hospital; partly because there are more of them on the streets.

What did anyone expect when even staying at home is no defence and your whole neighbourhood is found guilty already?

It’s some of these men, captioned ‘militants’, who devise a means to blow up an armoured troop carrier, weeks into the invasion. Six soldiers are blown up, gruesomely, then another five later that day.

There are some superficial differences between the soldiers’ funerals and the Palestinian funerals. A green cemetery instead of the dusty streets and dusty burial ground. It’s somehow more sedate and the dead are in coffins, not on stretchers.

But they too are draped in flags, and there are the same contorted faces of women relatives, and tired men in uniform overcome by tears.

But if you zoom in on the grieving faces you miss an elephant of a difference. This is the first soldiers’ funeral I’ve seen since the invasion started, and the only Israeli funeral apart from the settler and her children, since the oddly inverted “pullout” from Gaza started.

Truth is it’s also the last I see to date, two weeks later, though by far not the last Palestinian funeral.

In fact when I think about it, these are the first serious casualties inflicted on the IDF since the invasion began.

Those ignorant kids, those soldiers, were getting ready to pound a neighbourhood some more. They’ve been told they’re defending something. A way of life. Independence. Freedom from oppression and anti-semitism. Their motherland. Something. They’re David against Goliath.

They’re deluded. They’re goliath when it comes to firepower. They’re in the fourth biggest army in the world. Not the fourth biggest for troop numbers but in expenditure and thereby in sophisticated killing machinery. And they’ve been ordered to set that machine loose on people’s homes.

This fundamental imbalance shows in the relative frequency of the funerals. For those 11 soldiers, Palestinians had already paid 29 corpses in two days, not all or most of them soldiers.

That paces the casualty ratio since 2000. I remember a striking picture two years ago. Some Israeli artists made a display, one coffin for every person killed since 2000, a white one for a Palestinian and a black one for an Israeli, and the ratio was pretty much 3:1. It rises to 5:1 for children, and the number of children killed is more than the number of militants killed.

I’ve looked at the maths and I now think my impression from the pictures might be skewed. I think all the soldiers’ and settlers’ funerals are being photographed exactly because those are still unusual, but only some of the Palestinian ones.

You might say every life should be equally valued and all deaths mourned. It’s wrong to kill even a single child in retaliation for the death of five, ten, even twenty children.

I like that idea and I wish the Israeli government would get it.

I’m a humanist, I love people, I think we have great potential as a species. It distresses me greatly that any shred of human ingenuity should be devoted to devising means of reducing a warm body to lumps of meat.

I’m not using the word meat loosely or offensively. It’s purely descriptive. One of those sights that’s not quite like you would have imagined.

These weeks of pictures have given me a lot of cause to contemplate the frighteningly fragile line between a person and a lump of meat and I do so again when I see the pics of masked fighters displaying body parts of soldiers killed in Gaza.

It makes me queasy. But by then the naseau has dulled slightly. I’d already goggled disbelievingly at a few pictures of people holding up lumps of meat that were part of a breathing human being just before the IDF missile strike.

The missing body parts are the next official reason for pressing deeper into Gaza. Now I don’t want to sound inhumane, the observation is just unavoidable: if you insist on turning people’s neighbours into human steak maybe you shouldn’t get a big surprise if some become accustomed to handling it.

What happened to the soldiers was grisly and I would hate for that to happen to anyone I love. But I can’t deny it, I’d find it really hard to love someone doing what those soldiers are doing.

I’m wondering how the soldiers carry on. Do they never personally see the slack-faced kids dying? Or they believe the slack-faced kid’s fate will be theirs if they dare put down those guns? Does it come from defending for too long the mythology of a land without people for a people without land? Are they too scared to say no or too stupid to wonder why they have to kill so many people in this land without people?

A couple of weeks later, I see a cryptic picture of two rows of car keys arrayed on hooks. The caption reveals that the installation is part of an exhibition put together by former soldiers who served in Hebron. These are car keys confiscated from Palestinians by the soldiers, one of the relentless routines of low-key harassment of Palestinians. Now the soldiers are sheepish about their role: they talk like people who’ve woken from a daze. Though they’re at pains to stress their loyalty to Israel – they refused to speak to any media that was not Israeli – they’re harassed by the intelligence services.

I’m saving my deepest disgust for the soldiers’ handlers and their handlers’ suppliers. There’s something incomparably sick and psychopathic about the pre-meditated, cold-blooded marshalling of huge resources by states and multinationals and the like to build, develop and perfect highly sophisticated, technologically advanced means of reducing humans to lumps of meat from near and far. The Gaza gunmen, despite their grisly pride in their prize, just don’t make that league.

And the horror intensifies despite the eventual return of the body parts in cooler boxes lined with tin foil.

On Friday I start to write this, thinking I’m wrapping up my weeks of repellant viewing.

Monday, I hear on the car radio the army is surrounding Rafah “to look for arms smuggling tunnels”. Several houses are flattened. A thousand people are left homeless.

Refugees are prevented from leaving and a handful of Israeli peace activists are prevented from entering.

Ironically its Rafah’s 56 birthday, which comes two days after the Palestinians commemorate the Catastrophe – the event 56 years ago that created Rafah and tens of other regugee camps for Palestinians driven from their homes by terror squads intent on making the mythology of a land without people into a fact.

By Thursday the Hector Peterson tableaus are blurring into one another. You must have seen a few of those published. A missile fired at a mass march demanding emergency aid ensures that the 5:1 ratio is restored, if it wasn’t already. The army says sorry, it was a mistake, but the crocodile tears are already dry as the next missile is fired. On the picture wires, smaller and smaller children are carried in to the hospital the whole day. An agricultural fridge becomes a morgue, the floor smeared with blood and lined with wrapped up bodies. Fresh corpses replace those taken to funerals.

Eventually the picture that stood out of the blur this week was the one of a Rafah hospital worker trying to wash a long blood stain off the concrete at the casualty entrance.

That stood out because it was different from all the injured, dead and dying people and it stood out because it tells a graphic story: so much blood spilled from so many bodies that it streamed into the street.

But by shayala-time on Thursday, blood pictures are becoming frequent enough to start to blur. On Friday I don’t want to look at that screen anymore. When I finally do the army is talking about a ‘partial pullout’ and flattening green-houses, and 41 are dead, none of them IDF soldiers.

By now you’ve noticed that I’m taking sides.

Repeat this word to yourself: massacre. It’s not operation Rainbow, it’s not a war and it’s not an anti-terrorist operation, unless you believe there’s a gene for terrorism and all of arab descent have it.

It’s a massacre. And what’s it all for, these rivers of blood? Its about oil, profit and power.

Ho-hum, you think as you make to navigate away from the page, tell me something new and interesting.

Don’t take my word for it, go look up the history yourself. I recommend Tariq Ali’s brief history of the middle east, Bush in Babylon. We’re becoming inured to it only because it’s been the same story for 50, 60, 100 years.

Britain’s sudden sympathy 56 years ago for a Jewish homeland had very little to do with that racist colonial empire suddenly developing a conscience about oppression of Jewish people. It links directly to Britain’s machinations to break the hold of the Ottoman Empire over this oil rich region. Of course the fate of a few million Palestinians and their descendents was only a minor sum in Britain’s grand calculus, as was the fate of the Jewish civilians who displaced them and could henceforth only keep them displaced through heavy weaponry.

The scene remains basically the same though the face of the sponsor is now Bush.

I read a Ramallah resident’s take on the Gaza pullout plan: “a plan to go out of the prison and close the door”. It’s costly policing Gaza, one of the poorest Palestinian areas and adjacent to Egypt and Jordan. Sharon has no interest in justice or self-determination or finding a peaceful solution. He wants to leave Gaza, but he wants to leave it flattened: totally subdued, terrified, devoid of resistance, demand or spirit.

Emboldened by Bush’s show of sympathy a few weeks before, and armed to the eyebrows with a military machine paid for in dollars, Sharon started methodically doing just that. It’s taking a little longer than planned though, because those pesky civilians keep resisting.

It’s getting Bush into another of those awkward situations that it’s so easy to get into when you’re the pinnacle of world violence facing an increasingly sceptical world. His miscalculation about Iraq has made him more dependent than ever on keeping Sharon’s military machine loyal to him, but those pesky revelations of continuing abuse in Abu Ghraib have made it riskier for him to do it… it all depends on just how jumpy those pesky towel-heads get, but maybe its safer to look just the tiniest bit concerned. That’s the sole reason we saw that rarest of things, a US abstention rather than a veto on a resolution condemning the Rafah invasion.

Me, I’m tired of drowning in pictured sorrow (though not one quarter as tired as the Palestinians must be). So I’m going to do whatever I can to make it as risky as possible for him and his watchdog.

You might be going hohum at my analysis but you should at least recognise that the conflict there is profoundly unequal. It’s not exactly healthy for Israelis either, though many of them don’t recognise it. (Nevertheless 500 Israelis went completely against the tide of their society on Wednesday to block streets in Tel Aviv, demanding an end to the Rafah massacre. That didn’t get a single picture on the wires. )

I’ve got a t-shirt, produced by the anti-nazi league in the UK, and it quotes a certain Pastor Niemoller’s poetic observation that you should not wait till you are affected before you act: “First they came for the jews and I did not speak out because I was not a jew, then they came for the gypsies and I did not speak out…” and so it goes on, the gays and the trade unionist, until “they came for me, but there was no-one left to speak out for me”.

No, I don’t think Sharon’s coming for us in South Africa when he is done exterminating Palestinians. But injustice is like cockroaches, the more we let it live in any part of the world the more it breeds and spreads.

There’s not only Palestine, though Palestine is by far one of the worst places to be alive right now.

Don’t just sit there wiping a tear. Follow the news. Imagine it’s someone you care for.

Ask yourself, like Khaled’s father: how can this be happening, still, today, in the so-called modern world? How can it be allowed to happen?

Cultivate the same combination of pragmatism and disbelief that allows us to look at the holocaust or the Rwanda massacres and say, never again.

Maybe by the time you read this the army is out of Rafah and the prison door swinging shut. Or its possible that the army is still going in there but that’s no longer news. Don’t let that make you passive. Keep at it until murderers like Sharon, and better still his US patrons, are decisively separated from their killing machines.

You can say, it’s not my friends, kids, siblings, or my country, but you’d be wrong. The world’s a small place, and we’re mak ing our future now. (2004)

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A year later when i post this it not totally out of date. The prison door has swung shut on Gaza, Palestine has dropped out of the news again - and that wall is still being built. Those killing machines are still in the wrong hands. And it still needs you to do something.